Just ordered a 4gb 290x. Upgraded some other things with the money I saved.
Will be buying a new GPU once my paycheck clears. What do you guys think will perform better now, and later? I play at 1080p now, but plan on upgrading to 1440p shortly. I play mainly ARMA and heavily modded skyrim. It will be paired with an 8350, so I'm thinking having mantle will be able to increase performance a lot (I'm aware games that support mantle are currently very limited.).
EDIT: I should also add that the 8gb 290x is about 100 dollars cheaper than a 980. I am factoring that in as a plus toward the 290x, but basically its the VRAM and price to performance of the 290x vs the pure performance and temps of a 980.
The 290x
The 980
THe GTX980 will perform better offcourse.
However, since you are running an AMD cpu and you are playing cpu bound games, ARMA and Skyrim, i think that mantle will help you some. But the question will be, if your games support mantle.
THe thing is that whatever GPU you buy 980 or 290X, it will definitely get bottlenecked by the FX8350 in ARMA and Skyrim @ 1080p
A few guys out here, do use a FX8 core with a 290X and still get decent frame rates in Skyrim. So i may think that a 290 may be your best bett.
Also i dont think that you will need 8GB of Vram for just 1440p. But yeah if its only a few bucks more then a normal 290X then it could offcourse never hurt.
I know I won't need 8gb just for 1440p, thats for all the ridiculous 4k texture mods that are around for skyrim. I will be upgrading to 1440p less than a month after I get the card, so I'm much more concerned with that. I'm just wondering if the extra hundred dollars is really worth the performance difference I'm going to see.
There should be no bottleneck with either card.
In skyrim and definetly Arma3 there will be a bottleneck. Because those 2 games in particular are cpu bound, even on 1440p.
But yeah in terms of gpu performance, the GTX980 is simply better, so is the GTX970 in allot of games.
I still mainly play ARMA 2, and will continue to do so until nobody plays it. I cant deal with every soldier having asthma in ARMA 3.