GPU Recommendations

[Matthias King 348]

Any GPU recommendations for a system with a decent CPU, 24gigs of RAM and using a lot of assets/mods? I was looking at possibly the GTX980 as those seem to have dropped in price quite a bit since I last looked at one. Any others I should look at?

[rsc204 21,815]

The thing about buying a GPU is that it's never as simple as saying get X. There is always a sweet spot between price and performance, regardless of your budget. The point where the next card up is too much extra to justify for the performance or where you might as well spend another $20 to get the better card.

So in essence start by asking if you want an NVidia or ATI card, I'm guessing the former. Then look at what your budget allows for in terms of the chip on the card. Ideally you want as much vRAM as you can afford, 4GB is a minimum these days, but 6GB or 8GB would be better. Then try to buy a brand of card that gives good performance, a decent cooling system and driver support for the long term. Because manufacturer enhancements aren't always best supported by the generic NVidia drivers. But after a certain point only NVidia bother to update them. Personally I tend to buy the same brand card as my motherboard, but it's not really necessary. The more you pay, the better the card you should end up with at the end of the day.

[kingofsimcity 5,739]

Cards that are relatively close in performance to the 980 that you can take a look at are AMD's RX 480/580 and NVIDIA's GTX 1060 6GB. These usually run in the 250$-ish price bracket. If you could get the 980 for a lot cheaper then by all means go for it. It's a solid card that's more than enough for a game like Skylines and most other modern titles at 1080p.

[Matthias King 348]

Thanks for the replies. One last question. Is there a noticeable difference between different brands of the 980, in performance and/or driver stability? I'd like to avoid headaches if at all possible. I'm currently dealing with semi-regular blue screening from a display driver problem with my current card, so stable drivers would be an improvement right off the bat.

Thanks.

[cmdp123789 710]

Speaking of which.. would it be possible to determine a minimum requirement for a gpu? right now I'm running on a NVIDIA GTX 965M, and game seems to be fine.. but, just to take the conversation a step further.. you know, for the sake of discussion.

[rsc204 21,815]

5 hours ago, Matthias King said:

Is there a noticeable difference between different brands of the 980, in performance and/or driver stability?

This can be the case with any chip. NVidia licence a reference design to the manufacturers. Then to differentiate themselves, the manufacturers will do various things. Some will tweak the cooling system, overclock the card slightly or use varying amounts of RAM. Whilst the chips are pretty much identical, the quality of the cards and components can vary hugely. I've stuck with ASUS for a long time, since I use their motherboards pretty exclusively. The last ones I bought even came with a 5 year extended warranty if you registered the card.

5 hours ago, Matthias King said:

I'm currently dealing with semi-regular blue screening from a display driver problem with my current card

One thing you need to be careful about though, BSODs are not normal, they indicate a problem somewhere with your system. Replacing the card won't necessarily fix that problem, it really depends on what the cause is. One thing you do need to check is that your PSU is sufficient to power your system, the graphics card can be a major part of that equation. PSU Calculators exist online to give you a good rough idea if you have a sufficient wattage PSU for your machine.

But if you are having BSODs from the display driver, maybe it's time to install the driver from the manufacturer and not the one recommended and/or supplied by NVidia, which includes drivers distributed through Window Update. Because if the manufacturer did alter the reference design specifications for your card, almost certainly the generic drivers won't be coded to handle that. Which can easily lead to such BSOD problems too. As mentioned previously, that might leave you having to use a far more out of date driver though.

 

[Matthias King 348]

2 hours ago, rsc204 said:

This can be the case with any chip. NVidia licence a reference design to the manufacturers. Then to differentiate themselves, the manufacturers will do various things. Some will tweak the cooling system, overclock the card slightly or use varying amounts of RAM. Whilst the chips are pretty much identical, the quality of the cards and components can vary hugely. I've stuck with ASUS for a long time, since I use their motherboards pretty exclusively. The last ones I bought even came with a 5 year extended warranty if you registered the card.

One thing you need to be careful about though, BSODs are not normal, they indicate a problem somewhere with your system. Replacing the card won't necessarily fix that problem, it really depends on what the cause is. One thing you do need to check is that your PSU is sufficient to power your system, the graphics card can be a major part of that equation. PSU Calculators exist online to give you a good rough idea if you have a sufficient wattage PSU for your machine.

But if you are having BSODs from the display driver, maybe it's time to install the driver from the manufacturer and not the one recommended and/or supplied by NVidia, which includes drivers distributed through Window Update. Because if the manufacturer did alter the reference design specifications for your card, almost certainly the generic drivers won't be coded to handle that. Which can easily lead to such BSOD problems too. As mentioned previously, that might leave you having to use a far more out of date driver though.

 

Thanks again for the thorough reply.

The BSOD situation is odd. I had a system HDD failure a while back. Incidentally, I lost all my Cities save games, some of which I put hundreds of hours into. But anyway, I replaced the system drive, but nothing else. Everything else is exactly as it was before, but I wasn't having the BSOD problem then. Only since the new HDD. I'm pretty sure I used the same GPU driver I used on the original configuration, but I had first built the computer quite a while before the HDD failure, so when I rebuilt, I didn't really remember. To my knowledge I have the recommended driver, but maybe that's not actually the best one. The odd thing is that only certain things set off the BSOD, like clockwork. If I avoid them, it doesn't happen. Cities doesn't trigger it, thankfully, pretty much just certain websites.

I'll look into a 980 from various manufacturers. I may match it to my motherboard.

Thanks again.

[rsc204 21,815]

On 25/05/2017 at 11:29 AM, Matthias King said:

The odd thing is that only certain things set off the BSOD, like clockwork. If I avoid them, it doesn't happen. Cities doesn't trigger it, thankfully, pretty much just certain websites.

You could try disabling hardware acceleration in your browser, it might help.

[Matthias King 348]

2 hours ago, rsc204 said:

You could try disabling hardware acceleration in your browser, it might help.

Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering. That one?

[rsc204 21,815]

Sounds right to me, since Hardware Acceleration is just another way of saying utilise the GPU. It depends on the browser you use really, in Firefox the option is called Hardware Acceleration, but I couldn't say exactly for other browsers. By removing it, you should reduce the chance of incompatibilities between the graphics drivers and the browser causing a BSOD.

[Matthias King 348]

Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a whirl and see if the usual suspects crash me or not.