HD 6850-OC upgrading to HD 7870 GHz worth it?

[poorshot]

Running ancient hardware

MB: ASRock 880G Pro 3 Here
GPU: Gigabyte HD6850-OC 1GB 256-Bit GDDR5 Here
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Deneb 3.4GHz (OC'd to 4.0GHz) Here
RAM: HyperX 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin 1600 (running at 1600) Here
PS: 850W Xclio Here

Running on two Acer X223 @ 1680*1050 Here

I can run most games above medium. When I try to record using OBS, MSI Afterburner, LoiLo, etc, I of course get skipped frames and choppy gameplay.

With this old setup, would a new HD 7870 GHz (Here) be bottle-necked too badly? I cannot afford a CPU, GPU and 16GB ram combo. I just want opinions if throwing a better GPU would help with recording sessions, or with old components, would it be throwing money down the drain?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Traciatim]

If it helps, I went from a 6870 to a 7850 on my kids 965BE@3.8Ghz. I couldn't tell the difference at all. The only reason it got the upgrade was it was a hand me down from another machine that was getting an upgrade at the time. Pretty sure it's two monitors are 1080p and 1600x900 if I remember correctly.

I couldn't measure a change in Planetside 2 or Rift at the time, and while your jump is larger I kind of doubt you would actually notice a difference. In my case in large PS2 battles and in Rift open world events the processor is so slow anyway that it really didn't change the frame rates. You might be able to turn on some AA or other GPU heavy features in a few games, or crank up the textures if you are going from a 1GB to 2GB card.

I suppose it really depends on the games you are going to be playing and if you are hitting CPU issues now. The frame skipping during recording could be that your drive is so busy trying to write out the video that the game tries to load assets and jumps. It could be that your processor is being used to compress the video and that's causing the game to slow way down. If you really want to record, have you thought about switching to an NVidia graphics card that supports shadowplay?

 

[wurkfur]

The 7870 Ghz edition is quite a bit faster, but it may not be enough of a difference to justify the price you may be paying for it.

It would be a better to save a little more and get a HD 7950 like I have or get the R9 280. The R9 280 is the same thing at 1 Ghz.

 

[kittencake]

not really you would be better off going with a 7950 should retail 200 bucks used 250-300 new instead, or a r7 270x or 280x is budget is an issue , if money isn't a problem a nvidia 780 (overpriced) or a r9 290x which is half the price of the 780 and has a little more oomph ,

 

[poorshot]

If it helps, I went from a 6870 to a 7850 on my kids 965BE@3.8Ghz. I couldn't tell the difference at all. The only reason it got the upgrade was it was a hand me down from another machine that was getting an upgrade at the time. Pretty sure it's two monitors are 1080p and 1600x900 if I remember correctly.

I couldn't measure a change in Planetside 2 or Rift at the time, and while your jump is larger I kind of doubt you would actually notice a difference. In my case in large PS2 battles and in Rift open world events the processor is so slow anyway that it really didn't change the frame rates. You might be able to turn on some AA or other GPU heavy features in a few games, or crank up the textures if you are going from a 1GB to 2GB card.

I suppose it really depends on the games you are going to be playing and if you are hitting CPU issues now. The frame skipping during recording could be that your drive is so busy trying to write out the video that the game tries to load assets and jumps. It could be that your processor is being used to compress the video and that's causing the game to slow way down. If you really want to record, have you thought about switching to an NVidia graphics card that supports shadowplay?

First, thanks for the insight. But, Shadowplay has issues with STEAM's VAC and old school PunkBuster. I do have separate HDD's, one with software and one for the video dump. That helped a bit. I just wanted to know if the CPU and RAM were being bottle-necked by to GPU, or if the whole bundle is really too old to inject life into. The MB with newest BIOS update didn't list far up enough on the AMD FX series tree to warrant a CPU swap. Was hoping to avoid another upgrade dead end with this MB.

Even with doubling the RAM, I would still be held back by CPU?

Thanks

 

[poorshot]

I'm basically wanting to stop the slight stuttering and skipping while recording. Without a CPU swap, is this impossible? Some games do fine with lowered detail, some full blast, others are almost a slideshow to record. Doubling the RAM wouldn't solve anything at this point, would it?

 

[poorshot]

Would a capture card solve this issue?

 

[Traciatim]

Would a capture card solve this issue?

Probably, that was the idea behind the Shadowplay option. You could use an external device like the this: http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hdpvr2-gaming.html (or something similar, I don't have much experience with them).

Compressing video actually takes a good amount of horsepower. If you consider a 1680x1050 screen at 60FPS you are trying to compress 105,840,000 pixels... if you have 3 bytes per pixel (8-bit per colour per pixel) that's 317,520,000 bytes, or 302.8MB/s that you are trying to process and get something like 50 times smaller and then get to a drive. Offloading that work from your CPU to some other device should help free up your machine to continue playing the game.

Is Shadowplay still having problems with older anti-cheat things? I don't really use mine very much so I don't have much experience with it, but they are changing it pretty much every time they update the GeForce Experience software, you would think that would be a fairly commonly complained about problem.

Edit: Doubling the RAM probably wouldn't help much unless you are actually running out. You can watch resource monitor for a while while you are playing. If you notice your used physical memory one the overview tab or the available number on the memory tab getting really low then it might be something to look in to, but I doubt many games are using much more than 2-4GB of RAM anyway, leaving 4GB free for your system to use as needed.