i wish there was an ignore button so i could ignore you.

lol I'm sure you will, he always just sprouts non sense about 98 percent of the time to the point where most people don't even reply to him now. It's pretty sad.

fixed for you

Anyway, to any of the devs contributing on here: When I next upgrade my PC (currently i5 2500k @ 4.5GHz + GTX 560ti SLI + 8 GB RAM @ 1600MHZ) what do you think will be the most beneficial upgrade? Would a switch to an AMD GPU help at all? Should I just go with as much vRAM as I can afford?

Not looking to get a PS4 or Xbox One at this stage, I just want to be able to keep up with multiplats in the future.

I know what I'm going to post is from a beta, but

http://hardocp.com/article/2013/10/10/battlefield_4_beta_performance_preview

One of the first things that we noticed when we initially starting playing the beta was the high level of CPU usage that was occurring on the author’s personal gaming system, this is an Core i7-2600K system with 16GB of memory and two Radeon HD 7970 cards in CrossFire driving three 1920x1200 monitors. As we were getting acquainted with the basics of game play. Remembering back to Battlefield 3, we were accustomed to seeing 40-50% CPU usage during game play, however, during the Battlefield 4 Beta, we often observed CPU usage in excess of 80-90% on my personal system, at the onset of his game testing.

Moving on to our official review system with the the GeForce 770 GTX, during game play, we observed an average load across all CPU cores in the 90-95% range during each of the testing scenarios. However, with the R9 280X, we were observing CPU usage around 80-85%. Initially we began testing with just 8GB of system memory in the review system. After a significant amount of gameplay, we were noticing that 8GB of memory may not provide enough space for the game. We were experiencing memory being swapped out to the hard drive in virtual memory, meaning we were exceeding 8GB of RAM and this was affecting our smoothness and performance.

We upgraded our test platform to have 16GB of system memory, which is the level that we performed all of our graphed testing at here today. Subjectively, there did feel like there was a difference in the overall gameplay experience by utilizing a larger amount of memory, especially with the GTX 770.

You don't have to do much, I'd wait to see what Nvidia has with Maxwell before making any real video card purchase decisions next year, maybe increase your RAM count a little to get enough overhead(I run 32GB 9-9-9-24 personally, it's cheap these days) and look into getting MLC SSDs in RAID-0 configs at a reasonable cost to lower loading times overall. AMD or Nvidia is more personal preference, I personally use both at home and Nvidia is a little better on the software part while AMD is better for "bang for the buck" when counting performance/price ratios.

Can you recommend a good 3d modeling program for beginners, hopefully cheap or free?

Blender, not so beginner friendly but they have full tutorial youtube videos that teachs you on how to use it and I consider it the best free 3D modeling program ATM. Lots of plug-in support too.

Cool, i'll check it out. Does it export to unreal?

The best one for free is blender. Great community and it's definitly a good place to start.

http://www.blender.org/

Also beware that lots of the more professional programs can be bought for pretty cheap with student licenses, but then your game has to be free.