Upgrade to 1080Ti or wait?

[Paladine]

Hey peeps,

So I have an Inno3D iChill 980Ti Black Edition Hybrid (the liquid cooled one) - it is a nice card but I got it originally because I built this machine as a Hackintosh and at the time Pascal was not supported in OS X so the 980Ti was the best I could get.

That said I now own 3 MacBook Pros (one older 2011 and a 2015 & 2016) so tend to just use them in clam shell mode on my 4k display when I am working which leaves my PC for gaming which is - well lets just say underwhelming at 4k on a 980Ti.

I did consider getting a second 980Ti but without a custom loop I would struggle to fit a 3rd rad in my case (my existing 980Ti and 6700k both have AIO liquid coolers) plus I simply cannot find another Inno3d hybrid card anywhere. Also after reading some info on 4k gaming with 2-way 980Ti SLI - it seems it is still a bit underwhelming on newer games and will struggle to hit 60fps on many titles with max settings.

So I am considering a 1080Ti but again, from what I have read whereas the performance is very good the 1080Ti still struggles to hit 4k @60fps in many AAA titles currently so I expect in 2018 we will start to see more games coming out where max settings will not be possible.

So what to do? With all the news on the Titan V - do I just wait for desktop Volta cards - if so how long do we think that will be before they are released? If it is only going to be a couple or months then I guess that is worth waiting for but if it is going to be after Q1 2018 then that is quite a long wait.

So kinda stuck - would appreciate some thoughts/insights.

 

[Paladine]

I suspect next gen will be 4k capable (on pretty high if not max settings for most games) without SLI so my gut is to wait for next gen - will see what happens at CES next week - NVidia are lining us up for some big announcement.

 

[Paladine]

Already got Volta but for day to day use I just use one of my watercooled Pascal cards as the performance difference is not really that noticeable for most things (about 35%).

There are some really nice 1080 Ti cards around at the moment that will not be seen as next gen NVidia card variants for some time yet.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/giga...4mb-gddr5x-pci-express-graphic-gx-007-au.html

Problem is, I need 2 of those to play 4k at max settings on AAA titles - if I wait for next gen, I will probably only need 1 and then can buy a second 18-24 months later when newer games start to require much more performance.

 

[Paladine]

Hi, reading various reports online and watching as GPU prices go up. I actually say buy now as even when you do upgrade to Volta whenever that comes out you should get a good price for your 1080ti as its good for mining. Just read report that GPUs like 1070 are very scarce across the pond as crypto currency fever takes hold.

That would be great and all but why, I would gain nothing from it and just throw money in the toilet - because the more I read, the more I understand that the 1080Ti will not handle 4k on Max Settings in many games (not just AAA titles) and on a 40" 4k display downgrading to 1440p resolution looks absolutely terrible (I am about 14" from the display). Plus there is a factor you have not considered when going out and buying a new GPU every couple of months (and it is not cost or affordability, I earn plenty of money) - it is called Wife (and they are not so easy to upgrade).

Very disappointed not to hear something from NVidia on a new consumer GPU at CES yesterday

 

[Paladine]

To put things in perspective with Volta.

I have Volta and it can not handle 4k on max settings either.

A Titan V is about 35% faster than a 1080 Ti, this is nowhere near enough to totally max out all games @2160p/60htz with the MSAA turned up. To do that would need 3 Volta cards running mGPU.

The way to look at a 1080 Ti is it's ok to run 2160p with high but not max settings and a Titan V is slightly better.

You have to keep in mind though that Titan V is not designed for games and the drivers are not optimised for games either - everything I have read seems to offer the opinion that the next gen NVidia gaming GPU (probably Volta) will perform much better for games than the Titan V. We will have to wait and see of course...

 

[Paladine]

Well the problem there is obvious, lowering from 4k to 1440p is bound to look worse than it would look on a native 1440p monitor. Plus if you're sitting that close to such a large screen I'm not surprised either.

At least that upcoming 8k screen with AI scaling looks promising, and prob uber expensive for a while. Scaling is always an issue because of rubbish interpolation etc, makes lower resolutions look worse than they really do.

Well I am sat that close because I spend most of my time working - I bought the monitor for work not for gaming and never realised at the time that gaming would be such an issue on it. I spend a great deal of time doing legal research which involves a lot of side by side document comparisons and a lot of reading in general - so 4k screen real estate is incredibly useful for my job. Had I realised it would be such a problem I would have simply purchased 2x 1440p screens which would have given me the same screen real estate but would have allowed me to switch to a single monitor for gaming purposes - hindsight is 20/20 as they say but it doesn't fix the situation I am currently in.