I'm looking to upgrade my graphics card. I have a mildly overclocked (4.3ghz) FX 8350, GTX 770, Seasonic 750 watt power supply and 8 gigs of ram.
The computer works great and I have no plans to upgrade the CPU / Motherboard anytime soon. I'd just like to get a fastest GPU that the FX 8350 can handle without a bottleneck.
I play two games mostly, Elite Dangerous and Diablo III. I'd like to have enough graphic power to run 3 1080p panels at a decent frame rate, it that is not possible then a card with enough power to run a 1440p monitor at a 60+ frame rate.
The triple monitor setup would be the dream, for immersion in my space sim, but a large 1440p would be great also. The card can be from AMD or Nvida, whatever is best for what I'm trying to do.
can the 770 not do triple 1080? mine does 4k in most games pretty decently
edit: more stuffs also the 8350 bottleneck thing is a pretty baity topic. on most games at higher resolutions where the card is actually having trouble keeping up the 8350 will be fine.
the issue with all these tests showing the bottleneck is that they're mostly centered around seeing how high the framerates can go. there's always something limiting performance and lower resolution/settings kinda force the cpu to be the bottleneck
I run a 390 and 390X with an 8370 at 4.8 ghz, it works pretty well. A single 390X (or rx 480 as they are similar performance) will power 1080p max everything with 60+ fps for the most part On the nvidia side that's roughly a 1060 or gtx 980. Only games where I see some throttling from CPU things is GTA V really, but most others are fine.
I've also ran triple 1080p with a 390X it handles it decently at high in most games, medium in some of the more demanding ones.
There's not a set "This cpu with this gfx card" rule that can be applied without putting in a definite resolution, and even then its not a rule but a guideline due to games also being another variable. For single 1080p, an rx 480 / gtx 1060 + 8350 is probably a good guideline / close to maximum for most games. Triple 1080p and 4k are going to have similar limits, but really at that high of resolution your probably talking gtx 1080+ territory. Probably an advisable guideline for what to pair a 8350 with at single 1440p is Gtx 1070 / R9 Fury X.
Again take all of this with a grain of salt, as games are still another variable that has to be considered for more definite rules. You could put a 8350 with a gtx 1050 at 1080p and still find a game that will bottleneck (Arma 2 heh).
Actually, there is an article a couple years ago from pcper... https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Systems/Quad-Core-Gaming-Roundup-How-Much-CPU-Do-You-Really-Need Basically anything more powerful R9 280X is showing the FX's age... Depending on the game, the 8350 may beat the i3 and sometimes even i5... But mostly 280X is the limiting factor there... 980 and 290X are definitely getting held back a little bit in some titles...
Depends if your going higher resolution or not, cause in 4K gaming, you can still get a good GPU without serious bottleneck since the GPU is doing the bulk of the work.
But then again, it isn't magically better going that route. I just find it surprisingly common for people to pair it with a GTX 970/R9 390 when they were new (I considered the combination myself). So i'd say an RX 470 or 480 would be the max, even then some reported that in CPU bounded scenarios, the R9 380 and GTX 960 was even bottlenecked.
I'd say get a high end GPU if you can (or want) and then get a Zen CPU.
Another thing to consider is which games you intend to play; some games are much more CPU intensive than others.
I'm running a [email protected] with a GTX 980. On Battlefield 1 I get 80-90fps on average at 1080p using the Ultra preset and my CPU runs between 60 and 95% depending on the map and what's going on. On most other games my CPU isn't hit nearly as hard. On Overwatch for example I get around 100fps on Ultra and my CPU stays at 40-50%.
Get the best graphics card you can afford (price / performance)
Even if underutilized a little on your current cpu it will be fine when you upgrade (which you will at some point) as being modular is the beauty of pc's.
Honestly, just go with whatever graphics card you can reasonably afford. For the past seven years, I've been running on an LGA 775 rig w/ an overclocked Q9550. On that system, it has seen four different cards(8600GT > 8800GT > GTX 460 > GTX 970). At the time of upgrading to the GTX 460, several of my friends protested that my platform was at the limit before fully saturating my CPU, and that I should strongly consider IvyBridge, as my next upgrade.. While they were right in some regard, I think it was more to do with compatibility pains of NVidia's BitStream and PCIe 1.0 limitations, causing IRQ calls to stall(would materialize as audio clipping when too many channels were in use). Anyway, disregarding their advice, I decided to stick through one more GPU cycle and picked up a GTX 970 the day it was released; needless to say, the upgrade felt just as substantial as it did moving from an 8800GT to a GTX 460.
Fast forward to last November: I have overhauled my platform to one of Neweggs black friday specials (EVGA Z97 Classified, I7-4790k, 8GB stick, and four games for $375), and have transplanted the GTX 970 to that system.. To tell you the truth, I was a little disappointed in the small performance gained from the overhaul, in contrast to the GPU upgrades. While the overall system performance has improved(can stream 4k youtube without the CPU pegging to 100% util, smoother scrolling, USB3.0, etc..), the gains I was expecting to see from playing games wasnt nearly as large as others have made it out to be..
Anyway, the TLDR from my experience: I say just upgrade to whatever GPU you feel sensibly represents your gaming needs. If you end up with a GPU that overpowers your system, the worst that will happen is you lose a little at the top end, or drop a few frames. You can always move the big beefy card to a better platform at a later stage; but there's plenty of performance to be had by upgrading that GPU, regardless of whatever top end you might sacrifice due to the platform you're on
CPU bottlenecks are becoming less and less of an issue, especially with newer APIs. They also become less relevant when you increase the graphic demand. I'm not familiar with Elite Dangerous, but Simulation games in general tend to be CPU heavy. What I'd do is run the game (benchmark) at high settings, or whatever settings you intend to play at, but at minimal resolution (720p max); this should put maximum stress on the CPU and give an idea at what frame rate will be bottleneck for CPU (monitor CPU + GPU usage to verify which component is bottlenecking). And then look up benchmarks to see which GPU should hit the ballpark of your "cpu bottlenecked" framerate
It looks like Gamer's Nexus did a benchmark on Elite Dangerous, and it looks 780 is more than enough to handle Elite Dangerous 1440p 60+FPS on Max settings, so your 770 should be adequate:
I'd also do the same for Diablo III, but I'm guessing you might not need a GPU upgrade. I'd look into an Ultra Wide 34" 1440p display (3440x1440). That resolution might warrant a GPU upgrade as that is 35% more pixels than standard 1440p, and should still be immersive, maybe more so than triple monitor since there isn't bezel in the middle of the picture.
This is also dependent on resolutions, settings, engine/software optimization, and a variety of other factors. I did kinda touch on this in my previous post, but I also want to to point out explicitly.
I have a 2500k, OC'd R9 380X, 8GB of RAM.
In the first test (I forgot to capture CPU usage, my bad), I got around 180FPS, but the GPU was hardly being used. This is a benchmark that is, in theory, entirely GPU bound, yet my GPU is not stressed. I used Ultra settings, no AA, and 640x380 resolution, no tessellation. Something ridiculously low. CPU usage was around 55-60%
Running the same benchmark, only increasing the resolution to 1600x900, with 8X MSAA, that was more than enough to shift the bottleneck back the GPU. The CPU usage dropped drastically to around 25%.
This is extreme, but the concept still applies. So there is no max GPU for a CPU. You can even Pascal Titan X's to their knees with enough resolution and filtering (something like 4x 4K monitors, AKA 8K), and in such case, your FX8350 would be just fine.
if you dont have budget concerns, get a 1070. it'll do triple 1080 and 1440 no problem and get good frame rate. yes if you had a better cpu your fps would be better, but you will still see improvement over lesser cards like a 480. for 1440 you can get 100+ fps in near everything and the card will last for a while.
Im running a fx-8350 with a RX 480, and price to performance it is balling imo. Its not one of those get 200 fps at 4k setups, but it gets the job done, quite satisfactory. without overclocking i hit 30-40ish fps with ultra settings in witcher 3 @ 4k supersampled resolution. Albeit i had to fire the Nvidia hairdresser and such to get there.
If you're playing a sim game like Cities:Skylines, you will likely hit some CPU intense stuff. I don't think it would be too much for the 8350. Some other things: I run a 380 with a 4790k, and it runs fine. I would imagine to see similar results with a AMD chip of similar caliber, maybe a couple frames difference but nothing noticeable. But this also depends on the games you want to play. I can't run nvidia's hairworks in Witcher 3, for example, for obvious reasons. The cards mentioned are probably fine... but keep this software thing in mind. Some games get along better with your hardware, some will not. For Diablo and Elite Dangerous the cards mentioned should be totally fine with you chip.
Thanks for all the input! From what I have read the minimum card would be the RX 480 and the max card a GTX 1070. I guess it will depend on how soon I can afford to upgrade to a new mobo and cpu. Waiting to see how the Zen chip stacks up to Intel later next year. If I upgrade soon, I'll just get the 1070 and move it over to the new rig. If I upgrade later I'll just get the RX 480 and live with it till I go to a whole new system and pass the FX 8350 / RX 480 down to the wife. She only plays Diablo III, well and cookie clicker ;-)
Thanks again for all the opinions, options and data!
