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Raistline on 22 June 2016
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dreamcast210 said:
Raistline said:

Your CPU will be a bottleneck for anything over 1080p for sure. You will also see about 10-15% less performance on most games compared to similar benchmarks for the same video card, this may increase as games get more demanding.

With that said you will get amazing performance out of an AMD R9 380 or a GTX 960. So long as you stay at or under 1080p for resolution you should be able to get near-MAX on all settings and get a stable 60FPS for all but the most demanding games. They will run better, and look better than anything the PS4 can put out.

You could also wait for the RX 480 to come out and actually be in stock, you will likely wait a couple months unless you get lucky. It will be cheaper and perform better than both my suggestions above, but entails a wait. You will also likely lose closer to %20 performance vs standard benchmarks due to your i3 CPU. 

You should not have to worry that much about that performance loss though since you can always upgrade your CPU later. Any Motherboard that can run an i3 can run an i5 so when you get the cash together later you can upgrade your CPU and get performance gains throughout your entire system.

 

There is quite a bit to consider when upgrading huh?

A lot to consider but cool to finally have an understanding of this stuff. Always shied away from it because I like the plug in and play of consoles. Honestly, it's Microsoft's announcement about Xbox Play Anywhere that started me thinking about doing this.

Doing a quick search of graphics cards on ebay, the ones you mentioned are at the same cost or even higher than the RX 470 coming out that I'm considering. You think demand for that will be high too?

Yes, I expect the demand for the 470 will likley be higher than the 480, depending on price.

Additioanl thoughts, It is rare that a new-release and highly anticipated card sells at MSRP or are easy to get during the first couple of months. If you do not mind waiting for the 470 then that may be a better choice but as of now there is no release date and the price has not yet been announced. Typically the x70 series cards relealse 1 or 2 months later than the x80 cards. So if the 480 releases on the last day of this month the 470 will not release until sometime between end of July and end of August.

If you compare the demand to Nvidia's side of the coin, right now the GTX 1080 and 1070 are both totally sold out everywhere but ebay. They were released 5/27 and 6/10 repsectively. The next shipment is expected to sell out just as fast. It is just like the PS4 and PS3 releases, the hardware manufacturing cannot keep up with demand.

If it were my money I would pay the extra amount for the 480 vs the 470 (if it is within $40) with the expectation of upgrading the CPU later. Yes, your GPU will be bottlenecked by your CPU for a while but it is only temporary, and to be hondest even the 470 will be bottlnecked, just not as much.