Video Card Savvy

Hey all, I wanted to toss this out to the community and see if any of you tech savvy peeps can gimme a suggestion.

I'm running the game on windows 10 64 with an Intel Core i5-2500 CPU @ 3.3 GHz, 8 GB RAM, and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti.

Can anyone give me an idea of what I might upgrade to get the biggest bang for the buck? I was thinking of just getting a new video card but I'm not if anything else needs attention. What I want is to play the game well on high graphics but it doesn't have to be max settings as long as I know I got a good deal on an excellent piece of equipment. Thanks in advance.

Depends on your budget. Saying you want bag for the buck means you want something in the mid range with good performance. I would recommend an Nvidia GTX1060 6gb or an AMD RX480 8gb.

If you're in the US you can go for a RX 480 8gb, it's very good for the price it has, outside of US it costs more so it makes it not worth it, a gtx 1070 has an higehr price but outside of the us we're talking about a minimal difference and a 1070 is going to last you a long time and will allow you to play everything at good level; I personally wouldn't go for the 1060, is cheaper yes but as bang for the buck gtx1070 seems the best one on the market.

Your processor is solid. At this point I think your best bet is a new graphics card. A GTX 970 is a good card and not nearly as pricey as the 1070 mentioned above. Though it's one generation older, it would still be a huge upgrade for you and can run games easily. You'd basically have the same build my husband has at that point, and he can play any MMO at max settings.

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Originally Posted by Naunet

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This is also a good point, a 970 would be excellent and would come fairly cheaper. the reason I am suggesting a 1070 is because being of the current generation is probably going to last you much longer and I believe that is a good investment. Again if you're in the US I would still go for an aftermarket RX480 (better coolers solve some overheating problems the factory version has) and it has better performance than the 970 and is VR ready. A case can be done for the 980 and 980Ti, you could find them on the cheap and even tho they are also a generation older they should last you longer as they have higher performance than a 970.
My base reasoning is that considered your current card you don't like to upgrade often I assume, so getting something that won't need an upgrade for a longer time should be the best way to spend your money.

Biggest bang for your buck on a budget I'd recommend a Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 or an AMD Radeon RX 480, or a GTX 1070 if you can afford it. They are fairly budget friendly and can run the game no problem. A 1060 performs about as well as a previous gen GTX 970.

Also the GTX 1080 got a price drop to $500 because the 1080ti is coming out, but if you get a 1080 you might as well build a new rig because of CPU bottlenecking.

That said: Your CPU should be good enough to easily push 60fps at the settings those GPUs can push out (my GTX 970 can easily push ~60-100FPS @ 1920x1080 with max settings depending on model/effect population density on screen). The i5 2500 might be a bit of a bottleneck on the FPS for other more CPU intensive games, but it should be at the very least able to push a steady 60 for XIV.

Thank you everyone for all the responses. You guys and gals nailed it. I want solid to high performance (on ffxiv which shouldn't be asking too much) above all and I think that's what you recommended. I'll be looking for deals on 1060s and 1070s and go from there. Thanks again, see you all ingame.

1050 TI would surely already net you 60 fps at 1080p, 1060 would probabl net you 60 fps at 1440p, 1070 would probably net you like 100 fps at 1440p.

But then again they scale a little with games, i think there's a benchmark coming for 4.0 soon, right? Might be worth holding out for that.

IMO, dropping a mid to high end GPU on an ancient motherboard with a first gen PCI Express x16 slot is not a great idea.

I can vouch for the 970s as stated above. I ran with one for a long while until I converted to 4K and it just couldn't handle that resolution above 30 FPS and I had to switch to a 1080. Most of the 1000 series will give you solid performance in the 1920 x 1200 to 2K range so that's a safe bet and will do a bit of future proofing, but if you have any prospects of 4K gaming (and let me tell you that it's gorgeous) then you want to stick to the higher end of at least a 1070 if not a 1080.