Soldato
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- 1 Apr 2010
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I’d be looking for Black Friday deals on a 1070.
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Bah, I can't decide what graphics card to buy. If any.
- Thread starter Angilion
- Start date
If you have a good boosting 980ti that gets upper 1400s, or into 1500MHz it will give the 1070 a hard run - at least on paper numbers - in my experience the 1070 holds up a little better in some demanding scenes while the 980ti can be hitting higher framerates where it is less useful which can pull the averages up a bit but not necessarily give you the performance you want but in most cases there isn't much in it.
Personally I wouldn't be buying something around 580/1060 performance even for 1080p this late in the day.
Soldato
It's like that old anti-drugs campaign "Just Say No"
Just Say No to paying multiple hundred pounds for mid-range cards.
Just Say No to paying multiple hundred pounds for mid-range cards.
But then I'd be paying at least £400-£430 for a used card with no guarantee and that grates on me more than paying £420 for a slightly lower spec new card with a guarantee (which grates on me too much to click the buy button). Even though I know that a modern graphics card hardly needs a guarantee because it will almost certainly work for longer than a guarantee period, £420 for a used 1080 card is more of a "too much" to me than £420 for a new 1070Ti.
Caporegime
I personally couldn't advocate going for a second hand GPU. Frankly I find GPU's to be the most temperamental for failure.
I imagine you'll be able to pick up a V56 for ~380 on Monday or a 1070 for 350.
I'd wait for black Friday first.
If nothing tempting comes up - like a 1070, perhaps consider going second-hand again and look for a 290/X or thereabouts equivalent (or a 980Ti if you can get one for good money).
http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-HD-7950-vs-AMD-R9-290/2160vs2171
Btw, what CPU do you have?
If nothing tempting comes up - like a 1070, perhaps consider going second-hand again and look for a 290/X or thereabouts equivalent (or a 980Ti if you can get one for good money).
http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-HD-7950-vs-AMD-R9-290/2160vs2171
Btw, what CPU do you have?
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Does anyone really expect significant price reductions on new graphics cards for black Friday? I thought that existed for the purpose of starting fights over the handful of items at very low prices and bringing incautious people into a shop for the shifting of old unsold stock and a 5% reduction in price on some items being labelled a 25+% reduction by referring to some made up prices.
I've seen some very relevant examples of the last one on another site, e.g. a 1070 which was selling for £390 last week now "on sale" at 25% off...by listing the price as £520 reduced to £390.
I've seen some very relevant examples of the last one on another site, e.g. a 1070 which was selling for £390 last week now "on sale" at 25% off...by listing the price as £520 reduced to £390.
Caporegime
I imagine the V56/V64 might hit "launch" prices or near. A V56 at 380 despite its many flaws would probably represent a quality buy (Despite me thinking it should be ~350 tops and AIB models) Or 1070's for 350 (But frankly performance wise I'd take a V56)
Ocuk 1070 zotac mini was at £350 for a limited batch twice and then prices rose to 390 and 410.
Vega 56/64 slithered down to 389/449 and then went back up.
So no I'm not expecting anything at all, though I'd love to see the 1070ti mini drop to £380
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I nearly bought a zotac 1080 mini for £467 and destiny2 from elsewhere.
Vega 56/64 slithered down to 389/449 and then went back up.
So no I'm not expecting anything at all, though I'd love to see the 1070ti mini drop to £380
.I nearly bought a zotac 1080 mini for £467 and destiny2 from elsewhere.
Permabanned
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Same position as the OP... Have had a 7950 for ages and been looking to upgrade for some time now... Was thinking about taking the plunge 18 months ago but thought I would hold off and wait to pick up a cheap 1070 or a bargain RX480 card.... Unfortunately the RX480 equivalent is more expensive than at launch and 1070 price point has not moved. A 1060 just seems like being too expensive for what I will be getting considering what I will be upgrading from.
Am seriously thinking of going for a 2nd hand 980 ti...
Am seriously thinking of going for a 2nd hand 980 ti...
Still a great card for 1080p.
Associate
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- 21 Oct 2012
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If you're buying new then I'd suggest 6GB GTX 1060 if you're playing at 1080p.
Buy it as a stop gap until the next round of cards appear and then sell it on to fund a new card.
Buy it as a stop gap until the next round of cards appear and then sell it on to fund a new card.
Soldato
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- 13 Aug 2010
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I don’t see any bargains to be had given the cryptocurrency miners are hoovering up all 1060/1070 cards and the AMD equivalents therefore why would retailers be offering deals on kit that sells itself ?
Permabanned
I dunno, my last two GPU's have been second hand and both going strong. 980 and 1080. 980 now in daughters PC. 
Caporegime
Warning - pointless rambling ahead!
I want a new toy to replace my Radeon 7950. I've certainly got my money's worth out of that card (I bought it used for ~£100 IIRC) but it's lacking in grunt nowadays even though I'm gaming at 1920x1080.
But the problem is what to replace it with. I'm balking at the current price of graphics cards. £400 for a high midrange card. £250 for 2.5 year old second hand cards not quite as good as those.
But then I look at a 1070...and think that a 1070ti isn't much more expensive...and then think that a 1080 isn't much more expensive...and then I'm looking at £500+ for a graphics card...and then I think that's really silly and my 7950 is still working and tolerable for 1080...and then I play my FO4 with my ludicrously elaborate settlements and ~150 mods and it's really quite sub par...and then I look at a 1070 and....you see how this goes.
I've looked at Vega56 and 64, but they're louder and more power-hungry (I have a good quality 600W PSU that should be enough, but I'd rather have it under lower load and thus quieter) and not cheaper or better so I'm leaning towards nVidia this time.
And now I've seen a decent quality 1070 Ti with a good cooler for £417 and that's a good price for a 1070 Ti that's silent when not gaming, quiet even under stress testing and boosts as high as ~1900MHz at stock settings at 1920x1080. It beats a stock 1080 in a couple of games at 1920x1080 because of how high it boosts at stock.
But...that's not pocket change. £417 seems like a hell of a lot for a graphics card to me.
The money isn't a hard constraint by itself. I've been lucky and I've become very prudent with money as I've got older and so I have accumulated some spare cash despite being a minimum wage flunkey. Not a lot, but more than enough for this without any trouble. It's just that, well, I've become very prudent with money. £400+ for a graphics card feels like too much.
Black Friday is being mentioned, but I doubt if graphics cards will have any actual reductions. I was looking at another site and they had some graphics cards with big reductions labelled on them, but that was blatant lying. The prices were the same - all they'd done was put some much higher prices next to the real prices and crossed out the higher prices. The usual price is 25% off this made up price! Bargain!
Maybe prices will go down after Christmas...and maybe it won't be all that long until the next gen comes out and maybe they'll be significantly better so I could buy a lower model for a much lower price and make do with my 7950 for a while longer...
And now I've talked myself out of it again
I play massively modded FO4 too(around 250 mods),with large settlements too. I have packs like SOE,Manufacturing Extended,etc. I have a Xeon E3 1230 V2/Core i7 3770 and a GTX1080 running the game at qHD. I also run War of the Commonwealth.
I have two different playthroughs with the game. One has big settlements,and the other I didn't really do much with settlements. Both playthroughs are a few 100 hours each. I am around level 100 in each. Both have the same mods.
My observations on the matter:
1.)Once you start building lots of largish settlements in the game in tanks performance overall as it hammers the CPU with GPU usage getting down to something like 60% in settlements. My second playthrough has noticeably worse performance than the first one,using the same mods. The only difference is I have far more settlements and much larger ones,with far more going on.
2.)War of the Commonwealth also pushes the CPU as it increases the amount of NPCs in the games and the size of NPC groups.
3.)The game once modded with texture packs,etc easily hits 6GB usage at qHD and if you increase draw distance,etc it causes VRAM requirements to easily be way too much for even 8GB at qHD.
4.)In settlements with mods you can see one maybe two threads being pushed massively with a few others being used at a lower level and it has been shown the game needs two strong threads and another 4 or so at a lower level to perform optimally.
5.)The game loves fast RAM due to the way the engine pushes one or two threads.
6.)In its modded form the game is close to unplayable off a normal HDD. I should know when my Sandisk SSD went kaput and I moved the game back to an HDD for a brief period. It was incredibly stuttery,and when I moved it back to a new SSD,it was much smoother.
You need to remember Creation engine is not only a few years old but is still based on the Gamebryo engine from the 1990s. It has a lot of impressive improvements to it like the streaming tech and the settlement building stuff,but all this has done is really make it more and more CPU heavy.
Hence,you might be quite CPU limited if you don't have a good enough CPU in the game,and if you don't load the game off an SSD its going to also lead to more cases of stuttering. I would say if you have an oldish CPU,one with not enough threads or not enough clockspeed,a CPU upgrade and a GXT1060 6GB(RX580 8GB has more VRAM so will be useful for texture mods and enhanced draw distance but IIRC Nvidia cards tend to have better framerates in the game),would be a better choice than spending all your money on a GTX1070/GTX1070TI/GTX1080 especially at 1080p.
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Yup.
That's definitely true. I was playing it on my old PC with a C2Q 6600 (overclocked to 3.2GHz) and DDR2-800 and that was dire even with my earlier medium-sized settlements.
My current PC has an i7-4790K and 16GB DDR3-2400, so it's not a hugely lower spec than a good modern PC. I couldn't get much better without spending rather a lot of money. I think my graphics card is now the main bottleneck.
Oddly enough, I still haven't got around to migrating my OS installation to my SSD so it's just hanging around unused. It's only 250GB, so I'd have to faff about a bit moving some stuff and not other stuff as it won't all fit on and I haven't yet bothered. I wasn't intending to move games to the SSD until after I moved the OS to it. The only time I see loading lag that really stands out is when I open sections in the building menus - it can be 10s before the icons of the items appear. Also, of course, loading times when moving from one cell to another. I'm not seeing drive activity showing at other times. Maybe it is a problem and I'm just not noticing. Something to fiddle with at some point.
I'm an inch away from saying "Ah, what the hell" and buying a 1070 Ti. I'll probably use it for several years, so it might end up as maybe as little as £100 a year. Not so expensive if you look at it that way. But I still feel like I'm being had paying >£400 for a high midrange card and Volta on gaming cards is likely in the not too distant future. There's always something new in the not too distant future and Volta already exists. I'd feel rather silly if I bought a 1070Ti for £450 now and it's beaten by a 2060 for £300 in 3 or 4 months. Then again, maybe Volta gaming cards won't be hugely better than Pascal ones (because Volta is designed more for compute tasks and it will be cut down for gaming cards) or maybe they won't come out soon. Who knows?
I'm almost decided on a 1070Ti. Almost.
Caporegime
Upto a degree yes - I was running the game on a GTX960 at 1080p and qHD and moving to a GTX1080,I saw a huge improvement in non-CPU bound areas,and could turn some more settings up. However,those dips in settlements didn't really improve that much.
Even a Haswell CPU can pushed in the game:
https://cdn.sweclockers.com/artikel/diagram/14239?key=22c6c318c004c7a7dbdd39f1da29c8fa
https://cdn.sweclockers.com/artikel/diagram/12969?key=60aa34429f5b4d4bdd503732730a56fc
Look at the relative difference between a Core i7 4790k and the Skylake/Kaby Lake Core i7s and the Intel Coffee Lake Core i5 and Core i7 chips. Once you start building larger and more complex settlements,and have more NPCs the game becomes massively CPU bound.
That is with a GTX1080 at 1080p,but large settlements will push your CPU far more.
It also is massively dependent on RAM bandwidth:
https://static.techspot.com/articles-info/1171/bench/Fallout.png
It was noticed earlier even with DDR3 systems:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-the-best-pc-hardware-for-fallout-4-4023
HardOCP did a comparison of various CPUs:
https://images.hardocp.com/images/articles/14958035970qy2jlakgl_5_2.png
That is SB with 2133MHZ DDR3 and SKL with 3000MHZ DDR4.
So at least you have used the best speed DDR3 for your system,so that should increase performance another 10% maybe a bit more over those Sweclockers tests,but remember they are also running stock RAM for the newer CPUs,so once you have faster DDR4 they start pushing away.
It becomes more and more of a CPU test than a GPU test,once you push the engine.
It takes a few seconds for the build menu to actually come up,but the icons do load up quickly. It does not take 10 seconds for me though - a few seconds,but it happens.
However,I noticed a smoother experience in settlements running the game from an SSD and I run War of the Commonwealth which increases the NPC density in the maps and they spawn in larger groups. I do run more mods than you and some of my settlements are quite elaborate(I have a few 100 settlers apparently in total),so definitely run the game off an SSD.
But like I said my other playthrough with less settlements,which were more basic and smaller,saw much better performance overall in the game.
It seems it might be down to the number of NPCs per cell,so a few large settlements with a cell can lead to overall performance going down.
Coming from someone running the game with a GTX1080 at qHD - since you are stuck at 1080p,its not worth it. Like I said I am mostly CPU limited in settlements and its the same with people with much newer CPUs and faster RAM.
Also remember I am running the game at qHD which is 78% more pixels than what your display can muster. Remember the GTX1070TI/GTX1080 are on average 60% to 70% faster than a GTX1060 at 1080p,so realistically a GTX1060 at 1080p should produce similar performance to a GTX1070TI at 1080p. This is why I suspect a GTX1060 6GB would be enough to get good performance in non-CPU limited areas,as its easy for me to get 60FPS in such areas with a GTX1080 at qHD.
Yes,to a degree you are GPU limited and also VRAM limited if you use graphics mods,but personally I would just get the cheapest GTX1060 6GB or maybe a GTX1070(if you want to have more longevity) and spend the extra on another larger SSD. My FO4 folder is around 110GB in size now,and my NMM folder,where the mods are downloaded to is around 50GB(I have that on a HDD currently).
My save files are now breaking 100MB+ too,so another thing is to make sure to manage the amount of saves too as they can fill up the drive.
Edit!!
Some comparison of various cards:
https://images.hardocp.com/images/articles/1509608832rtdxf9e1ls_12_1.png
Remember that is a GTX1070 Founders Edition against an aftermarket GTX1070TI. So an aftermarket GTX1070 won't be much slower.
Comparison of aftermarket GTX1070 and GTX1070TI cards:
http://www.legitreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/fallout-1080p-1070ti-645x634.jpg
Not much in it.
I would seriously wait for a GTX1070 deal as I have seen a few for well under £400 recently,and save the money and buy a dedicated SSD for your games and run FO4 off it. I have seen 480GB ones for £130 to £140 recently and there might be some deals in the next few weeks.
Going from the launch review,and if you have overclocked your R9 280 and equate it to R9 285/R9 380/R9 280X level performance,you are looking at a 2 to 2.5X increase in performance with a GTX1070:
https://tpucdn.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1070/images/perfrel_1920_1080.png
A GTX1060GB should yield a 60% to 70% increase overall:
https://tpucdn.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1060/images/perfrel_1920_1080.png
Also,remember both cards have more VRAM,and once you start adding graphical mods to FO4 it can start to use much more VRAM too as your current card has only 3GB of VRAM.
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Thanks for the detailed information. I agree that a 6GB 1060 would be the best buy for Fallout 4, but I'm going to go for something better because I'll probably play something else within the next few years, something less CPU limited, and ~£250 for a 1060 appeals to me even less than the pricing for 1070, 1070Ti and 1080. I have £1500 in spare cash for fun money and more every month, so the cost isn't directly an issue. The sticking point for me is perceived value for money more than price per se.
I'm obviously missing something because I'm not seeing the prices I see other people referring to. The prices I'm finding are about 10% above the ones I'm seeing people referring to. I'm seeing £380+ for 1070, £420+ for 1070Ti and £470+ for 1080.
I had a smile over the changes shown by your casual reference to my current card having "only 3GB of VRAM". 3GB is an "only" amount nowadays, but I remember when 4MB was the huge amount of memory on the amazing new 3Dfx Voodoo graphics cards that transformed PC gaming like nothing before or since.
I'm obviously missing something because I'm not seeing the prices I see other people referring to. The prices I'm finding are about 10% above the ones I'm seeing people referring to. I'm seeing £380+ for 1070, £420+ for 1070Ti and £470+ for 1080.
I had a smile over the changes shown by your casual reference to my current card having "only 3GB of VRAM". 3GB is an "only" amount nowadays, but I remember when 4MB was the huge amount of memory on the amazing new 3Dfx Voodoo graphics cards that transformed PC gaming like nothing before or since.