New GTX 970 & 980: Dream GPUs for Skyrim modders?

[Gekko64]

How is this downsampling thing different from supersampling AA ? I don't see the point, it's a massive decrease in performance.

[Aiyen]

The main reason is that supersamping is a thing of the past. 

 

Most modern engines and games made on them do no longer support that mode at all. Mainly due to various effects that wont work. You can already see ENB effects that wont work with supersamping.. it is the same thing elsewhere. 

 

Also multi card solutions tend to not like supersamping at all... but mainly the first reason. 

 

In general if you can afford more pixels then it will always be the best solution... just like atm the best solutions are downsamping and some form of software based AA technique for Skyrim... at least if you want the best quality/performance ratio. However with these new bad boys then 4k resolution at acceptable framerates is within the reach of many systems since you no longer require a dedicated wind turbine to run your computer. 

[Kelmych]

To those of you who are already upgrading : any feedback will be appreciated greatly ! I'm really hesitating : my 760 is not so old (14 month and I usually change my GPU every two years) but the 2gb is really lacking some punch.

I'm running an AMD R9 290X (4 GB). I am not using an ENB at the moment. Outdoors in Skyrim I sometimes, but not always, see VRAM usage between 3.8 and 3.9Gb. I'm using 2k exterior color maps and 1K exterior normal maps. The FPS is almost always above 30; interestingly, in the unusual cases when it isn't the CPU and GPU usages aren't especially high.The GPU usage never gets really high, and I don't hear any noise from the graphics card. The only time I hear the computer fans a bit is when I'm running DDSopt to optimize textures. It uses all the real and virtual cores on my i7-4770 and close to 100% of the CPU, based on the CPU monitor tool I use.

[Amyr]

I actually tried K ENB at 4K with some tweaks of course(otherwise it's impossbile to run), even my pitiful 280X Toxic managed to give me around 10-18 FPS in outdoors. I'm assuming these badboys can handle 4K quite well, especially with SLI. And also I made some changes in my ini files, draw distance was huge, uGrids was 9 and etc... Even then managed to get around 15FPS at Whiterun outdoors. A new era for Skyrim has begun :P

[Spock]

Should have been a little clearer in my post.  I'm curious about how much real world difference there will be with the 4gb card given that we now have ENBoost and the memory patch/hack.  

Like I said, the real world difference is the texture resolution you can use. If you don't have enough vram for the textures you choose, the game will stutter when turning because new textures have to be loaded from ram to vram at hoc (better to have the vram to preload them). If you seriously don't have enough vram fps will drop to a crawl because processing textures from ram is excessively slow.

So vram means you can use higher resolution textures. Think of textures like an image sticked to the geometry. Generally speaking the higher the resolution of the image the more detail you can see. This depends on the image and view distance of course.

The real world difference between 3gb vram and 4gb vram in Skyrim seems to be the ability to go for 2k exterior textures. Which is (theoretically, not counting compression) 4x the pixel density and 4x the size of 1k.

[Aiyen]

To sum up this... 

More VRAM = more texture memory use before you get stuttering and excessive slowdowns. Nothing else really. Ofc. if you try to simply load a silly amount of textures then the game will most likely still CTD due to lacking overall memory, since the bandwidth is simply just not enough to move the data in a reasonable amount of time.... causing timeout errors and what have you. 

 

However you are still quite able to run 2k textures with just 2Gb of VRAM.... You will notice some slowdown when changing cells etc. but depending on your expectations then it is all reasonable. 

It is only if you absolutely expect that everything loads in instantly and you absolutely hate popin and slow texture loading that you really need more.

 

Also reading from memory is not excessively slow... it is still in the Gb/s bandwidth range depending on your MB and CPU etc. It is true that it is nothing compared to the insane bandwidth that GPU and VRAM communicates with though.. so if you can get stuff in there all the better. What is excessively slow is if you have to read from disk!  

[Spock]

What I meant with "excessively slow" is that fps pummel when processing textures from RAM.

[Heliadhel]

Ive been running a single GTX 670 2Gb, messing with modding and a full step extended build with no ENB netted me 55 fps.

A half done SR:LE with Vividian ENB on was netting me 35-40 FPS which I was a little sad about last week.

 

So I gave in and ordered a Gigabyte reference GTX 980 4Gb.  It arrived today, but i havent had time to install it yet.  I hope this means I get some better frames as I could see SR:LE grinding my poor 670 into the dust when all the landscape, armour and texture mods go in.

 

Ill let ya know.  For those in England, I bought the 980 from Dabs for £460.

 

Cheers

[Neovalen]

Cool I'll be interested in relative performance as I am looking into SLI 970s.

[Heliadhel]

Neo - your twin 670's were the reason I upgraded (though as above my decreasing perf in SRLE played a part) but it was a vram thing.  I noted your twin 670's (and meant to ask you about micro-stutter from SLI which is a reason ive always avoided SLI) but also noted they both have 4Gb ram which is the clincher.  I've always preferred a single card solution to avoid micro-stutter and wanted the 4Gb - so the 980 was the answer for me - its also reasonably cheap for a flagship card.  Those with an 780Ti should stay put - its the same performance for less watts. 

 

I can certainly give you a feel for the shift in Skyrim from a single GTX 670 2Gb to a GTX 980 4Gb.  Also like you I am a huge BF4 fan (play regularly in a clan) and I'll give you some maxed out settings BF4 performance too (but AA will be off).

[EssArrBee]

The Anandtech review of the 970 is out. They have the 970 on par with the 290x. At that price, it is definitely a steal. I'd bet AMD drops prices for their cards before the release of their next cards. You can't have a second tier card being tied in performance with your flagship card and charge that much more for it.

 

Looking through the benches, the 290x is better at 3840x2160, but either equal or worse than the 970 at lower resolutions. Not sure how many people have paid for monitors or TVs that are UHD, but if you do have one, I'd bet you could just go grab a couple Titans anyways.

[Neovalen]

I play at 2560x1600 in all my games, so looking at this review the 970 SLI is the definite winner on the price/performance especially since the 970 can easily overclock to 980 levels.

My only concern/holdback is Skyrim in particular with its decrepit engine not handling SLI the greatest and it would be nice to get rid of the quirks for this game. That being said, going single card 980 would be shooting myself in the foot for future titles and I cannot hold back the awesomeness for old ones as much as I enjoy it. It should still be a nice increase over my 670 SLI.

 

I have two people interested in buying my old 4GB 670s on Toms Hardware, so if anyone in this community is interested now is the time to tell me. Selling them 200 each.

[Heliadhel]

Would you believe I havent gotten around to actually installing my 980 yet?  Im trying to get benchmark data in skyrim and BF4 before I do.  But im struggling to get skyrim benchmarking because there seems to be something wrong when i fire up the enb indoors (inside helgen keep at the beginning).

 

Anyhow Ill take that issue to the proper thread. 

 

Neo - any idea how much my GTX 670 2Gb should go for?

[Spock]

I play at 2560x1600 in all my games, so looking at this review the 970 SLI is the definite winner on the price/performance.

If you are set on a Nvidia card - yes. But the 290 performs very similar to the 970 at 1600p. The review is not exactly fair here because the 290 vapor-x performs similar to a reference 290x. It really depends on what game you are playing and how much it's optimized for the more complex AMD architecture. I expect the 290 to be better in the long run as it has better shader performance which I expect to be more imporatant then geometry in future game releases. Power is an issue with the 290 though.

[Heliadhel]

Well Im reporting back on the GTX 980.  You would be surprised if i had anything bad to say - which I dont.

 

For comparison I went from a GTX 670 2Gb to a GTX 980 4Gb.

 

In battlefield 4, my 670 was giving 60-90 FPS depending on map and how much action there was.  this was the same in flight in a helo or jet.  Most settings were ultra but a few were high and AA was off.  The 980 is delivering 110-150 for the same settings.  infact if im honest i put a couple more settings from high to ultra and had post aa on medium too.  So thats stupidly smooth.  i now need a 120 Hz monitor to actually get the smooth play and aiming that folks like lvlcap and xfactor have.

 

For skyrim, under helgen in the interior with SRLE taken to the point you install the Vividian ENB and ELFX but no further my 670 2Gb was delivering 45 fps.  With SSAO off in the ENB i got 53.  Also my GPU was ALWAYS at 99% use.  

 

With the GTX 980 and SSAO back on in the ENB i just cap at 60 FPS no matter what I do.  It is worth noting that my GPU is sitting between 65% and 75% usage when in the middle of the fights in Helgen keep.  Obviously there is some left in reserve before frames start going below 60.  

 

Ill report back how this is out doors etc once i progress a little more with SRLE build.

 

Cheers

Edited September 28, 2014 by Heliadhel