heywood on 30/10/2018 at 19:18
Earlier this year I purchased a 38" LG ultrawide, and my current card (MSI GTX 1060) can't handle the native 3840x1600 resolution when playing most major games released in the last 5 years. I didn't upgrade my video card because the crypto miners had prices jacked up, and once they started dropping back down to near-MSRP levels the new RTX cards were right around the corner. Now that the new cards are on the market, I'm looking at maybe buying a GTX 1080 before they go out of stock, or a new RTX 2070.
The first card I'm looking at is an MSI RTX 2070 ARMOR 8G which I can get for $550 USD online or $570 locally. That's kind of a steep price for a midrange marketed card. GTX 1080 cards are selling for around the $500 mark, and the good ones are going fast. I can also buy a refurbished GTX 1080 Founders Edition for $430, but I'd rather not get a blower fan card and I've never purchased a refurbished video card before. I've looked at benchmarks and the RTX 2070 appears to be about 5% faster than the GTX 1080 on average, which isn't much. The RTX 2070 also offers ray tracing, but when games start making use of it, I'm sure I'll need more horsepower than the 2070.
What would you do?
Sulphur on 31/10/2018 at 05:45
The RTX 20xx series features dramatically stupid pricing and is a proof of concept for real-time raytracing hardware, which means it's going to have kinks and performance hurdles to work out that'll likely only see some semblance of maturity a cycle or two in. There's one interesting bit of tech that the 20xx cards feature, though: DLSS. It's still a thing that needs to be enabled on a per-game basis, so adoption is going to be fragmented at best, but from the initial reports, performance and image quality for its upscaling look quite intriguing.
Keep in mind that at your monitor's native resolution, even with a 1080 you're going to need to dial things down if you want decent performance on newer games. If early adoption and DLSS doesn't sound interesting, I'd hang on to my cash and get either a 1080 or 1080 Ti on the cheap. The 20xx cards just seem to be spearheading a marketing push for something that was bound to evolve much more slowly without it.
Judith on 31/10/2018 at 10:40
RTX series is sort of like first nvidia cards with pixel shader. Technically, you could run games using it, but framerate was nowhere near comfortable levels. Being early adopter always sucked in this industry, I don't expect it to change, not with intel or nvidia carefully creating demand and trying to get as much enthusiasts' money as they can at every opportunity.
heywood on 31/10/2018 at 11:18
I thought about getting a 1080 Ti, but they are really scarce. The 1080 Ti cards I've seen available from a reputable sellers are either priced above an RTX 2080, which performs about the same, or they are one of the poorer performing/problematic cards (e.g. Zotac) that I see a lot of people complaining about or returning. I really don't want to spend that much on a video card, I just don't spend enough time gaming anymore to make it worth it.
Sulphur on 31/10/2018 at 11:46
For what it's worth, I've got a 1070 Ti that features the same vapour chamber cooling system the 1080 has. It's pretty quiet for me on load, but I may be more tolerant of white noise. 42 dB according to Tom's Hardware at maximum stress, but the bigger problem is it hits 85 degrees C easily, leading to higher potential throttling. I don't trust refurbs either, tbh.
If you're not particular about being able to max out details on current games and get 60 fps (which, to be fair, only the 2080 Ti can guarantee at resolutions around 4K), a 1080 would do the business. I wouldn't get a 2070 unless they could get DLSS working on all games, because it'd be an ideal solution for your situation if that were the case.
heywood on 2/11/2018 at 12:30
I have no worries about either the GTX 1080 or RTX 2070 when it comes to power, cooling, and noise. They both draw a bit under 200W with stock clocks and a bit over 200W with factory overclocks. And the good cards run quiet. I'm partial to MSI because their fans seem to be really quiet and keep temps below throttling.
I looked into the RX Vega 64 because its performance is roughly the same at high resolutions and I have a FreeSync monitor, but OMG it's a huge power hog and noisy too.
I think I'm going to wait until AMD launches it's 7nm product, which may happen as early as Dec, but more likely early next year. I'll miss my chance to buy a GTX 1080, but I don't want to buy one at the same price as the RTX 2070. Even if AMD's new product isn't all that, it should help bring RTX prices down.
Thanks for the advice.