I've used the ATI HD 7850 for a few years now. It's fine. But, I only play rFactor 2 and I understand that the NVIDIA cards run it better. Would I notice a significant improvement going from the 7850 to a GTX 960 4GB? I know there are faster NVIDIA cards. But, I'm "budget conscious" a.k.a. cheap. Thanks, Beans
GTX960 will beat 7850 by a good 25+% in most any title, from everything I have seen that margin would blow out in rF2. Make sure you have PCIe3.0 compatible system. Run a GTX960 @ PCIe2.0 in rFactor2 you will lose performance.
Durge, The info I see online says that the performance difference from 3.0 to 2.0 is minimal. Is there something different about rF2 with respect to this? Thanks, Beans
http://isiforums.net/f/showthread.p...f2-using-PCI-e-3-0-x16-with-higher-end-cards! Gigabyte GTX960 2GB is slightly faster then a GTX670 2GB I run 4Sx 16x no HDR medium Shadows and everything else is full. If you are only ever going to run 1920x1080 resolution 2GB version would be fine. Cheaper version would do if you happy to drop settings like me. That's not bad bang for buck @ $180 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125807
That *used* to be the case, AMD drivers got better and then RF2 got better with AMD cards, recently there's been a lot of nVidia drivers causing issues in RF2 (just from the number of posts in this forum). Currently I'm running two HD7850s in Crossfire and it's as smooth as silk at High to Very High settings (Max settings track/mod/#AI dependent), about 2 years ago I would've been looking at an nVidia (single) card next but now I'm not so sure. Also take into account what other games you play, check out Card Comparison Charts for games and make your own decision, it may be that other games you like run better on AMD or vice versa - in other words it's never easy, just save up and buy the best one you can afford
As others already mentioned... RF2 seems to work great for many AMD owners nowadays. PCI-E 2.0 16x VS 3.0 16x only makes a tiny difference in, by far, most games - like 2-5 % - but rFactor 2 mysteriously performs contrary to that and can gain anywhere from 10-ish to 40-ish % fps when going from PCI-E 2.0 16x (or, it's equivalent, 3.0 8x) to PCI-E 3.0 16x. From my knowledge, it hasn't been revealed why this happens (if it's even known why).
Thanks, all. I'm almost caught up. The other thing on my current 7850 card is sometimes a simple re-boot results in greatly increased framerates. I try to keep my browser and other unnecessary applications closed while racing. But, for some reason my framerates can vary quite a lot from session to session. Anything I may be overlooking?
Like other guys said first talk to some ATI R 380 owners in the sims and games are most important to you personally. If rF2 is your major concern and like me you will never run higher resolutions unless you win a lottery I say save up another 200 and get a GTX970. It is a bit hard to give good advice when no one knows your hardware specs, even a GTX960 wants the healthiest "bus system" possible for no bottlenecks. With stock i5-4690, low end gaming H97 board, 1600 memory and Gigabyte GTX970 G1 all the latest sims at 1080p are very good. If you use more then 1920, even 1440p which a lot do with the same GPU is where you are still going to run into that "sacrifice zone" My point being you won't have to buy i7-4770, Z gaming best ram to run a GTX960 In fact you can build a i5-H97 system will run clock for clock just as good and you can afford a GTX970 ! The place Hi End hardware comes to effect is dragging every little bit of stability and speed out of every component for hi res multi monitor multi GPU setups. If you can afford this, why not
Yup, no point in going super high end I'd get a gtx 970 over a 980 any day, the price increase from a 970 to the 980 is just silly. And the only time I would go SLI 970s or a single 980 Ti or Fury X is if running triple screens, or single screen @ 4k and over. Single screen @ 1080p doesn't need super high-end stuff. I bet a GTX 970 can even run a single screen @ 1440p and high framerates quite well judging from my triple 1080p monitors w/ one 970 performance.
Only tests I tried so far are old stuff on standalone drive..... F1 2014, Grid 2 and Autosport all fully maxxed I got 110-130 fps averages @ 1080p Crap Spin Grid looks nicer then I remember, I mean the hardrives put away now only ran the test, not like I going to drive them lol ( okay I lie ...........I tried to do one lap keyboard on each codies and crashed at almost every turn lol ) AC and pCars I just turned most everything max and they started at least. lol p I get to benching tonight while I wait for MotoGP torrent. p P.S. Blows me away how ingame video settings + max graphics look in rF2, ie: no Inspector .......like wow
Thanks again for everyone's input. I will be doing a full upgrade with new MB, CPU,SSD and GPU in time and will likely go with the most cost-effective nvidia GPU at that time. For this baby upgrade I basically went from my ATI 7850 to a 7970, about 30% better FPS for a net cost of $40 US - buying used and selling old both on ebay. The new ISI tracks really shine with solid FPS - well enough for now. Thanks again. Beans
I had a XFX 7850 2GB and with the latest build and the new Spa 66 and others, it runs 60 fps, full details. I went to a Sapphire R9 280X and the quality looks the same, but now I have 100+ fps.
