Im looking at upgrading from my 3 yr old Asus 7870 Ghz edition. Im only playing at 1080p but might be looking to upgrade to at least 1440p within the next yr or two. Is it worth upgrading atm if im only playing at 1080p on a 60hz monitor? Will be getting the Witcher, GTAV, The Division, And Star Wars Battlefront 3 when they drop and will most likely need to upgrade to play those games at high/ultra anyways. Im looking at the GTX 970 as it seems it is the best bang for my buck as far as upgrades go. Open to Other Suggestions on Cards under $400 and also any monitor suggestions. Thank you my fellow Tekies!!!!!
Two 7970/280X's for $300 via ebay? Would destroy any game at 1440p and beat the 970 hands down.
If you're going for the 970 because it's shiny and new and efficient, that's a whole other thing.
Realistically you can put another 7870/270X with your current card and roughly equal the performance of an R9 290, which we already know is the minimum for 4K, so 1440p wouldn't really be too much of an issue.
Those games are set to release in several months,
You should probably hold off if your 7870 is enough atm.
AMDs 20nm 300 series is going to launch in february, so there will probably be some price drops.
A 970 is roughly double as good as a 7870, so if you subtract the ~ 30% performance hit going from 1080p to 1440p it will be about as good as the 7870 in 1080p + 2-4x msaa or tesselation etc. Knowing Witcher 2 it will probably not be enough to completely max out witcher 3. If you want more raw performance for 400$ or less you could get 2 used r9 290s, for a new single card the 970 is probably still your best choice.
I generally want to stay away from crossfire/SLI just for the issues that can arise from multi gpu setups also that would also require a new PSU to do as well. Knowing that AMD has new cards on the horizon i will probably wait and wait for Nvidia to respond with some price drops on their cards.