Are we still of the mind that we should go for a lot of memory ?

I'm just looking at the prices of these GTX 970's and the price is not bad. For my rendering it's the cores that are more important. These have quite a few cores and are half the price of a GTX 980 ti.

I think the 970 is a nice mid point for a lot of people from what I have read.

http://www.scan.co.uk/shop/computer-hardware/all/gpu-nvidia/nvidia-geforce-gtx-970-graphics-card

All 4GB.

Here's a good article : http://techreport.com/blog/28800/how-much-video-memory-is-enough

Seems like in normal use, for very demanding games like Mordor, that the 970 4GB will do the job.

I'm not convinced about 4 GIG to be honest, when I played AC Unity the Vram usage was very high even at 1080 but go over 1080 and the usage goes way over 4 GIG.

This video shows that:


Then what about modding games and adding your own super hi res textures.

For me the jury is still out and I'm going to sit back and watch what happens for a bit longer. 

How much RAM does your card have again mate ?

I'm only running 2 GIG, which is now a bottleneck in new games. I couldn't run AC unity close to maxxed out 

My gut feeling says that a 4 GIG card will be ok for 1080 on a single monitor for a good few years but have multiple monitors, jack up the AA and you might well hit the Vram bottleneck.

I watched that video and to be honest I have to chuckle. I'm sure he's right but he's talking about an extreme beast of a machine.

I mean are either of us going to buy a couple of Titans for two grand and a 4K monitor ? I know I am not.

The other thing is, on my monitor you don't need any kind of AA on at all - you just can't see the difference. The pixels on this main one are so small. So okay that game blipped out, but I'd never run AA on it anyway. And it seemed that this was the major factor towards it using more VRAM. So for me that is not part of the equation.

So at the end of the day it depends on what you want to use it for and how deep your wallet is.

I can just about manage a 980ti, but any more for me is just overkill. For me it's a lot about the cores like I said for rendering. I reckon the 980ti with 6GB will last a good few years - even the 970 might well do it for me.

We need to win the lottery mate 

BTW Black Friday is next Friday so I'll be looking out for some deals.

I'm holding fire for HBM2, we said a while ago that it wouldn't be long until AMD make these cards, they are on the horizon. HBM2 will bring 8GIG to HBM VRAM. 

http://wccftech.com/amd-greenland-gpus-feature-hbm2-14nm-coming-2016/

If nothing else I might be able to grab an R9 Fury Nano (4GIG) at a bargain price when the new cards get released.

That sounds good. It's nVidia for me now though, only because that's what Daz use, otherwise I would probably go for it too. Looks like they may still cost a fair whack though.

I've got another plan brewing 

Buy one gtx 970 now which will handle current games. Then once DX12 gets going and can use more VRAM from a second card, then get a second 970 for SLI.

This gives me 8GB VRAM in the future which should be plenty - with DX12 as I said.

Then for my rendering I get 3,328 (1664 x2) cuda cores instead of 2816 cores on a single 980Ti - which is possible because Daz Iray renderer can use whatever GPUs you have hooked up.

Does that sounds like a plan Batman ?

Followed this up and found this : http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/geforce_gtx_970_sli_review,23.html

Seems they work well together.

I found some benchmarks at the Daz forum and the 970 is pretty quick on it's own. I think it's viable, tempted to put an order in for one tonight, but will probably wait until Friday to see what all the companies will tempt us with.

Sounds like a plan, I did a bit of looking into the performance of the 970 vs a 280x, there is a quite a nice performance gain with the 970.

Should be good for Daz and gaming 

Nice, I think I will go for the two 970s then, seems like a good option and means I can spread the cost.

This is the one I think :

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/4gb-evga-gtx-970-ssc-gaming-acx-20plus-pcie30-7010mhz-gddr5-gpu-1190mhz-boost-1342mhz-cores-1664-plu

I'd get Assassin Creed Syndicate which is £50 on Steam.