The performance of the crossfired 480's is indeed impressive, I think I'll still get a 1070 though and just overclock it. As much as I'd love the raw power/price of 2x 480s, I just think crossfire is going to be a right fuck on to get working on games.
I used to run crossfire/sli and was dissapointed.
Crossfire only works in fullscreen, so if you wanted to play fullscreen windowed and do other stuff at the same time, you couldn't get the performance you paid for.
I believe this is still the case - except for vulkan/mantle/dx12 titles.
Sli at least works in windowed/fullscreen windowed, although more reliant on developer support than crossfire for perf gains. Requires sli bridge ( why? ) which means you need a sli enabled motherboard ( cuz nvidia are greedy fucks ), so almost every board supports crossfire, but only support sli if the nvidia tax is paid.
the tldr is neither is great, it's mostly epeen except on titles you know it's well supported for, and generally is a massive heat generator for no point.
DX12/vulkan/mantle might fix all the things, but that's still a few years away. DX9 games are still getting released for fucks sake.
To be fair I got caught out last year buying a X99 Deluxe and finding out that only certain slots are wired for crossfire (like you can't just put 2 cards in whichever slots you want and crossfire will work - I needed slots 1 and 3 to work together but only 1 and 4 would). I do like the lack of bridge though and yeah, there's no tax for buying something to work with AMD.Requires sli bridge ( why? ) which means you need a sli enabled motherboard ( cuz nvidia are greedy fucks ), so almost every board supports crossfire, but only support sli if the nvidia tax is paid.
I am still happy with my Dell 2713H dual monitor setup. Is there much of a difference going to 4k when I am sat 12 inches from the screens?
That's my feeling on this generation. While an excellent upgrade (bang for buck, the 1070 especially) on older cards its not quite there for reliable 4k, so not really worth the upgrade.
I am happy to concede I perhaps shouldn't have bothered with my 980ti at such a time, could have waited a couple of months and got nearly the same performance for half the cost.
I will still get a 4k monitor though (the same one as @TdC) as there are one or two older games that should be OK for 4k @ 60fps. I was toying with the idea of getting the 2k version but the price difference isn't actually that great and I can always downscale to 1080 or 1440 as and when.
MSI GeForce GTX 1070 GAMING X 8G - 518.99 euros
MSI GeForce GTX 1080 GAMING X 8G - 771.50 euros
How does it compare to the 1080 though?
... the 1070 offers approx 85% of the performance of a 1070.
How does it compare to the 1080 though?
Monitor upgrade is next purchase but mainly I'm happy it will serve me for a few years.Cool. Now unless you're a 4k monkey, I bet you wish there was a PC game worthy of it
Rift/Vive?Monitor upgrade is next purchase but mainly I'm happy it will serve me for a few years.
Not quite yet no.Rift/Vive?
I think the former is where I'm headed next. 1920x1200 is so dated.2560x1440p 144hz is a thing, so is 3440x1440@120hz.
Yeah. It seems like resolution is the only thing driving PC hardware on nowadays.2560x1440p 144hz is a thing, so is 3440x1440@120hz.
Yeah. It seems like resolution is the only thing driving PC hardware on nowadays.
You're both wrong. There is far more driving PC graphics forward, especially with 3rd party mods that are driving PC hardware.
Even console pap like battlefield can look stunning with all the pretties turned up. Something EA has actually improved on in recent times. They are still dicks ofc but they certainly don't appear to be treating PC gamers as second class citizens any more, unlike Ubisoft.