Horizons How a gtx 960 performs with Horizons?

[M1ndoro]

I run Elite with asus 960gtx 4gb, i7 4690k @4.7ghz, 32Gb ram, 250gb SDD with Win 7pro to use all ram available on asus gryphon z97 chip motherboard.

It runs butter smooth, fps well into the triple numbers.

If you have a system that are all in similar performance range its is much better than having a top GPU, as you will bottleneck the system. Also if cpu or gpu not cooled properly you will get thermal throttling thus reducing what your machine can do.

Not at home now, can post fps numbers.

Home built pc for video editing. So spec are passed minimum.

 

[BigF]

I run an almost identical setup to M1ndoro except it's an MSI board and a gtx970, all I can say is everything turned up to Max running full HD on a big screen and the graphics cards fans rarely come on more than quarter speed. The detail is so good it why I'm currently limping back from the edge of the galaxy with 9% hull, I got too up close and personal to a gas giants ring system.

 

[M1ndoro]

Im thinking of of upgrading to a 97. What do you think BigF?

I'll prob just do another powerbuild for my 14 yr old son as I have bought 2 ED horizons. So we can wing up.

 

[BigF]

Its a good card, mine is the MSI gaming one 4gb of ram and works flawlessly with my MSI z170 board. All the MSI Toys are great but not essential to the cards performance. As I said it's turned up to the max in ED and nearly gets into a sweat. I've not tried it over clocked yet because I didn't think I needed to. My i7 happliy goes to 4.7 GHz and with my cooler only goes a degree or so above Intel's standard coolers reference temp.

All in all great, the best bit is the 970 has had a price drop, and is now only a few quid more at Scan.co.uk than what I paid trade late last year.

 

[Nilt]

I have a 2gB GTX 960 myself. I get a solid 60FPS at full ultra settings, even on planets. The rest of your system may be a little bit of an issue, but probably not too bad.

 

[DasUnding]

I would not buy an Nvidia card now. The GTX960 and 970 would not perform well in the future. With the 960 you are limited to 1080p and u pay a lot of money for that. With the 970 you depend on optimisation to get rid of the lack of vram. Both cards does not support async compute. The reason why the cards with limited hardware perform well are the good Nvidia drivers. The 380 390 AMD cards are much more powerful cards for the same price limited by bad drivers, but now we see signifanct changes in Dx12 where the 390x handles an gtx980ti and yes u have 8gb and async shaders. Consider how easy it is for Nvidia to bring a 970 user to buy the new generation cards by stopping to optimize there drivers for the lack of vram in more and more vram demanding console games.

 

[Nilt]

I would not buy an Nvidia card now. The GTX960 and 970 would not perform well in the future. With the 960 you are limited to 1080p and u pay a lot of money for that.

This is just plain nonsense. First of all, I play at 1920x1200 with my 2GB GTX 960 with full Ultra settings in several games, including Elite, The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, and GTA 5 just to name a few. I get a solid 60FPS in all of those with the exception of GTA 5 when there's too many cars on screen; then it drops to "only" 50 or so FPS. Second, there's no reason whatsoever why these cards would "not perform well int he future" assuming tasks reasonably similar to existing ones. Sure, if you want to try and play a game in 2 years on one in 2 years you may have some limits, but that's the case with any video card over time. Even if you're talking about VR tasks, the Oculus specifically states that a 970 is sufficient.

As far as your AMD is inherently better but is limited by drivers, that's bunk as well. Sure, you may not have every single feature in all cards but what matters is whether any games are going to be requiring those anytime soon. AMD has a tendency to add extra bullet point features then limit it via drivers because that's their strategy to push their products after changing up their business model. NVidia, OTOH, didn't bother putting certain things in current cards because there would be no point whatsoever for end users. As for NVidia making "bad drivers", I think you need to find some actual evidence of that if you're going to throw it around. I haven't had any issues with any of my NVidia based cards while I've seen driver problems on the Radeon stuff as far back as when they were ATI. Even then, that hasn't always been the case and anyone can have a bug that needs fixing at some stage no matter who they are.

Note that I am not an Nvidia fanboy; some of my rigs have AMD cards and others NVidia. Both are suitable for the tasks, so long as you don't ask more than they're capable of. When you start off by spewing nonsense about NVidia cards not being capable of resolutions that I happen to actually use daily, though, you lose all credibility in my eyes.

 

[BigF]

When it comes to upgrading my GTX970 I will do exactly what I did with its predecessor, buy another identical card when they get cheaper in a year or so and then SLI them. Works well for me. That said the old cards did really well with settings in the high end, considering they were well over 4 years old.

 

[DasUnding]

This is just plain nonsense. First of all, I play at 1920x1200 with my 2GB GTX 960 with full Ultra settings in several games, including Elite, The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, and GTA 5 just to name a few. I get a solid 60FPS in all of those with the exception of GTA 5 when there's too many cars on screen; then it drops to "only" 50 or so FPS. Second, there's no reason whatsoever why these cards would "not perform well int he future" assuming tasks reasonably similar to existing ones. Sure, if you want to try and play a game in 2 years on one in 2 years you may have some limits, but that's the case with any video card over time. Even if you're talking about VR tasks, the Oculus specifically states that a 970 is sufficient.

As far as your AMD is inherently better but is limited by drivers, that's bunk as well. Sure, you may not have every single feature in all cards but what matters is whether any games are going to be requiring those anytime soon. AMD has a tendency to add extra bullet point features then limit it via drivers because that's their strategy to push their products after changing up their business model. NVidia, OTOH, didn't bother putting certain things in current cards because there would be no point whatsoever for end users. As for NVidia making "bad drivers", I think you need to find some actual evidence of that if you're going to throw it around. I haven't had any issues with any of my NVidia based cards while I've seen driver problems on the Radeon stuff as far back as when they were ATI. Even then, that hasn't always been the case and anyone can have a bug that needs fixing at some stage no matter who they are.

Note that I am not an Nvidia fanboy; some of my rigs have AMD cards and others NVidia. Both are suitable for the tasks, so long as you don't ask more than they're capable of. When you start off by spewing nonsense about NVidia cards not being capable of resolutions that I happen to actually use daily, though, you lose all credibility in my eyes.

You are very defending but I don't want to attack you. I used a GTX770 with 2GB of vram and I even tried an SLI config and the performance was good until I reach the vram limit and getting stutter and extrem low fps drops. Another problem was that higher resolutions than 1080p kills the performance horrobile. I tried a 390x and the games runs much smoother. In fact the games run better in 4k with the 390x than my gtx770 SLI in 1080p. That's not true for all games but for the newer and more vram demanding ones.

Buying a 2GB card now is not a good decision and even 3.5 is not enough.

The AMD drivers are horrible, they have so many bugs and a much higher driver overhead and u will notice that if u had a Nvidia card before. In order to get rid of that, AMD even build their one API, so there is hope. Because of the experience I had with low- and midrange Nvidia cards, I could not advise some of these short living ones and there is no hope because of the lag of hardware.

 

[Nilt]

You are very defending but I don't want to attack you.

Fair enough. My point, however, wasn't defensive but simply pointing out that what you're claiming is not, in fact, true.

Buying a 2GB card now is not a good decision and even 3.5 is not enough.

This is not currently the case. As more games come out that exploit more, this will change but game designers make games that work on many levels of system. We're almost certainly at least 18 months away from 2GB of VRAM being insufficient to play a game. As I said before, my 2GB GTX 960 is perfectly suitable and performs quite well indeed, on many games. More VRAM can be helpful, but it isn't nearly the issue you're making it out to be.

The AMD drivers are horrible, they have so many bugs and a much higher driver overhead and u will notice that if u had a Nvidia card before. In order to get rid of that, AMD even build their one API, so there is hope.

AMD's video division has historically had trouble with driver stability, yes. That isn't to say their cards won't work, though. A majority of users with their cards do well enough despite missing out on some potential performance.

Because of the experience I had with low- and midrange Nvidia cards, I could not advise some of these short living ones and there is no hope because of the lag of hardware.

Sure, but that's the case with any low range card. Depending on what you call mid-range, it can be an issue there as well. Typically anything up to 2 bumps down from the peak cards will be high end in terms of performance, regardless of the prices. If you're looking at a 700 series NVidia card now, though, it's at least two generations out of date, so it makes sense that they're not going to perform as well as a 900 series card might. Even so, my kid's still using my old 2GB GTX 670 and it plays his games just fine. Sure, it bogs down here and there, but not in Elite. Elite actually performs quite well even on pretty outdated systems.