Graphics card recommendations

[Josh1161]

Currently got a Radeon RX 550 and AMD Ryzen 7 1700 CPU and 1080p monitor. I don’t really know much about graphics cards but I’m looking to be able to run the game on medium settings at minimum, maybe with textures on high. Anybody got any recommendations for graphics cards? Ideally something up to £200.

[Liesel Weppen]

Imho the best you can get for ~£200 is a GTX 1660S. Should also be enough for medium settings easily. I'm playing on high with a 1070 which is just a little bit faster.

 

But i don't know how the "just" 6GB VRAM affect the texture quality since my 1070 already has 8GB.

 

Alternative would be a AMD 5500XT which would have 8GB but quite a bit less performance. And sadly i hear a lot about driver problems and don't know how it performs with 7d2d.

[Fox]

With Covid happening, the market is terrible for computer parts right now. I'd wait for prices to drop back down before making upgrades again.

 

Also, there's awesome new stuff expected to be released some time this year, like the 4th Gen Ryzen and RTX 3000 series GPUs... which will influence the prices on older hardware as well. So it might be worth saving up for a few months and go nuts when they release. It's what I'm doing.

[ElCabong]

I've been playing this game since A7 over three different computer systems and it's always been on a graphics card that cost around 250 bucks. It's never been the fastest and it's never been the slowest. The only time I bog down the system is when I mess with the shadows. I bump them up a little, things look a little better, until it slows down and then I go back to where I had them the last time I liked the performance.

 

They've generally lasted about two years before failing except the one I have now which is a 6 GB GTX 690. It's getting kind of old but it runs the game just fine.

 

This sort of thing depends upon what your expectations are and the resolution you play it at. I play at 1920 x 1280 resolution and don't care what the frames per second are as long as I like what I'm seeing. I always look here first before I buy a graphics card.

 

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

If it needs to be right now and you can´t wait until Q3 2020 the AMD RX580 or the Nvidia GTX 1650 Super are in your price range. When the new generations come this year, there might be some reduced prices for older models. Or maybe a new model in your price range that is better.

 

If you buy right now i would spend 250 for GTX1660 Super. You get roughly 30% more power than for 200. And who knows how GPU intense A19 will be? It looks like it will be a bit more than A18. Can´t really tell from screenshots only tough.

 

But honestly, saving until later this year sounds like your best option. I am starting to save already. My 420€ GTX1070 from 2016 is on par with a 250€ GTX1660. That hurts a little bit. But meh i have it for a while now.

[warmer]

Hmmmm I have a Radeon 580X,  Ryzen 5 1600x 6 core, and 32gb of ram in my gaming rig and I run at max settings at 45fps or higher pretty regularly. I wonder what is slowing down your rig? because we are basically the same on GPU, you have me beat on CPU, but I imagine have you on RAM.

[Bzyk]

I'd also recommend buying used graphics card. There's really no risk to that (I'm only buying used) and you can probably get into 1080ti range which outperforms most of the stuff on the market atm.

[hotpoon]

I'm playing the game with a GTX 1060 6gb and it runs at 40 to 60 fps with most things maxed (except reflection and bloom). I also have 32gb of ram though. 

[Josh1161]

I’ve got 16GB RAM but I don’t tend to be using more than 60% in total when my game slows right down. At one point yesterday with shadows still turned on my card was running at just over 90 degrees which hasn’t happened very often at all. I actually turned shadows completely off after that. Game looks a bit bland but it’s unreal how much smoother it runs now without them. A few other settings were changed too (screen of my current settings attached) but it’s not as enjoyable playing this way.

 

ideally I would like to get something sorted soon but if the better option would be to wait then I guess I’ll do that.

 

@warmer it seems your card has 2x the memory of mine and is slightly faster in speed too. I don’t know much about them but I’d guess that’s the reason yours outperforms mine quite significantly. The extra 16GB RAM probably helps a bit too, not sure.

 

screen of my current graphics settings (looking quite sad at the moment)

[Liesel Weppen]

7 hours ago, warmer said:

Hmmmm I have a Radeon 580X,  Ryzen 5 1600x 6 core, and 32gb of ram in my gaming rig and I run at max settings at 45fps or higher pretty regularly. I wonder what is slowing down your rig? because we are basically the same on GPU, you have me beat on CPU, but I imagine have you on RAM.

He has a RX550. You have a RX 580 i assume (there is no Radeon 580X out there) which has roughly triple the 3D-power!

That is not nearly "the same gpu", with the same thoughts you could tell a GTX 1050 ist the same as GTX 1080....

 

The RX550 is an absolute low end (and low cost) GPU, designed for media center PCs accelerating video playback or upgrade an older computer with display port and/or more modern hdmi specs. It's not ment for gaming at all.

[Liesel Weppen]

14 hours ago, ElCabong said:

which is a 6 GB GTX 690. It's getting kind of old but it runs the game just fine.

Huh, exotic. The GTX 690 is basically one card with two 680 GPUs. That sounds very powerfull but it hardly depends on the games if they can take an advantage out of such a dual-gpu setup. Depending on the game even an 680 outperformes a 690 due to it's running at a higher clocks.

Also the 690 shipped with 2x2GB or 2x4GB of VRAM. This might also sound nice, but the 2x4GB is not nearly comparable to a current card with 8GB, as each 4GB is for one GPU only. One GPU can't access the VRAM of the other GPU, even if the second GPU is not used at all. That means all the data needs to be stored for every gpu in each VRAM. So this is really 2x4GB and not 1x8GB, as you need to store everything twice. So effectively you have only 4GB.

Both that points are basically the reason why NVidia discontinued SLI and especially those dual-GPU cards.

 

I have no clue how you come to 6GB, maybe there have been some custom designs that shipped with 2x3GB i never heard from.

 

According to all of this, an upgrade to an (used) 1060 (6GB) or RX580 (8GB) would also increase your perfomance by estimated 50% while halfing the power consumption (690 = 300W, 1060 = 120W, RX580 = 185W).

[Fox]

7 hours ago, Bzyk said:

I'd also recommend buying used graphics card. There's really no risk to that (I'm only buying used) and you can probably get into 1080ti range which outperforms most of the stuff on the market atm.

Yes and no. There are in fact risks when buying used GPUs, mostly if they've been used for crypto-mining in a piss poor setup where the owner allowed the card to get really hot for hundreds of hours at a time.

[ElCabong]

4 hours ago, Liesel Weppen said:

Huh, exotic. The GTX 690 is basically one card with two 680 GPUs. That sounds very powerfull but it hardly depends on the games if they can take an advantage out of such a dual-gpu setup. Depending on the game even an 680 outperformes a 690 due to it's running at a higher clocks.

Also the 690 shipped with 2x2GB or 2x4GB of VRAM. This might also sound nice, but the 2x4GB is not nearly comparable to a current card with 8GB, as each 4GB is for one GPU only. One GPU can't access the VRAM of the other GPU, even if the second GPU is not used at all. That means all the data needs to be stored for every gpu in each VRAM. So this is really 2x4GB and not 1x8GB, as you need to store everything twice. So effectively you have only 4GB.

Both that points are basically the reason why NVidia discontinued SLI and especially those dual-GPU cards.

 

I have no clue how you come to 6GB, maybe there have been some custom designs that shipped with 2x3GB i never heard from.

 

According to all of this, an upgrade to an (used) 1060 (6GB) or RX580 (8GB) would also increase your perfomance by estimated 50% while halfing the power consumption (690 = 300W, 1060 = 120W, RX580 = 185W).

Well I must be wrong about the amount of memory on it, it has been three or four years since I've worried about it. It's running 7 days to die just fine and everything else I'm running at present. I will replace it when I buy a game that it doesn't handle very well or it fails. Usually they have failed by now.

 

[warmer]

15 hours ago, Liesel Weppen said:

He has a RX550. You have a RX 580 i assume (there is no Radeon 580X out there) which has roughly triple the 3D-power!

I didn't realize given the ram speed and generation/drivers of the card being so similar. Thing is this card was crap until I upgraded my ram and CPU to a Ryzen chip. I was running a 6 core AMD FX chip previously and the ram speed and the cpu were huge bottlenecks in performance.