Setting up a rig

[dinmegil]

I am currently playing ED on XBOX ONE and slowly building a PC to play it... Right now my PC has
[h=1]AMD FX-8300 Vishera 8-Core Socket
8 Gigs of Ram

Currently I am watching 3 video cards for a price drop or a sell promotion or I finally scap enough to buy one.

GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 960 4GB WINDFORCE 2X OC EDITION
XFX Radeon R9 380X R9-380X-4255 4GB 256-Bit DDR5 PCI Express 3.0 CrossFireX Support DD XXX OC Video Card
Or
SAPPHIRE NITRO Radeon R9 380 DirectX 12 100384NT4GOC-2L 4GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready Dual-X OC Version ...

How well will ED play on this machine and any suggestions:
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[NotAFurry]

I have a pretty similar PC to yours:

AMD FX-8350 8-core 4.0 GHz base/4.2 GHz Boost
8GB RAM
GIGABYTE 970A-D3 AM3+ Motherboard

I have an EVGA GTX 950 as my GPU. Elite runs almost flawlessly with it on Ultra in 1080p. The only weird things that have happened are the game sometimes lags when performing a system-to-system jump, and a massive lag spike at one point (but I'm fairly certain that was a bug.) I've never used an AMD GPU before, so someone else with more experience with them might be able to give you more help with that. But I know for certain that you will not be disappointed with running E on a GTX 960 (as long as you're not running it on anything a lot higher than 1080p)

 

[Tiamat]

AMD GPUs generally run hotter and whilst the hardware is good they have a history of bad drivers (one bug caused supercruise stutter). Admittedly they have gotten better lately but I would still recommend the 960. You will be fine playing on Ultra with any of those cards though.

That lag in hyperspace NotAFurry mentions happens to everyone to some degree though mine is hardly noticeable after upgrading my rig.

 

[Garrus]

I used an R9 280X for a while in my old rig and ran into what Tiamat described; great hardware for the price, but I had driver issues with certain games. I haven't decided to never buy an AMD GPU again, but I've had the best luck with Nvidia cards.

I would reckon that with a GTX 960, you'd get 60+ FPS in space, slightly less in stations, and probably 40 to 50 FPS or so on planets, if you're playing at 1080p on Ultra. Good on picking something with 4GB of VRAM too. The more the better with current games.

 

[Phrygian]

Meh, I run an R9 290 (a marginally slower version of the R9 390, with half the RAM) and if I ever hear a driver is going to be a problem I just don't upgrade. Simple. Not to mention I hear NVIDIA are having some issues with their drivers as well lately. I mean, hello and welcome to PC gaming.

As for running hot, that depends on which card you go for. Reference cards do run hot, I hear, but non-reference, like the sapphires, run much cooler, largely due to having beastly coolers and fans. Although they do still suck way more power than the GTX cards and they typically run louder.

However, at the price point dinmegli is going for I'd be tempted to recommend the GTX 960 as well. It sucks for us AMD users, but so many more games are optimised for NVIDIA that if push comes to shove, it makes more sense to go for them.

 

[Stattick]

Go for higher vram and try to slide an ssd in there for OS and games. Helps a LOT. AMD drivers are solid right now and nvidia has had some very recent issues recently. I would put them pretty even in software now. Dx12 is soon and should help with some overhead on GPU processing power but won't help vram so go high on that. Multi GPU setups should see a huge boost too so you can plan ahead to upgrade in the future.

AMD cards do pull more power and heat but tend to see increases in fps through their life whereas nvidia is a pretty solid number over their lifespan.