Dev Graphics Card

jsargent

Hi guys, I was wondering if I could get some advice on graphics cards.  My poor old GTX 470 just gave up on me!  I need to run high settings on unreal 4, world machine, substance,3dmax etc...  I don't use it so much for gaming. I would like to stick to an Nvidia card.  I was about to go for the GTX970 for the great performance and awesome price but I'm now really worried about its memory issues.  I have read that it has big problems with running substance painter/designer and high end gaming.  Any advice would be super appreciated!  

Thanks in advance!

repete

if your worried go for the 980

jsargent

Its so expensive! .  Does look awesome though!

marks

High-end consumer graphics card intended for running high-end games from an extremely reputable brand supposedly has serious problems running high end games? Sounds dubious to me...

jsargent

There is plenty of information about it online including on algorithmics forum, if you are interested you should look in to it.  Its a shame because that aside its a great card at a great price but as I am including substance in my workflow I don't want to risk it unless I have evidence that the problem wont effect me.
 If anyone has been running the 970 with Substance I would be really interested to hear your experience of it so far.  

m4dcow

Well they just knocked off a few bucks from the 900 series cards today, so maybe that would make buying a 980 a bit more palatable.
http://wccftech.com/nvidia-cuts-prices-900-serie/

CreativeSheep

I bought a Titan X; I'm power crazy though When I realized the grand total was reaching towards $2K.

ZacD

From what I've read, the memory 3.5 gigs of fast vram limitation is only an issue at 4k gaming or 1440p with high vram usage, but turning down some settings can help reduce any issues. Haven't heard about anything with Substance though... 

RobeOmega

jsargent said:

There is plenty of information about it online including on algorithmics forum, if you are interested you should look in to it.  Its a shame because that aside its a great card at a great price but as I am including substance in my workflow I don't want to risk it unless I have evidence that the problem wont effect me.
 If anyone has been running the 970 with Substance I would be really interested to hear your experience of it so far.  

970 + Intel 4770 user here. I have not encountered any problems with Substance or any other programs I use with 3D with my set up. 

throttlekitty

m4dcow said:

Well they just knocked off a few bucks from the 900 series cards today, so maybe that would make buying a 980 a bit more palatable.
http://wccftech.com/nvidia-cuts-prices-900-serie/

Damn, every time. I just bought a 980ti a week ago, but it doesn't look like the model I picked up has had the price adjusted (yet?). Titan Z's have been half off for the weekend though.  

From what I've understood, the issue with 970's is/was that the whole memory bus slows down once you exceed that 3.5. I believe it was more or less fixed since. There was a lot of misinformation going around on that one too, so I may be wrong. My brother has one and it works without issue, FWIW.

Froyok

throttlekitty said:

I believe it was more or less fixed since. 

It's not fixed and it will never be unfortunately. I would suggest avoiding the 970, especially if you plan to work with an application that consume a lot of VRam (like Substance Painter). From our own internal tests we saw a factor of ten is loss of performances when hitting those last 500mb.
Source : http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov/nvidia-we-will-not-boost-geforce-gtx-970-performance-with-drivers/

ZacD

From an application perspective, if the performance loss is that bad, wouldn't it be better to hard limit that card to 3.5 gigs of vram? 

Jerc

Unfortunately it's not as simple as it sounds and having a special case for this specific hardware requires too much rework to be worth the effort. That being said, we are always working on improving the memory footprint of SP, so it will hopefully be less of a problem in the future.

jsargent

Thanks so much for all of the advice guys!  I have decided to get a second have 680 for the time being from a friend and do a full upgrade next year when I have the money, probably to a 980 unless something else is out then! I will avoid the 970 to make sure I can use Substance without any issues just to be sure! 

Thanks again!

Simmo

I've had a 970 for nearly a year and I've had zero problems with any of my 3D tools, apps or games, including Substance Designer/Painter so far.. for what it's worth

Lamont

@ SIMMO, it could be worse-case or just performance issues (FPS, viewport responsiveness). So you should have zero problems with current drivers. I was running on a GTX 580 until last month (980ti upgrade) and yes, it is very obvious the performance gains, but other than that, same.

Amatobahn

I would say that a large portion of the software you listed relies more on CPU than GPU. However, you're wanting to run Unreal 4 on 'high' so off the bat just grab a 900 series card.

claydough

Pascal is already in production to be released in 1rst quarter 2016 ( supposedly ).
At twice the transistor count of a titan X and with second generation iteration of HBM memory...
Considering the high cost of a 980/980ti GPU I think waiting till this winter might be the way to go.

( Nvidia's NVlink would require a motherboard upgrade tho... )