GTX 780 - Worthwhile upgrade?

[colinb1984]

Hello everyone!

After craving to play a modded Skyrim since it's release in 2011, I recently converted to PC gaming finally and have pretty limited knowledge about components and other such things. The system I just purchased is an Acer G3-605 Predator with the following specs:

i7-4770 @ 3.4
16GB Ram
GTX 770 (2GB)
2TB HDD

This was a refurbished system from a Catalogue and with a 15% voucher code it cost a little over £600, which to me seemed a very fair price. So far I've been very satisfied with it's performance. I tested Skyrim at the Ultra setting and was averaging over 60 FPS. Since adding around 70 mods, including a graphically taxing ENB (Being new to modding I've spent the last couple of weeks learning by a lot of reading, browsing YouTube videos and a stupud and extremely frustrating amount of trial and error!) and still average just below 50 FPS, though at times this does drop noticeably for a moment in certain areas.

Basically, with the likes of Dragon Age Inquisition and The Witcher 3 on the horizon I would like to know what should be upgraded so that my system can keep up with the demands on these games. I'm sure what I have right now will play them, but I want to be able to play games with the best graphics possible. Obviously I can and will invest in an SSD at some point, although things seem to load more than quick enough with the HDD I have right now. Is it worth spending £300+ to upgrade the GTX 770 to the 780? Obviously if I did invest in this I would eBay my current card, and after a quick search a used one seems to fetch around £150. So my ultimate question is, is it worth paying around £150-£200 on the 780? I have had a quick Google search and I'm not sure if the performance varies all that much to warrant it, so your advice would be very much appreciated

 

[Gregster]

The 780 is a fair chunk faster than the 770 and the extra VRAM will be a nice bonus

 

[MissChief]

Marginally faster and 1gb extra ram for that price doesn't seem like a good deal?

 

[Rusty0611]

Is your current card struggling with all the mods enabled? Unless it's really struggling I would just keep it as it;'s still a very handy card.

It doesn't sound like your 770 is struggling for memory as when I ran out of memory on Skyrim it ground to a halt pretty much.

A 780 would be a nice upgrade but if all you play is Skyrim then I probably wouldn't bother in your situation.

 

[varkanoid]

Marginally faster and 1gb extra ram for that price doesn't seem like a good deal?

The 780 is a fair chunk faster than the 770 and the extra VRAM will be a nice bonus

He He.

As having gone from a 770 to 290 to 780ti to 780

3dMark 11
770 - P10596
290 - P12361
780ti - P13042
780 - P11927

The 780 is quite noticeably faster than a 770 (which lets not forget it based on older tec 680's) in my personal opinion. Everything seems more fluid and smoother and you dont have this doubt in your mind that the 770 is not quite fast enough.

However like has been said if you are happy with the 770 currently then fine but the 780 would remove those instances in Skyrim you say when the FPS drops quite noticeable.

What you now have to ask yourself is selling the 770+the cash difference going to be worth paying for a 780 ? 2nd 780 probably new 780 ??

 

[colinb1984]

For the games I'm playing currently, the likes of Skyrim, Mass Effect 3 and Divinity: Original Sin, the 770 is absolutely fine. But I worry that it will struggle to play The Witcher 3 on Ultra, though that's still some way off as it's release date is February. Maybe I will wait a few months and see if the 780 goes down in price.

Are there any other bits I can invest in to really improve the perfomance for gaming, other than the graphics card? I could add more Ram, but I think 32GB would just be overkill?

 

[varkanoid]

Yeah you dont need more than 8gb and 4gb is still enough.

SSD would be nice but it doesnt improve gaming other than if you had your games on it for loading times.

 

[Panos]

Hello everyone!

After craving to play a modded Skyrim since it's release in 2011, I recently converted to PC gaming finally and have pretty limited knowledge about components and other such things. The system I just purchased is an Acer G3-605 Predator with the following specs:

i7-4770 @ 3.4
16GB Ram
GTX 770 (2GB)
2TB HDD

This was a refurbished system from a Catalogue and with a 15% voucher code it cost a little over £600, which to me seemed a very fair price. So far I've been very satisfied with it's performance. I tested Skyrim at the Ultra setting and was averaging over 60 FPS. Since adding around 70 mods, including a graphically taxing ENB (Being new to modding I've spent the last couple of weeks learning by a lot of reading, browsing YouTube videos and a stupud and extremely frustrating amount of trial and error!) and still average just below 50 FPS, though at times this does drop noticeably for a moment in certain areas.

Basically, with the likes of Dragon Age Inquisition and The Witcher 3 on the horizon I would like to know what should be upgraded so that my system can keep up with the demands on these games. I'm sure what I have right now will play them, but I want to be able to play games with the best graphics possible. Obviously I can and will invest in an SSD at some point, although things seem to load more than quick enough with the HDD I have right now. Is it worth spending £300+ to upgrade the GTX 770 to the 780? Obviously if I did invest in this I would eBay my current card, and after a quick search a used one seems to fetch around £150. So my ultimate question is, is it worth paying around £150-£200 on the 780? I have had a quick Google search and I'm not sure if the performance varies all that much to warrant it, so your advice would be very much appreciated

If your budget is stressed, look for the XFX or the PCS+ R9 290.
They cost £100 less than a basic GTX780 and they are as fast if not faster.

 

[Gregster]

He He.

As having gone from a 770 to 290 to 780ti to 780

3dMark 11
770 - P10596
290 - P12361
780ti - P13042
780 - P11927

The 780 is quite noticeably faster than a 770 (which lets not forget it based on older tec 680's) in my personal opinion. Everything seems more fluid and smoother and you dont have this doubt in your mind that the 770 is not quite fast enough.

However like has been said if you are happy with the 770 currently then fine but the 780 would remove those instances in Skyrim you say when the FPS drops quite noticeable.

What you now have to ask yourself is selling the 770+the cash difference going to be worth paying for a 780 ? 2nd 780 probably new 780 ??

I came from a pair of Lightning 680s to a pair of Titans and the difference was massive in truth. I have always considered the 780 to be just behind the Titan and with a decent OC, it surpasses the 780. In some benches, I can't get past the Classy 780

On reading what the OP is looking to the future, possibly will pay to wait it out. The Witcher 3 is due in 2015 at some stage, so I fully expect nVidia/AMD to have newer and faster cards to choose from.

If you are not struggling now OP and just looking to the future, hang on to what you have but if you are having slow downs or VRAM limitations, it could pay to grab a 780 or even a 290.

 

[murah]

You don't need to upgrade your GPU tbh. Reduce some mods or remove some anti aliasing for performance gain. While a 780 would be an upgrade it isn't worth while IMO.

Given I only need 1 of my cards to run most things max your 770 should be fine.

You would get gains just by overclocking your CPU from it's stock 3.4 to something like 4.4 (Cooler depending)

Adding an SSD or two is a great way to use your PC to it's full speed too, cold boot to windows in 20sec , files opening lightning fast and games loading way quicker!

At the point you are at your money is far better of spent on other things.

Play around with AA types too! familiarize yourself with Nvidia control panel and Nvidia Inspector
MSAA can be heavy taxing and frankly isn't the most amazing AA out there (for instance CSAA looks mighty fine and taxes less than MSAA)
And make sure you try the latest beta drivers they often contain decent performance enhancements until official is released (And even then I stay with beta drivers more often than not for the SLI profiles)

in short:
Overclock your CPU
Play around with settings
Reduce some mods (70?!)
update or play with drivers
Look into an SSD for OS/Game drive

 

[Phixsator]

Yeah you dont need more than 8gb and 4gb is still enough.

SSD would be nice but it doesnt improve gaming other than if you had your games on it for loading times.

Actually thats not entirely true. There are games that loads assets on the fly as you are playing the game, diablo 3 would be one of such games, and some of these games that do this can have stuttering issues due to the long wait for a mechanical harddrive to retrieve that data, where with an SSD that issue usually goes away. But ofcourse its fare from every game that does things this way and normaly once the game is loaded, you are correct, it should affect the performance.

 

[SirCanealot]

I went from 680 -780 - 780ti, but I only really did this since I work in a second hand tech shop and I can shift stuff around. Cost me maybe around £100-150 each time.

With the 680 games would mostly run fine, but some would struggle to hit 60fps all the time (Far Cry 3 was a pain for this). The 780 basically **** on everything, but I really couldn't resist the 780ti at all. The performance difference is visible when running 1080p+ resolutions or pushing a lot of mods or something. It basically just doesn't struggle to run anything unless I'm being silly (Dark Souls 2 at 4k with gedosato).

I was happy with each upgrade, but I wouldn't really recommend it if you're spending £300 to do it. I'd just wait and buy something when you really need it. Upgrading now for Withcer 3 would be silly since things will be much cheaper in 2015 when that comes out, imo

 

[kabir92]

770 Sli ?, if you want to stick with nvidia and don't want two 770's, then id say wait, otherwise the 290s are probably more value for the money.