PC Gaming

Hmm, I think I'm coming "back" to PC gaming. After buying Project Cars on the Xbox One and getting annoyed with the poor framerate and stuttering, I bought it for my PC. Even though I've only got a GTX 680, using the Nvidia Geforce Experience tool to set optimal settings and it runs great! Graphics are superb and framerate is solid too!

Then I fired up Batman Arkham Origins as I remember having some framerate issues with that which put me off a little. Used the Nvidia tool again, solid 60fps and looks brilliant.

So now I'm debating whether to pick up the new Batman and Witcher 3 on the PC rather than Xbox One. I also get a work bonus in June so looking to get a GTX 970, which should hopefully have dropped even further in price if the 980ti and AMD cards are released soon.

If you buy the GTX 970 now you will get the 2 games for free, but also you shouldn't be getting any issues with a GTX 680, it is still a massively powerful card and much better than what is in the current gen machines.

I recently upgraded from a GTX 680 to a GTX 970 like your thinking of doing and TBH I have not noticed a single bit of difference.. The GTX 680 can still run all games maxed out.. I also though never played GTA 5 on my 680 so have no idea how well that performs.

The GTX 970 I noticed is just quiet out the box, especially if you get a custom cooler one.
 
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The 680 definitely can't run everything maxed out and still get 60fps. I've found it's mostly high/medium, very few games can get ultra graphics and still get 60fps unfortunately.

I've just loaded GeForce Experience and it turns out it wasn't optimised after all! So it still looked great and ran at 60fps. So I've just optimised it and it pretty much killed my GPU. Dropping to 30fps as soon as fighting started, and even though FRAPS showed 30fps, it felt like it even dipped below that sometimes too. Very jerky.

Even the likes of Cities Skylines have the optimal settings set with the level of detail as "medium".
 
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I never really had any issues with my GTX 680 when running with Ultra settings.. Very few games needed toning down to achieve 60FPS.

The only time it really didn't cut it was one I tried it with 4K gaming and it really struggled..
 
I THINK Batman is due to DX11 being messy. I'm sure if I turned it off then it ran okay.

Odd that Nvidia give me "optimal" settings but it knocks my fps down to 30fps if not lower :LOL:
 
Pillars Of Eternity is £11.39 at cdkeys.com in case anyone is thinking of buying from the Steam daily deal today.
 
Planing to buy something like this at the end of the year. What do you think?

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+ maybe later change the fans of the H100i to quieter ones
 
Looks a lot like something that I would buy for myself, though I would probably choose AMD graphics card instead of Nvidia. No hard reason for that, I have just had better experience with ATI/AMD for myself.


If I may ask, how much would that hardware cost?
 
Looks a lot like something that I would buy for myself, though I would probably choose AMD graphics card instead of Nvidia. No hard reason for that, I have just had better experience with ATI/AMD for myself.


If I may ask, how much would that hardware cost?
About 3300 €, hopefully less at the end of the year.

I saved money for a big buy, that's why I want to get something really insane. :D
 
I'd rather wait for at least another month or two for Skylake to become available (august/september) and then make a choice. Not sure if it is worth to dump that much money into tech that, although extremely powerfull, is the end of the road for current Haswell architecture.
 
Like others have mentioned wait till October/November time for the release of Skylake.

There is big improvements coming with Skylake this year so just wait till end of the year.
 
Like others have mentioned wait till October/November time for the release of Skylake.

There is big improvements coming with Skylake this year so just wait till end of the year.
As I said, I will wait till the end of the year anyway.

I have no clue about, what to expect from Skylake, just a more powerful CPU? Will it be affordable at the start or cost a lot more than the OC 5820k I selected? And furthermore the other components can stay the same?
 
There is also the new chipset coming with Skylake (100-series), so current motherboard would have to be replaced too. Other components shouldn't be questionable - if anything, chipset for Skylake is actually designed around DDR4.

Another plus should be wider PCIe bus - 20 lanes vs. current 16 - which is very handy if you want to use top grade GPU (which kinda needs the bandwidth of all those 16 lanes) and having some spare lanes for new super-performant M.2 SSD drive, which has to be connected to PCIe too.

As for the most powerfull Skylake CPUs being available from the get go, let's wait and see :) some fishy politics may be involved on Intel's side, because they have another near-stillborn architecture waiting to hit the market (the infamous Broadwell, which is actually the architectural predecessor of Skylake).
 
Arrrgh, sorry - I somehow missed probably the most important ingredient of your desired configuration - high-end X99 chipset (Haswell-E)! That monstrosity already has full support for DDR4 and provides up to 40 PCIe lanes. Basically, it already supports many of the features that Skylake brings as an upgrade over ordinary Haswell.

Combine that with Intel probably holding back on most powerful and unlocked Skylake CPUs for a while (2016?) and by the end of the year your configuration probably won't have real competitor in Skylake at all.
 
My 2 cents? The highest tier available usually is overpriced. You pay a lot more for the best parts around but usually there's also something performing like 5% less with a price tag that's 30% less or so (just because it's not top of the benchmark results). In your case I'm looking especially at the Titan X, it is purely an overkill.

If you don't need 12 GB of RAM on the graphics card (and actually I believe you don't but it's a matter of taste) you could save something by buying a 980Ti instead (which comes with 6GB of memory).

And, as others said, you might aswell wait for what Skylake has to offer. You never know.
 
My 2 cents? The highest tier available usually is overpriced. You pay a lot more for the best parts around but usually there's also something performing like 5% less with a price tag that's 30% less or so (just because it's not top of the benchmark results). In your case I'm looking especially at the Titan X, it is purely an overkill.

If you don't need 12 GB of RAM on the graphics card (and actually I believe you don't but it's a matter of taste) you could save something by buying a 980Ti instead (which comes with 6GB of memory).

And, as others said, you might aswell wait for what Skylake has to offer. You never know.
I know I can get away cheaper and I maybe don't need that powerful graphic card like the Titan X. But guess what, I really want it, I want to invest in the future and yeah, I just would love to have that beast :D
 
So go for it! And show us some benchmarks once you get it as I'll hardly ever see one of them live in my lifetime... The last GPU I bought was a R9 270X for 150 euros :D
 
I would suggest to wait upto 2016 for Nvidia's Pascal GPU. Buying Titan X will do no good at all. If you need a GPU now, I say go for 980 Ti, that will save some money which will help you to upgrade to Pascal GPU next year.

Titan X really isn't worth that much of money. It's just my opinion though.
 
I would suggest to wait upto 2016 for Nvidia's Pascal GPU. Buying Titan X will do no good at all. If you need a GPU now, I say go for 980 Ti, that will save some money which will help you to upgrade to Pascal GPU next year.

Titan X really isn't worth that much of money. It's just my opinion though.
Well, that's the progress of development, there will be always something better coming out in the future, you could wait till you die for upgrades. I won't wait until summer 2016, no way, I want to buy a complete new PC this year and don't want to upgrade for at least 3 years.
 
What I fear most is that I bought 980 Ti from Ngreedia (The way it's meant to be payed) and even if it performs like beast- Ngreedia will kill it when pascal comes out. Just like they did with keplar. 290x and all other Amd cards still perforns like they did before while Nvidia 700 cards are starting to choke.

Not sure what should I buy next year for 4k. Ngreedia Pascal or AmD ?
 
What I fear most is that I bought 980 Ti from Ngreedia (The way it's meant to be payed) and even if it performs like beast- Ngreedia will kill it when pascal comes out. Just like they did with keplar. 290x and all other Amd cards still perforns like they did before while Nvidia 700 cards are starting to choke.

Not sure what should I buy next year for 4k. Ngreedia Pascal or AmD ?
Speaking of 4k, when do you think it's affordable and reasonable to buy a 4k monitor with GSync? Or is there any other technique about to come out in the next 2 years? Really no need to do anything on a monitor soon as my Samsung SyncMaster is still fantastic but the time will come to change to 4k.
 
4k is not much of a good choice now in my opinion. Gsync isnt good @ 60 hz and it's price is way too much now. There will be better 4k monitors with less price in maybe 2-3 years. Or maybe even next year incase Next gen cards can handle 4k in max settings.

One more deal breaking about these hi res gsync monitors are that they dont have vga, dvi or hdmi port in some case. So I wont be able to connect my old pc, or any console that I bought. It would have been acceptable if the price was low.

As per my guess, 4k wont get cheap even in next 1-3 years. Maybe 60hz version will get cheap but in that case I'll go for non gsync ones. Oh, there's still no 4k gaming monitor currently which gives better picture quality, color wih low latency yet.

I say you should still stick with the current monitor (whats its resolution and refresh rate?) you have. Since you're going for Titan X and don't wanna upgrade for 3 years, then buy 4k after 3 years too (Even though Titan X can play in 4k, lowering picture quality for hi res isnt worth it).

And I will buy 4k if the price drops to $500-700 which will take at least 4 years I think.
 
4k is not much of a good choice now in my opinion. Gsync isnt good @ 60 hz and it's price is way too much now. There will be better 4k monitors with less price in maybe 2-3 years. Or maybe even next year incase Next gen cards can handle 4k in max settings.

One more deal breaking about these hi res gsync monitors are that they dont have vga, dvi or hdmi port in some case. So I wont be able to connect my old pc, or any console that I bought. It would have been acceptable if the price was low.

As per my guess, 4k wont get cheap even in next 1-3 years. Maybe 60hz version will get cheap but in that case I'll go for non gsync ones. Oh, there's still no 4k gaming monitor currently which gives better picture quality, color wih low latency yet.

I say you should still stick with the current monitor (whats its resolution and refresh rate?) you have. Since you're going for Titan X and don't wanna upgrade for 3 years, then buy 4k after 3 years too (Even though Titan X can play in 4k, lowering picture quality for hi res isnt worth it).

And I will buy 4k if the price drops to $500-700 which will take at least 4 years I think.
Yeah, exactly my thoughts, I will definitely wait about 2-3 years or maybe more until I think about a 4k monitor as second monitor. As I said, I love my Samsung monitor, even though I bought it a long time ago, it's still amazing with fantastic picture quality. Oh and my monitor is 1920x1080 with 2ms.
 
Then you'll have a very good experience with your games :) And wih that resolution, Titan X is totally beast in max settings and it'll pretty much last you this whole ps4 gen with great graphics ( I said pretty much because Nvidia might kill Titan X with new drivers in future, I would stick with old drivers in that case).

Now I doubt if it's the developers who doesn't optimize the games or it's Nvidia/AMD who pays them to make it optimized for only new cards.

GPU's equivalent to Ps4 are dying now and with new Gpus we get only better image quality, not better graphics. Like we get better AA, AF etc but the main graphics looks similar. That wasn't a problem but the same graphics card will choke after 2 years even with settings equivalent to Ps4 because the new games won't be optimized for that card anymore. It's 30% fault of developers for being stupid and 70% fault of Nvidia or Amd for stop supporting their old cards which are better than Ps4.

Edit: Oh, and they should stop making dozens of new card models. They should have made only 2 cards in 4 years where one would be for $150 and give max settings on high res and other card which would be for $300 and would max everything on highest res. But they want money, so it will never happen.
 
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Since you guys are discussing about VGAs I thought I'd talk about this here.
Last month I bought a Sapphire Radeon R9 290x Tri-x 4GB for my Intel i7 @2.80 GHz, 4GB DDR3 of RAM (OCZ REAPER), Windows 7 x64. And still I can't get games like Watch Dogs and GTA V to run at ULTRA detalis settings. They lag, they freeze, etc. What's going on? Is it the video card or is my RAM not enough?. Not even on VERY HIGH. I have to set them to HIGH. Which is weird.

I thought I would be able to run everything at the top level when I bought this card.
 
OH and by the way... I play those games at 1920x1080. Not even at a super high resolution (I play PES 2015 and FIFA 15 at 3200x1800)
 
Your RAM is too weak IMO. How about add more RAM. In my case, 8GB RAM X 2.
 
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8 GB is minimum for this whole Ps4 generation. 12 is safe and 16 Gb is more than enough. But 4gb will choke like shit.

And keep in mind that Watch Dog is horribly unoptimized. So it might still lag (specially on Sli or crossfire If I recall correctly).

Your GPU is good and it won't necessarily need any upgrade for 1080p.
 
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