Best Graphics Card For ULTRA settings on BF4

Tyler_9919

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Dec 21, 2015
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As the title suggests, i'm looking to buy the best graphics card for BF4 and GTA 5

My budget is $350 - $400

I currently have NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 (Gigabyte)

Motherboard: MSI Z170A XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM EDITION
RAM: G.SKILL 32GB 4x8gb TridentZ Series DDR4 3200MHz
CPU: Intel Core i7 6700K Skylake 1151LGA

What graphics card would work the best for my budget? My current card can barely play BF4 on medium settings. Even at M settings, I still get the low performance icon that pops up. I would like to play it on ultra settings or at the very least, high.

If you think my 960 can cut it, can someone show me how to optimize it? I have never gone over 28fps, it's not even worth playing.
 
Solution
Those scores seem good, However with BF4 those red symbols depend on the tick rate of the server as well. Like some higher tickrate servers don't like under 60fps.

After looking around there is heaps of other threads about having low FPS only in BF4, which is really weird since for most people it is a really optimised game.
What you can try, go into your Nvidia control panel and try different levels of SMAA. Also another thing that could be a problem is Vram, is your card the 2gb version? That could limit you with certain settings, try different lighting settings (e.g. not HBAO) and turn off anti-aliasing.
Also in Origin, right click on game properties and turn off Origin in game overlay.
One more thing what does CPU temps and usage...
Yea if you're playing at 1080p and only getting that fps on a GTX 960 something is very wrong. Really the 960 should be capable of running BF4 at Ultra or very close to ultra (AA down) at above 60fps
 
If I were you I'd go with the 390X and overclock it. If that is too expensive then go with the RX 480.
 







I've tried to optimize the game via graphics settings.. Every other game I have, works fine for the most part. I can play GTA5 at full graphics but low rendering distance. The only game I have a problem with is BF4.

Do you think it could be a driver issue? Any idea what driver is the best for BF4? I'm open to try anything at this point.
 
Do you happen to have resolution scale set to higher than 100%?
Other than that what do you gpu usages and clocks look like when you're playing Battlefield 4? You can use GPU-z to see this in the sensor tab.
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/
Play a little of BF4 and have a look at the graphs to the right on usages and clocks, If it changes only a little that's no worry due to the randomness of BF4 multiplayer. Then post back here 😉

Do you have any benchmarking software to get a set score for your graphics card?
You can try 3dmark, or a uniengine benchmark.

-good luck
 




Heres a link to the screenshots.

http://imgur.com/a/FG8qS

I'm not too knowledgeable in the field of OCing. I have no idea how to run a benchmark.





Update:

Just figured out how to do a benchmark
Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0
FPS: 32.1
Score: 809
Min FPS: 7.4
Max FPS: 76.9

Direct3D11
1920x1080 8xAA Fullscreen
Ultra Quality
Extreme Tessellation


By these standards, I shouldn't have any issues in game. So what is causing it to lag hardcore, and popup with the dark red performance icon?? Even if it ran at 35fps, I shouldn't be able to notice THAT much of a difference..
 
hmm. If those usages are correct then that's pretty bad. This is in fullscreen and not borderless window right?
What is max usage, click on the box that has the value until it says max in GPU-z.
Ill look around a bit and try to find something, in the meantime try updating your GPU drivers or reinstalling.

-good luck
 


Yeah it was full screen.

i've already tried at least 20 different drivers, nothing works.

GPU Core Clock: 1341.6
GPU Memory Clock 1752.8
GPU Temp 64 C
Memory Used: 1250MB
GPU Load 99%
Memory Controller Load 94%
Video Engine Load 34%
Bus Interface Load 13%
Power Consumption 66% TDP
VDDC 1.2000 V


these are all set to [MAX]


I've already replaced the power cables to the GPU itself with high quality ones, I've reseated the card, i've optimized airflow, and i've checked to make sure my power options aren't set to "balanced" or "power saving" and it's set to "high performance"
 
Those scores seem good, However with BF4 those red symbols depend on the tick rate of the server as well. Like some higher tickrate servers don't like under 60fps.

After looking around there is heaps of other threads about having low FPS only in BF4, which is really weird since for most people it is a really optimised game.
What you can try, go into your Nvidia control panel and try different levels of SMAA. Also another thing that could be a problem is Vram, is your card the 2gb version? That could limit you with certain settings, try different lighting settings (e.g. not HBAO) and turn off anti-aliasing.
Also in Origin, right click on game properties and turn off Origin in game overlay.
One more thing what does CPU temps and usage look like across all threads when in game? Also you've set high performance in windows and in the Nvidia control panel?

With drivers uninstall normally, then restart in safe mode then run DDU
http://www.wagnardmobile.com/?q=node/82
This removes all little fragments of the driver.
After that reinstall again in normal mode and see if that makes a difference.
Another thing to try is, go into the BF4 folder and run DXSETUP.

-Good luck, I found all these other threads with bad fps in BF4 but hardly any of them have solutions.
 
Solution