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It's very difficult to find games that are bottlenecked by graphics cards nowadays (at 1440p60 or below). There are three major reasons why this is happening:

by 013a 8y ago

It's very difficult to find games that are bottlenecked by graphics cards nowadays (at 1440p60 or below). There are three major reasons why this is happening: - Nvidia has been killing it in graphics card design relative to the competition. Consider that a GTX 1070, released 30 months ago, can go all the way to 1440p60 comfortably. - Nearly every game has to be playable on consoles, and consoles are all running AMD's last generation chipset. - 4K is still the "storm on the horizon" that no one's graphics cards are truly ready for in an affordable way. All of that combined really means that raw graphics quality in games hasn't improved a lot in the past four years. So, most games will continue to show increased performance the more clock you throw at a processor. Combine that with more and more games optimizing for more cores given the prevalence of 6-8 cores chips on the console market and in gaming PCs, and this should make sense to anyone. It should be said: This is why cloud gaming is quickly becoming a real thing. Beyond connection speed, graphics cards were always a huge bottleneck in making that cost affordable to cloud providers. Today, the graphics card isn't a bottleneck, and all the cloud providers have an abundance of them in their data centers for AI-focused work. And if neither the cards nor the connection speed could handle 4K anyway...

gknoy 8y ago
> 4K is still the "storm on the horizon" that no one's graphics cards are truly ready for in an affordable way. I wouldn't call it a "storm on the horizon". I am fortunate to have a GTX 1070. If I turn off anti-aliasing, 4k at 60hz seems to work perfectly well in just about every game I've played. (Older steam games like Deus Ex:HR and Dishonored, HotS, WoW, Mechwarrior...). Most things are built with antialiasing at 1080p in mind, and running it at 4k (without FSAA) seems to be similar workload.
- 013a 8y ago
  That's arguable. Even the RTX 2080Ti, the most powerful consumer graphics card on the planet at $800, barely breaches 60fps for many games at 4K (with a 7820x and 32gb of memory) [1] Battlefield 1 - 97fps [2] Far Cry 5 - 70fps [3] Grand Theft Auto 5 - 62fps [4] Total War: Warhammer 2 - 55fps And the 99th percentile of many of those titles drops below 60fps. The FE can push a little bit harder. Its true that at 4k you can pretty safely turn off the more powerful forms of AA and gain a lot of performance back; the resolution is so high that it doesn't tend to matter. How else would the X1X be capable of so consistently reaching 4k30 for titles like FH4 with a substantially less powerful graphics card? But that's not really how we observe what these cards are capable of. You can play CS:GO at 4k120 on a much less powerful card, but that's not really that interesting. Also, I consider the "affordable" mark to be ~$300, which is GTX 1060 territory. So when you consider that most gamers [5] are barely running 1080p144/1440p60 right now, that jump to 4k60 is actually pretty far. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13346/the-nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti-and-2080-founders-edition-review/6 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13346/the-nvidia-geforce-rtx-... [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13346/the-nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti-and-2080-founders-edition-review/7 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13346/the-nvidia-geforce-rtx-... [3] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13346/the-nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti-and-2080-founders-edition-review/11 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13346/the-nvidia-geforce-rtx-... [4] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13346/the-nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti-and-2080-founders-edition-review/14 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13346/the-nvidia-geforce-rtx-... [5] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... (Far more than 40% of gamers on Steam are running a card less powerful than the GTX 1070).
  - gknoy 8y ago
    > that's not really how we observe what these cards are capable of I think you may be looking at what most benchmarks show, which is often high/ultra details, with AA. Yes, you can compare cards better by putting them through their paces, and showing that card A handles a heavy load better than B, but most games look amazing _right now_ on lesser settings at 4k, on the 1070, even if it's certainly eclipsed by better cards. (I also agree with you on the affordability front.) Just about any game that came out before last year will look amazing, and I've been able to run pretty much every game that I have at high-ish (other than antialiasing) settings quite happily. You're absolutely right that $300 is a lot better target than $400, though.

by 013a 8y ago

gknoy 8y ago

> 4K is still the "storm on the horizon" that no one's graphics cards are truly ready for in an affordable way. I wouldn't call it a "storm on the horizon". I am fortunate to have a GTX 1070. If I turn off anti-aliasing, 4k at 60hz seems to work perfectly well in just about every game I've played. (Older steam games like Deus Ex:HR and Dishonored, HotS, WoW, Mechwarrior...). Most things are built with antialiasing at 1080p in mind, and running it at 4k (without FSAA) seems to be similar workload.

013a 8y ago
That's arguable. Even the RTX 2080Ti, the most powerful consumer graphics card on the planet at $800, barely breaches 60fps for many games at 4K (with a 7820x and 32gb of memory) [1] Battlefield 1 - 97fps [2] Far Cry 5 - 70fps [3] Grand Theft Auto 5 - 62fps [4] Total War: Warhammer 2 - 55fps And the 99th percentile of many of those titles drops below 60fps. The FE can push a little bit harder. Its true that at 4k you can pretty safely turn off the more powerful forms of AA and gain a lot of performance back; the resolution is so high that it doesn't tend to matter. How else would the X1X be capable of so consistently reaching 4k30 for titles like FH4 with a substantially less powerful graphics card? But that's not really how we observe what these cards are capable of. You can play CS:GO at 4k120 on a much less powerful card, but that's not really that interesting. Also, I consider the "affordable" mark to be ~$300, which is GTX 1060 territory. So when you consider that most gamers [5] are barely running 1080p144/1440p60 right now, that jump to 4k60 is actually pretty far. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13346/the-nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti-and-2080-founders-edition-review/6 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13346/the-nvidia-geforce-rtx-... [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13346/the-nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti-and-2080-founders-edition-review/7 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13346/the-nvidia-geforce-rtx-... [3] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13346/the-nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti-and-2080-founders-edition-review/11 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13346/the-nvidia-geforce-rtx-... [4] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13346/the-nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-ti-and-2080-founders-edition-review/14 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13346/the-nvidia-geforce-rtx-... [5] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... (Far more than 40% of gamers on Steam are running a card less powerful than the GTX 1070).
- gknoy 8y ago
  > that's not really how we observe what these cards are capable of I think you may be looking at what most benchmarks show, which is often high/ultra details, with AA. Yes, you can compare cards better by putting them through their paces, and showing that card A handles a heavy load better than B, but most games look amazing _right now_ on lesser settings at 4k, on the 1070, even if it's certainly eclipsed by better cards. (I also agree with you on the affordability front.) Just about any game that came out before last year will look amazing, and I've been able to run pretty much every game that I have at high-ish (other than antialiasing) settings quite happily. You're absolutely right that $300 is a lot better target than $400, though.