[SOLVED] Inquiry for upgrade(s)

chubster3000

Honorable
Apr 17, 2014
40
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10,530
I plan on buying a new graphics card this fall, as my 770 has been chuggin' along for so many years. I just wanted to make sure if there are any other things i need to upgrade and that the new Nvidia Ampere cards should still work; I have a Gigabyte H170-D3H motherboard and a 750w PSU. I also have a i5-6500 and was wondering if that might be a bottleneck now. Any recomendations are appreciated. :)
 
Solution
Today, there are no products that use pcie 4.0.
Pcie 4.0 will initially,be mostly about marketing.
The obvious ones are graphics cards and ssd devices.

Tests comparing pcie 2 vs. 3 show minimal differences in fps and that shows up only when using the very top end cards. I expect that to continue with 3 vs.4.
On the ssd side, pcie4 devices can, in theory do better sequentially. But the big benefit from a ssd is the low latency.
There is little difference in random i/o today between sata and pcie x4.

Vram is an interesting thing.
Here is a post I made some time ago, I think it might still be relevant:
VRAM has become a marketing issue.
My understanding is that vram is more of a performance issue than a functional issue.
A game needs...
The psu requirements for your GTX770 are about the same as for a RTX2080 super.
750w is good for anything, assuming it is of decent quality.

No telling what will come in the fall. New products usually have better price/performance than the parts they replace.

How effective such an upgrade will be will depend on the types of games you play.
Some games are graphics limited like fast action shooters.
Others are cpu core speed limited like strategy, sims, and mmo.
Multiplayer tends to like many threads.

Try this test:
Run YOUR games, but lower your resolution and eye candy.
If your FPS increases, it indicates that your cpu is strong enough to drive a better graphics configuration.
If your FPS stays the same, you are likely more cpu limited.
 

chubster3000

Honorable
Apr 17, 2014
40
0
10,530
The psu requirements for your GTX770 are about the same as for a RTX2080 super.
750w is good for anything, assuming it is of decent quality.

No telling what will come in the fall. New products usually have better price/performance than the parts they replace.

How effective such an upgrade will be will depend on the types of games you play.
Some games are graphics limited like fast action shooters.
Others are cpu core speed limited like strategy, sims, and mmo.
Multiplayer tends to like many threads.

Try this test:
Run YOUR games, but lower your resolution and eye candy.
If your FPS increases, it indicates that your cpu is strong enough to drive a better graphics configuration.
If your FPS stays the same, you are likely more cpu limited.

Ty for the reply. Let me elaborate a little more. My 770 only has 2gb of vram, and I play games of many genres. lately, I play LoL and valorant (this game in particular maxes my cpu usage, probably underoptimized), but I also play single-player games, and I saw I couldn't even run watch dogs 2 when that came out, because of my vram, so I was gonna get this new card, either this new product in the fall or a good deal on the 2000 series because of it. i just wanted to know if there seemed to be any obvious restraints or bottlenecks, and as well want to know if the PCIe 4.0 is worth the mobo upgrade or not.
 
Today, there are no products that use pcie 4.0.
Pcie 4.0 will initially,be mostly about marketing.
The obvious ones are graphics cards and ssd devices.

Tests comparing pcie 2 vs. 3 show minimal differences in fps and that shows up only when using the very top end cards. I expect that to continue with 3 vs.4.
On the ssd side, pcie4 devices can, in theory do better sequentially. But the big benefit from a ssd is the low latency.
There is little difference in random i/o today between sata and pcie x4.

Vram is an interesting thing.
Here is a post I made some time ago, I think it might still be relevant:
VRAM has become a marketing issue.
My understanding is that vram is more of a performance issue than a functional issue.
A game needs to have most of the data in vram that it uses most of the time.
Somewhat like real ram.
If a game needs something not in vram, it needs to get it across the pcie boundary
hopefully from real ram and hopefully not from a hard drive.
It is not informative to know to what level the available vram is filled.
Possibly much of what is there is not needed.
What is not known is the rate of vram exchange.
Vram is managed by the Graphics card driver, and by the game. There may be differences in effectiveness between amd and nvidia cards.
And differences between games.
Here is an older performance test comparing 2gb with 4gb vram.
Spoiler... not a significant difference.
A more current set of tests shows the same results:
http://www.techspot.com/review/1114-vram-comparison-test/page5.html

And... no game maker wants to limit their market by
requiring huge amounts of vram. The vram you see will be appropriate to the particular card.
 
Solution