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How long until we see a £300 card able to maintain 60fps at 4k?

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Participant

Caporegime
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Slightly arbitrary numbers in the title I grant you, but my general point / question remains - when will smooth 4k gaming be in the realm of the mid range new GPU market?

I've got a 4K screen, a 40" Philips BDM4065UC, which I bought a couple of years ago for general productivity, browsing, and media. It's great for that and gaming on it is very immersive.

I'm finding I'm starting to get a little more time for gaming now the kids are a little older, so have finally picked up Witcher 3 and am getting into it.

My GTX 970 obviously struggles at 4K, but it's just about playable for an RPG. I want a better GPU, but can't live with / justify the prices as a casual occasional gamer. They've just gone nuts. I remember when £300 got you the best.

So I'm in a tricky position where I don't want to spooge £400 on something that still won't do 4K but not sure how long I'd have to wait for anything better.

It feels like the GPU market needs an Intel Core-style revolution.
 
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I have that Monitor and i run a 1080ti Strix OC. Maxed out Witcher 3 with no AA gets between 55 and 60 FPS. You can pick up a 1080ti from fleebay for just over 500 if you get the right deal.
 
Participant said:
I was talking about new sorry. Not brave enough to buy expensive 2nd hand GPUs.
I guess second hand 1080Tis are ~£300? [edit - nope!] and can sort of do 4k at high fps.
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£500 is too expensive IMO. The GPU could be a year+ old and you're talking about paying £75 less than some of the recent "brand new" deals and potentially having no warranty. Should be much closer to £400 for a decent price.
IMO, at least 2 or 3 more generations. An issue with 4K is that as new hardware challenging games arrive it will affect the performance on the high res monitors more in regards to playable FPS.

Could probably apply some kind of rule, like paying close to 2x the price of a monitor on GPU performance to drive it well enough :). Actually a little surprised to see how cheap some of the lower end 4K monitors are now
 
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2022 or 2023 for new cards released to market, although depends on how long Nvidia can go this time without the mining boom in the middle to prop up older card sales. Sales of old tech will naturally dwindle over time and at some point reach saturation point for the majority of enthusiast users, so there £600+ buyer will need something new to keep them paying monies over and that is when the tech will eventually move into the low mid-range segment where the majority of discrete sales are made for gaming, but with much less margin if the tech in new.

If you wanted to go second hand then no doubt 2080's will be cheaper by 2020/21 so you've only really got a 2.5 year wait for that route. :)
 
DarrenM343 said:
£500 is too expensive IMO. The GPU could be a year+ old and you're talking about paying £75 less than some of the recent "brand new" deals and potentially having no warranty. Should be much closer to £400 for a decent price.
IMO, at least 2 or 3 more generations. An issue with 4K is that as new hardware challenging games arrive it will affect the performance on the high res monitors more in regards to playable FPS.
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I guess the top end 1080ti's are selling for more than 500 right now so the cards are worth what someone is willing to pay...

OP do you really need AA at that Res? I use the same monitor from around 3 feet away and i dont really notice the jaggies and it gives you a better boost in performance.
 
Unfortunately given the price/performance on the latest generation of NVidia cards hasn't provided any options to significantly increase performance for a reasonable price (2080Ti at £800 would have been nice :D)

For 4K I'd agree with other posters that the only reasonable option would be a second hand 1080Ti and I can't see that they'll reduce in price until either AMD release a competitive offering or NVidia releases their next generation (or lower their 2080 prices).

I'm in a similar position with 980Ti and a 32" 4k - which works for me in a lot of games but doesn't really cut it for AAA titles - I solved the problem by switching to a 35" UW 120Hz/gsync and that's given a new lease of life to the gfx card and my gaming.
 
Participant said:
Slightly arbitrary numbers in the title I grant you, but my general point / question remains - when will smooth 4k gaming be in the realm of the mid range new GPU market?

.
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You can play 4k with Vega/1080 etc..if you lower settings, so that means around a year away for mid range 4k (7nm).
I await 4k 120hz at a price point that makes sense still with freesync.
so I am still set and happy with 1440p 144hz.

To max out 4k and being smooth, that is likely a long way off due to die shrinks is coming to an end.
In a normal die shrink way we would have had 250$ mid range cards today that managed 4k.
Now we have a situation where the next card/s might be 10% faster or 20 due to die shrinks isn't doable anymore.
7nm is going to last a long time unless some real good invention with material happens.

We are faced with a situation where technology development slows down so much that your upgrade cycle becomes every 5 year instead of 2.
 
Vega 56 is still £350, and you can sell games bundle for £50 (but make haste, only a few days left to get it). It will do a solid job at 4K but it obviously won't be 4K60 Ultra, that's still many years away for this price.

Lokken86 said:
But is 4k enough or does anyone want more?
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I definitely want more. Very keen on 8K, but even 5K is enough that it makes a noticeable difference without as big of a hit on performance.
 
Poneros said:
I definitely want more. Very keen on 8K, but even 5K is enough that it makes a noticeable difference without as big of a hit on performance.
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I'm actually playing hl2 updated with the texture pack on my little 14" laptop with 1366*768 and I think it looks great haha. Maybe I'm getting old or maybe it just depends on how big the screen is. Pixel density n all that.
 
RBImGuy said:
You can play 4k with Vega/1080 etc..if you lower settings, so that means around a year away for mid range 4k (7nm).
I await 4k 120hz at a price point that makes sense still with freesync.
so I am still set and happy with 1440p 144hz.

To max out 4k and being smooth, that is likely a long way off due to die shrinks is coming to an end.
In a normal die shrink way we would have had 250$ mid range cards today that managed 4k.
Now we have a situation where the next card/s might be 10% faster or 20 due to die shrinks isn't doable anymore.
7nm is going to last a long time unless some real good invention with material happens.

We are faced with a situation where technology development slows down so much that your upgrade cycle becomes every 5 year instead of 2.
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Also Nvidia has allocated valuable silicon space for putting the Tensor/RT cores instead of using them for extra Cude cores, so the reality is that the RTX card could have been faster than they are at the moment.

Let's face it...by the time that there are enough games to make Ray-tracing relevant, the 20 series would be obsolete, so the existence of the Tensor cores in the 20 series is more or less "just there" (don't know who the sub 60fps at 1080p Ray-tracing are they aiming at, considering people that dropping £1200 on a graphic card most definitely won't be gaming at 1080p) for sake of riding on the Nvidia self-generated/initiated hype of Ray-tracing in gaming to command the 20 series cards at new high price point, so that it wouldn't upset the offloading of their excessive old 10 series cards.

Not gonna lie, Nvidia played this like a boss this time round in the business context, and have the consumers right where they wrong them.

AMD's incapability to deliver comparable graphic card that can game at 4K also doesn't help with the situation neither.
 
Lokken86 said:
I'm actually playing hl2 updated with the texture pack on my little 14" laptop with 1366*768 and I think it looks great haha. Maybe I'm getting old or maybe it just depends on how big the screen is. Pixel density n all that.
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Yup, absolutely. I don't see a big difference between 24'' 1080p (92 PPI) & 55'' 4K (80 PPI) either, but as you go up in size you definitely want more pixels. It is going into the realms of diminishing returns, that's for sure, but if you want to push visuals even further then that's the first thing to increase. Of course, actual games still lag far behind in terms of 4K quality even, so it's not gonna be night & day just yet, but in certain cases the resolution difference is very clear (e.g. Ryse Son of Rome, DX:MD, etc.)
 
Impossible to say, as it's all ultimately down to how fast process technology can be advanced, now that we're near the limits of silicon.

In the worst case, if there were no new process improvements, that £300 card for 4k/60 would never materialise.

And given that we have fewer and fewer people able to invest the sums of money required, the expectation can only be slower and slower progress. See GloFo dropping out of 7nm development, etc.
 
Lokken86 said:
But is 4k enough or does anyone want more?
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i dont see me wanting more than 4K for a good long while. i must admit i am a massive fan of QHD for when i cant quite manage 4k

performance is great on much lower end hardware and - on my 65 inch XE9305 at least - visually there is not that much in it.
 
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