As others have pointed out, what’s your budget? What resolution and what frame rates in what games are you looking to target?
Until we know the answers to those, its difficult for any of us to make an informed recommendation. If you have a 1080p monitor and are wanting an upgrade from a 970… a 1070 will be able to max anything out right now at well over 60 fps.
If you are upgrading your graphics card beyond that, you will want to also want to budget for a new monitor. Consider that if you are getting anything 1070+, you may want a monitor with adaptive sync technology and at least 1440p resolution. Since you are looking at Nvidia, that means G-sync which adds a lot more to the cost of the monitor over AMD freesync.
Adaptive sync technology is like night and day and you will be glad you got it with a modern higher end card.
After all, buying a 2080 and using it with an old 1080p TN pannel is like driving a Ferrari, stuck in 1st gear. The initial acceleration will be exhilarating but you’re missing most of the experience you paid for.
Even if you are def going nVidia the new amd cards will (hopefully) have an effect on gpu prices. I would also strongly advise looking at a 1080ti over a 2080. raytracing isnt in use yet and 2nd gen cards will be markedly better anyway.
I’m running 2560x1080 ultra-wide and am looking at 4k but waiting for IPS 4k HDR panel prices to drop.
That said, i’ve got a Vega 64 (the one i removed from my box above) running in the living room on a current model 4k HDR TV and in that environment it is fine. It will do 50 fps or more on most stuff (ultra settings, 4k) and the TV can only accept 50hz (to interpolate to 200hz if set that way) anyway.
But yes. I’d hold off on a top of the line card until you go 4k. And even then maybe just wait for the next generation at that point* If you DO go 4k, its not like a 1080 or 2070 that you bought earlier will be incapable of driving it, you might just need to live with 50 fps sometimes (OH THE HUMANITY!) or drop details down to high/very high from ultra.
edit:
If planning for 4k later (and buying a card for now, with 4k being down the track a bit), i wouldn’t go beyond 2070 until waiting to see what Navi (and/or Vega 7nm, if available for consumer) brings to the table, as like others have said above, going 4k+Gsync+nvidia is a lot more expensive than Freesync will be. Even if you still plan to go Nvidia, Navi will hopefully result in some Nvidia price drops.
Another way of looking at that may be that AMD’s drivers out of the box are well behind what their hardware is capable of, but Nvidia’s driver team get their shit together earlier.
Whatever the reason, AMD cards do tend to see more of an uplift over time than Nvidia. But i think that is more to do with
amd hardware in general being a little more general purpose/forward looking/architecturally complicated than Nvidia who tend to build hardware to run current software as fast as possible (20xx series with RTX an exception rather than the rule).
nvidia’s driver team being on the ball (i.e., their drivers are pretty optimal from the get-go), whilst AMDs team has in the past been under-staffed/under-funded and/or having to deal with more complicated architecture
gameworks. nvidia are involved in a lot of the game development and essentially ship their own binaries to game developers which AMD need to reverse engineer for each game over time. this means their driver performance on specific titles needs time to get up to speed.
But yeah, i don’t think old NV hardware gets gimped. It just doesn’t have as much left in the tank after release as AMD do. You can kinda see it to some degree with the TFLOPs numbers on the equally priced cards. AMD generally has stronger compute for the price, but that doesn’t instantly (or necessarily at all) translate into FPS without driver work. It’s not uncommon to see a driver update from AMD result in 5-10% performance gains (or more) in new titles with multiple drivers released shortly afterwards - for multiple driver updates.
I’ve been using a 970 for a few years now, and when I got a 4k tv for a monitor, I was still able to play some games on ultra with the AA turned off. I recently got GR Wildlands on sale, and besides AA, I had to turn down a few bells and whistles for playable framerates. I’m seriously looking at the 2070 and 2080 cards now, too.
Besides gaming, there is another reason to upgrade, and that is for things like Netflix and such. I watch Netflix from their website, and not from an app, so not sure if that matters, but the older 970, while fully capable, will not stream Netflix at 4k. The newer cards usually have baked-in dmr or whatever to allow 4k playback. There are probably ways around this, but I am not that smart:)
There are other things that matter to me too, like hdr support. I think the 20** series cards will be better for that also.
The difference, for me, between the 2070 and 2080, that I can see, is I will still need to turn some settings down with the 2070 here and there, depending on the game. But with the 2080, I should be able to just mash that ultra button for a few years and always put out 40fps or higher in AAA titles. Is that worth an extra $200? It might be. It would be an extra $5.56 a month for the 36 months the card should be easily useable. I would hate to have to tweak my settings just to save less than 19 cents a day.
I thought like that for a while, there were tests done on these very forums to.prove me wrong and I am happy to correct the stance.
They do not regress performance, what @MisteryAngel is saying and accurately too is that nvidia drop support for them quickly after a new line. They don’t make them worse but they make no effort to continue improving them.
I guess that’s one way of looking at it, but i look at it the other way. Saving that 200 dollars today, you can do something more productive with it TODAY.
In general, buying hardware you don’t need today in the hope it will last longer is pissing money away. By the time you need the performance it will be much cheaper.
Especially with the situation right now where RTX is “new” but not really practical, even for 20xx cards at decent resolution and frame rate, and now we are just about to drop a process node size (i.e., 12nm/14nm/16nm down to 7nm).
I would suggest not spending any more than you HAVE to on a 20xx (or any other 12nm or larger process card) to get by until the next generation drops.
7nm should result in significantly better cards (from BOTH AMD and NVIDIA) at lower prices (if nothing else, AMD/NV will be able to pump out a lot more dies per wafer and get lower cost. 20xx are BIG and EXPENSIVE dies to make). Also, you’ll get v2.0 of the RTX stuff.
I really do feel that at this point, cards built on larger/older process (including 20xx) will have a much shorter life-span than the 10 series or 9 series did.
Not as a nay sayer but as an enthusiast do you have some relevant new links regarding tech and release dates? I want to go full AMD next build. Not sure how long I want to wait.
There is definitely merit in your comment. And I agree wholeheartedly that any of the new tweaks made to the 20** series gpu’s will either gutterball or become embraced by the gaming community and vendors, and a brand new 21** series card will better reflect those new standards.
In that spirit, I will wait to pull the trigger for at least a couple months on anything. Who knows how amd will retaliate, they could suprise us all with something similar to the 2080 for less money.
