I have been running DCS for years off of a old Nvidia GTX 770, it has served me well but I can see the writing on the wall. The lack of Direct X 12 support and the increasing demands of sims means it getting to be time to look at upgrade options. Honestly these days I’m not even sure what my options are these days.
My question becomes will I not reap the benefits of upgrading if I only upgrade my GPU? Currently I’m running:
AMD FX™-8120 Eight-Core Processor 3.10 GHz
Asrock 990 FX Extreme 4 motherboard
GTX770
24gb of RAM
I am not intuitive when it comes to this stuff so any help is appreciated.
Depends on how much you want to spend Andrew? I think getting a cheap 1080 Ti etc would still be a pretty big boost. What resolution do you run at, as that tends to be the side that exercises the GPU?
Well I’m hoping to keep it about $500 or below. My main monitor is 1920x1080. But I do run dual monitors. Basically from my limited research it seems like just going with anything these days would probably provide some form of boost.
If you can find one then a 3060 Ti would be good bang for buck. If you’re DCS’ing on a 1080p monitor then that’ll do it just fine regardless of CPU in the future. If you can’t find any of those (single card purchases rather than bundles and systems are going to be hard for at least another 6 months) then a 6700XT or 6800 (to spend a bit more) are very solid and will last a while. You might be able to pick up a bargain 5700 XT 2nd hand if you want to skip the GPU rat race for a while .
Not so much about new parts, but just a point to note - when I did my new build, I decided to try selling the old, old PC parts I had, I thought I might get $10 here and $20 there, kind of thing.
They were really popular and some of them went for substantially more than I thought they would!
It seems that the supply shortage has sparked a surprisingly lively secondary market - people buying older PC parts, I assume for builds that don’t need to be top of the line.
So whatever you do replace, try selling the old parts - you might be pleasantly surprised!
Looking at prices, 1080s are still over $1000 which feels insane to me considering how long ago they came out. A refurbished 1070 though is pretty reasonable. I realize that I’ve picked the worst time in history to look at changing parts out.
Definitely a bad time to go hunting for a new videocard.
At 1080p you do have options however. A GTX1080 would run most games at high detail still, including DCS. The next bottleneck then for DCS would become your CPU.
Still at 8 cores it’ll chug along decently for a while still.
Try getting a 1080 or 1070 2nd hand. You should be able to remain within budget.
For 500 I am afraid recent cards are all out of reach and will be for a long while to come.
That said, the 1000 series were a beast for their time as well and still perform very decently.
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