Last couple of times were about every two years but I've had the current card for about 28 months. Its a 660 ti 2GB (OC version) bought 2nd hand.
The last couple of generations worth of nVIDIA families haven't really had the equivalent of a ti card bridging the x60 and the x70 families so the obvious upgrade options have looked a bit uninspiring. Because of the driver CPU overhead I've not really considered going to ATI for a while, as they take more of a performance hit on lower end CPUs. Still rumbling away with my Athlon X2 5200+ unlocked to Deneb equivalent (Phenom FX-5200 @ 3.3. GHz).
With the kind of games I play, I think I can maybe justify one more GPU upgrade on this platform before the CPU becomes unviable. Previously I was upgrading CPU every couple of years but held on to this one for 5 years now. I had thought of swapping in a PII x6 at some point but there seem to still be very few games where that would provide a tangible benefit over what I have.
At the moment only Geforce GTX 970 or better looks like it would give me a bit enough boost to bother - so waiting for 2nd hand prices to drop a little more. I suppose there's the 780 (and ti) but their higher power draw is a bit off-putting. Don't want to upgrade PSU if I can get away without it.
I used to get twitchy once I couldn't enable all the eye candy at my native resolution but there have been relatively few games where that's a problem (and I'm relatively tolerant of minor framerate drops). Everybody's Gone to the Rapture forced me to go medium details at 1080p but TBH I really can't see a lot of differnce between medium and very high (other than the game turning into a slidehow).
The last couple of generations worth of nVIDIA families haven't really had the equivalent of a ti card bridging the x60 and the x70 families so the obvious upgrade options have looked a bit uninspiring. Because of the driver CPU overhead I've not really considered going to ATI for a while, as they take more of a performance hit on lower end CPUs. Still rumbling away with my Athlon X2 5200+ unlocked to Deneb equivalent (Phenom FX-5200 @ 3.3. GHz).
With the kind of games I play, I think I can maybe justify one more GPU upgrade on this platform before the CPU becomes unviable. Previously I was upgrading CPU every couple of years but held on to this one for 5 years now. I had thought of swapping in a PII x6 at some point but there seem to still be very few games where that would provide a tangible benefit over what I have.
At the moment only Geforce GTX 970 or better looks like it would give me a bit enough boost to bother - so waiting for 2nd hand prices to drop a little more. I suppose there's the 780 (and ti) but their higher power draw is a bit off-putting. Don't want to upgrade PSU if I can get away without it.
I used to get twitchy once I couldn't enable all the eye candy at my native resolution but there have been relatively few games where that's a problem (and I'm relatively tolerant of minor framerate drops). Everybody's Gone to the Rapture forced me to go medium details at 1080p but TBH I really can't see a lot of differnce between medium and very high (other than the game turning into a slidehow).
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