Possible GPU upgrades

autoapprentice

autoapprentice

Joined
May 31, 2015
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Maryland
With the release of Cities Skyline 2, my wife and I are looking to upgrade our GPUs. She has a MSI Ventus XS OC GeForce GTX 1650 4GB, and I have a XFX THICC III Ultra Radeon RX 5700 XT 8 GB.

I've been doing the research, and I am trying to determine how much impact 128-bit vs 256-bit buses really makes, along with the impact in PCIE 4.0x8 and 4.0x16. What I'm noticing is the newer cards generally have a higher clock speed but a lower bus. The cards I'm looking at are snipped below. Out of the three I am trying to decide if I should go with the higher bus and lower frequency or the lower bus and higher frequency. YouTube is somewhat helpful, but I haven't been able to find a video that really answers my question. Does anyone have information to help with this decision?

EDIT: Our PCs are identical other than the GPU.

CPU = AMD R5 5600X
MOBO = MSI B550 Gaming Plus
RAM = G.Skill Ripjaws 32GB @ 3600 MHz CL 16

I would like to stay with MSI so the board (MSI B550 Gaming Plus) and card look good together, but I guess that wouldn't be an end all be all.

Thanks everyone.

GPU 1.jpg
GPU 2.jpg
 
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How much is the brand worth they have 6800 for 399
4070 for 540
6950 for 550
 
At PCI-Express 4.0 the difference between an x8 card and x16 card is really minimal in 99.9% of use cases which include 99.9% of games.

Memory bus width matters more BUT is only really comparable between same vendor cards of the same generation.

Personally I've been in an anti-NVIDIA kinda mood the last few years so I try to build systems with AMD GPUs or even Intel Arc cards wherever reasonable.

Edit: what resolution and refresh rate do you play at?
 
dogememe said:
At PCI-Express 4.0 the difference between an x8 card and x16 card is really minimal in 99.9% of use cases which include 99.9% of games.

Memory bus width matters more BUT is only really comparable between same vendor cards of the same generation.

Personally I've been in an anti-NVIDIA kinda mood the last few years so I try to build systems with AMD GPUs or even Intel Arc cards wherever reasonable.

Edit: what resolution and refresh rate do you play at?
Click to expand...
interesting about the bus and generational differece. I've seen the 4060Ti get a bad rap. I really like AMD as well. We just play at 1920x1080 and 60HZ.
 
Honestly, I would first try to run this game with your existing GPUs and see how they perform. That will give you a base line.

Also I see you’re shopping based on price, hence you’re looking at RX6800 and RTX4060ti.
RX6800 is superior to the RTX4060ti. It may even beat it in ray tracing, but I’m not 100% on that.

A more comparable card to the 4060ti is the Rx 6700 xt, which is like $350 now or less. Way better deal for the same or slightly better performance.
 
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I have a laptop with Intel i7 and built in Iris Xe GPU. I swapped the 1x 16gB stick out and put in 2x 16 GB so 2 operations could be started simultaneously. GPU performance increased dramatically although total bandwith didn't change. I averaged 50% increase in frame rates. On a side note, every metric increased by 10% or more, including disk speed.

So not directly comparable to what you have, but it seems that feeding data to the GPU is critical
 
dogememe said:
That's ridiculous. Perhaps best to wait a month or two for updates to improve optimization?
Click to expand...
Yea that's what I'm doing. I got super excited about the new Cities Skyline 2 but when the reviews started rolling out, people were reporting 20fps or lower in the menu too.
 
The only cards I've seen where the PCIe lanes matters is the super low end cards where AMD repurposed mobile GPUs that only have 4 lanes, those suffer if you put them in a system without PCIe 4.0 and Intel Cards perform poorly in systems not new enough to have resizable BAR support.
 
If you are looking at the 500$ price range and amd I'd second the 7800xt.
I literally forgot they released those recently (also first reply was from phone on break)

I had a couple really bad amd video card experiences so while I'm tempted I usually only consider green.

*ALMOST* bought the 7900xt over what I ended up with the 4070ti oc. although I did get a relative steal on that at 200$ off msrp...
graphics card market being what it is now.
 
Rand said:
If you are looking at the 500$ price range and amd I'd second the 7800xt.
I literally forgot they released those recently (also first reply was from phone on break)

I had a couple really bad amd video card experiences so while I'm tempted I usually only consider green.

*ALMOST* bought the 7900xt over what I ended up with the 4070ti oc. although I did get a relative steal on that at 200$ off msrp...
graphics card market being what it is now.
Click to expand...
Other than the 9000 series that absolutely creamed the FX series like 20 years ago, I've always been kind of meh on AMD/ATI cards, the only thing that's good is once the machine is super old it can still run Linux fine since they actively support the open source community, where the support for Nvidia ends whenever Nvidia decides to pull the plug on the proprietary driver for your card.
 
These AMD cards are so power hungry. I would have to upgrade my PSU as well.

The 7800XT seems to meet all the things discussed earlier, 16GB, 256 bit bus, pcie 4x16, and higher frequency.
 
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autoapprentice said:
These AMD cards are so power hungry. I would have to upgrade my PSU as well.

The 7800XT seems to meet all the things discussed earlier, 16GB, 256 bit bus, pcie 4x16, and higher frequency.
Click to expand...
what do you have now?

my i7-13700k with 4070ti pulls about 400w from the wall.
I'd think a 650w or so would be the min

I'd run something like this for 85$ or better.

My current psu is the asus rog thor 850.. microcenter pricematched for $140 iirc.
has a handy oled screen on side with power consumption.

its super hard to take a photo of it so pardon the blur.
1698881284624.png


Edit just noticed that screw it fell out of the overhead radiator from the cpu cooler.-- fixed.
 
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dogememe said:
If you only play at 1080P, 60Hz, I'm surprised your 5700XT isn't good enough.
Click to expand...
I was thinking this same thing. Haven’t played the game OP referenced, but my OC’d RX 580 will clear 100FPS on Forza Horizon 5 with settings on Ultra.

I put a 6750XT in the live-streaming computer I built for church, and while taking 3 full HD camera inputs plus a 32-channel soundboard, it’s only taking 3-5ms to transcode all of that stuff. To say that one “needs” a 4080 Ti for gaming seems nothing short of ludicrous if you’re not pumping the pixels to a 70”+, 8K TV.
 
SubieRubyRoo said:
To say that one “needs” a 4080 Ti for gaming seems nothing short of ludicrous if you’re not pumping the pixels to a 70”+, 8K TV.
Click to expand...

It;s not as crazy as it sounds when you consider new gaming titles which are horribly optimized because they are rushed and also need to be released on consoles.
There are games that barely break 60fps in 4k on an rtx4090.
 
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