Advice On Upgrading Graphics Card for 4K Gaming

[dante671]

Hi all

So my PC is now over 5 years old, but still runs pretty much all the games I play on high settings. Generally I've not been playing the most graphic intensive games, in the past its been League of Legends, Overwatch, but I've now started playing Eve Online which supports 4k.

This now has me considering upgrading my graphics card and purchasing a 4k monitor to go with it, and I was looking for some advice on selecting a graphics card for 4k gaming?

My primary goal with be to run Eve Online on a new primary 4k monitor, with my 2 existing monitors connected for basic tasks such as browsing the net or YouTube etc while playing.

Initially I considered a RX 480, but I didn't see too much about them relating to 4k, which left me a bit lost.

If possible I'd like to aim for under the £400 mark for the card, though if thats not possible then as close as I can get to it without sacrificing too much performance.

I've included my current system below:

• Intel Core i7-2600K 3.40GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - OEM
• MSI ATI Radeon HD 6950 OC Twin FrozR III Power Edition 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card with Dirt3 PC Game
• Asrock Z68 Extreme4 Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard
• Corsair Enthusiast Series TX 850W V2 High Performance '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply (CMPSU-850TXV2UK)
• Cooler Master HAF 922 Case - Black
• Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 8GB (4x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (KHX1600C9D3X2K2/8GX)

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.

 

[DONOHUE07]

I don't play eve, nor any of the games you have mentioned, but 4K is very demanding, even by today's GPU standards, the 1080 is the best GPU you can buy, the £1200 titanX aside. I recommend that's if your pockets are deep enough

 

[Curlyriff]

From what I could find Eve online is CPU intensive and requires large amounts of GPU RAM to be allocated to it so not sure that at this time.

With how things are I would actually suggest waiting to see with regards to Ryzen if your primary goal is Eve Online. The CPU side of things would also benefit from an Overclock to help.

Either way the £400 I think would need to be upped to £600 to get your CPU, RAM & Mobo updated to make the difference with Eve Online to aim for your 4K target.

Then you would still be looking to need a GPU with a GTX 1070 looking to minimum for 4K on Eve and really a 1080 or SLI 1080's to get things at higher settings.

A 1070 retails at £390 for the cheaper end. So that is now looking close to £1k for your PC to be gaming at medium to high settings in Eve Online. Then you still need a monitor.

You could buy the 1070 and overclock your current CPU to get some more out of it to keep it closer to your budget and see how you get on. In honesty if you buy the 4K monitor and then feel you loose too much in detail dropping to 1440p and upping the settings may be better. This would be my preference overall to try first. Then your CPU/Mobo update depending on the results.

 

[Poneros]

But going to 4K wouldn't put any additional stress on his CPU.. so that advice is naff. Resolution increases = increased GPU demands.

@dante671, If you haven't already bought a 4K screen, look at a Freesync one, it WILL make a difference with those dips. I would also say wait for Vega this spring as it will give you a choice for a good AMD 4K GPU (the 480 wouldn't really be enough). If you already have the 4K Monitor and it isn't Freesync/Gsync, then look at Nvidia's 1070s. I'd recommend the Zotac/EVGA ones for warranty/customer support reasons; performance difference between the other cards is minor otherwise.

 

[dante671]

Thanks for the replies, lots of useful info there.

I think for the moment I'll hold delay upgrading until the new cards are announced, and go from there. It'll also give me the time to put an extra bit cash aside to splash out on it where needed.

I've not bought a 4K monitor yet, but I'd been planning on getting a Freesync/Gsync one at the same time as the card.

Thanks again

 

[Curlyriff]

But going to 4K wouldn't put any additional stress on his CPU.. so that advice is naff. Resolution increases = increased GPU demands.

@Dante671, If you haven't already bought a 4K screen, look at a Freesync one, it WILL make a difference with those dips. I would also say wait for Vega this spring as it will give you a choice for a good AMD 4K GPU (the 480 wouldn't really be enough). If you already have the 4K Monitor and it isn't Freesync/Gsync, then look at Nvidia's 1070s. I'd recommend the Zotac/EVGA ones for warranty/customer support reasons; performance difference between the other cards is minor otherwise.

No that is not true.

It will certainly add to it as instructions that come from the CPU to the GPU and where things are being offloaded from the CPU because it is weaker than the GPU to do the same task.

This is why CPU intensive games are more intensive at higher resolution still. Not everything is done direct at the GPU that makes it directly relate to just the resolution in that the transfer of files are still larger etc.

Your logic is flawed in thinking that the CPU only does things that do not relate to resolution which isn't true unless it is a really badly optimised game engine.

 

[pieman109]

To run at 4K you're going to need serious gpu grunt (along with a cpu overclock to say, 4.5ghz I reckon). One thing to consider is Xfire PROVIDING the games you play will support it. The cost of 2 x RX480 8gb could be £430-£450, whereas a GTX 1080 starts at £600, thats a saving of £150 with the same amount of memory. As I said, it all depends on game support of Xfire.

 

[DONOHUE07]

To run at 4K you're going to need serious gpu grunt (along with a cpu overclock to say, 4.5ghz I reckon). One thing to consider is Xfire PROVIDING the games you play will support it. The cost of 2 x RX480 8gb could be £430-£450, whereas a GTX 1080 starts at £600, thats a saving of £150 with the same amount of memory. As I said, it all depends on game support of Xfire.

This is very good advice, I good friend of mine wanted to play bf1 at 4K but didn't want to pay over the odds on a 1080, he was going to buy a 1070 and knock the graphics down to high/medium with no AA just to play 4K, I told him if all he's interest in is bf1 then check if it scales well in crossfire (I apparently does, I don't play it personally) told him to buy two 8gb rx480's in crossfire and he's now rocking 60fps 4K ultra in his favourite game.

Hardly a future proof solution nor ideal if you plan on playing a wider range of titles, due too the flaky nature multi GPU configurations from both AMD and NVIDIA, but if your favourite games support it, it's a great solution on the 'cheap'

 

[DONOHUE07]

Plus the rx480's are down in price on here at the moment, never seen them at this price before

 

[Curlyriff]

xfire doesn't work in Window mode which is why I didn't mention it as the OP wanted to be able to go online while playing so would need window mode. Now I don't know if this ever got sorted but that was the case when I last checked it out.

If however you ran full screen and not worried about surfing internet on PC at same time then yes xfire of the RX480 8GB would make sense.

Further notes and reading it seems to suggest that Eve was running pretty good at 4k on the older titan a year ago so a RX480 would be fine then. That means with it being around the £220-£250 mark I would possibly purchase a better quality PSU that is gold rated around 600 watt.

Honestly the most impressive Titanium PSU is the SilverStone Strider 600w because of the size and being modular still whilst not being hundreds of pounds although the 800w SX800-LTI is really impressive.

SilverStone have really gone to work.

But yeah £250 for card (higher end out of factory clock and cooling) with £130 PSU that is highest rating for efficiency and thus highest build quality comes in the £400 budget.

If you want to save the pennys towards CPU/Mobo/RAM for future then you could go for a gold level that would be around £80.

I do think that when going up to the higher end that it is worth the Gold+ rating because there is a reason that OCUK and many recommend those level PSU's as a minimum for stopping things such as coil whine and longevity.

Edit: Should point out that Superflower/EVGA psu's are probably better at the Titanium rating but they are larger and a higher premium in terms of cost and I feel SilverStone have done excellent to get the balance.

 

[Poneros]

No that is not true.

It will certainly add to it as instructions that come from the CPU to the GPU and where things are being offloaded from the CPU because it is weaker than the GPU to do the same task.

This is why CPU intensive games are more intensive at higher resolution still. Not everything is done direct at the GPU that makes it directly relate to just the resolution in that the transfer of files are still larger etc.

Your logic is flawed in thinking that the CPU only does things that do not relate to resolution which isn't true unless it is a really badly optimised game engine.

Cool, now explain this:

 

[Tommy_Here]

Overclock that 2600k and look at minimum 1070 ideally 1080 for that extra oomph my overclock Ti does 4k and I'm satisfied with how it performs.

 

[Curlyriff]

Cool, now explain this:

GTA V isn't CPU heavy for a start.

Further to that you can clearly see a difference between the CPU's it just isn't as large in this particular game as others can be.

You can go and google for more results. However as an overview even on none CPU intensive games which share the same resolution then there is a gain from the CPU.

In Metro 2033 for instance going from an i7 2600K to the i7 3770k gained 3fps. Yeah again not much. I know from me benching Frontiers Planet Coaster though that is also CPU intensive using an older system with an i5 2500k to my i7 4790k at the same settings and 4K resolution I gained 8FPS from the CPU/Mobo swap.

The RAM was left stock in both at 16GB but it does at least correlate to my real world test that the CPU indeed can make a difference at resolution.

Further to that the gain at 1080 was only 3FPS which to me would suggest that the increase in going from 1080 to 4K is indeed adding further load that the older CPU can't handle. This to me would suggest the latest Architecture of the Intel CPU's handle 4K better than older ones due to a bottleneck somewhere with the CPU and GPU talking together.

Maybe try not to be patronising. Even with what you showed it has shown a principle gain as CPU's improve be it only marginal the premise is there.

This is likely to be further compounded by the release of Ryzen and how they work and DX12 and the other new API's that suggest further that newer CPU's will handle more tasks at different levels within different resolutions.

 

[Poneros]

I'm trying to talk practicality here. Sure, CPUs still matter, but if we're talking 1-5 fps on a £300+ investment then we might as well not, because that's still money that can go into GPU power and that's double-digit FPS returns. So for 4K for the foreseeable future unless you are past GPU-bottlenecks (which you won't be without QuadSli/CF setups - and in that case we're only talking X99 & similar setups anyway) then CPU differences are for all intents and purposes irrelevant and focus should stay on GPU. And more importantly, for someone looking to drop "just" up to £400 on a GPU, CPU is even less important for his 4K experience.

tl;dr Again, 2600 = great, keep it, pump all that new-platform-upgrade-money into a GPU instead.

 

[straxusii]

Don't go 4k, stick to 1440p 16:9 or ultrawide. Single GPUs aren't able to power 4k reliably at the moment and multi gpu support seems to have gone downhill recently

 

[Panos]

Hi all

So my PC is now over 5 years old, but still runs pretty much all the games I play on high settings. Generally I've not been playing the most graphic intensive games, in the past its been League of Legends, Overwatch, but I've now started playing Eve Online which supports 4k.

This now has me considering upgrading my graphics card and purchasing a 4k monitor to go with it, and I was looking for some advice on selecting a graphics card for 4k gaming?

My primary goal with be to run Eve Online on a new primary 4k monitor, with my 2 existing monitors connected for basic tasks such as browsing the net or YouTube etc while playing.

Initially I considered a RX 480, but I didn't see too much about them relating to 4k, which left me a bit lost.

If possible I'd like to aim for under the £400 mark for the card, though if thats not possible then as close as I can get to it without sacrificing too much performance.

I've included my current system below:

• Intel Core i7-2600K 3.40GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - OEM
• MSI ATI Radeon HD 6950 OC Twin FrozR III Power Edition 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card with Dirt3 PC Game
• Asrock Z68 Extreme4 Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard
• Corsair Enthusiast Series TX 850W V2 High Performance '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply (CMPSU-850TXV2UK)
• Cooler Master HAF 922 Case - Black
• Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 8GB (4x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (KHX1600C9D3X2K2/8GX)

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.

EVE Online is CPU heavy game and not so GPU heavy even at 4K. However you need a lot of VRAM for 4K especially on fleet battles.
If you only plan to use single client, overclock the 2600 to 4.5-4.7Ghz as first step.

Step two, you need a single card either GTX1070 or GTX1080.
You can escape with an overclocked RX480 if you buy 4K Freesync monitor which has low freesync limit at around 30-32 if you play EVE 90% of the time.

And RX480 will do fine paired with a freesync monitor, because my mate is still using on his 2x4K monitors with 2x GTX970 in SLI and an 4.7Ghz 2500K on EVE.

His system can do with 2 clients running on 2x4K monitors around 60 fps while docked, and undocking from Jita ~45 fps (and you know what I mean).

Also his system is close to the 3.5GB VRAM barrier eating into 3.8GB all the time. Which means is slower because of the VRAM issue.
But the cheapest non reference GTX1070 will serve you very well.