Go for 980Ti or wait for Pascal?

Yes I know that you always can wait forever because there always will be a faster successor, but for me this feels like a real hard decision now.

At the moment I have a rig with the following speccs:
Core i7 3770k @ 4,2 Ghz
16GB DDR3
Geforce 680GTX

I've built this roughly 3 years ago but now, this does not perform well anymore at high/ultra settings in newer games (Witcher 3, Batman Arkham Knight etc.). Soon the Intel Skylake generation is coming and that seemed to me a good time to built myself a new shiny pc. And well, there was the 980ti launch and the card performs very well, but its not very cheap. And thats the point... I read that the next generation nvidia chip Pascal will perform up to 10x faster than the current Maxwell generation (at least on the papers...). And if that should be really true, I would bite myself, even if it would be only 3 times faster.

The 980ti is a little bit more than 100% faster as my 680GTX, but this card is 3 years old now. Pascal is announced for 2016, so its ca. one year from now, if they launch it in Q2. And 10x faster in only one year?

What do you guys think? Will this really be that fast (or close to that) as claimed by nvidia (maybe due to HBM2), or is this the usual marketing blabla? I never saw a following generation that was even 100% faster than its predecessor...

What really makes me think 1000 times about this is the high price of round about 8XX € for a custom design 980ti. I wont change a card that expensive just after one year of usage. And even resell it has a high loss. But use my current rig for another year would hurt too because I want to have all the nice eyecandy the new games have to offer. I already tought about buying a cheaper Maxwell GPU for one year but:

960GTX is only as fast as my 680GTX
970GTX has the 3,5GB memory issue and for THIS ~350€ ist WAY too much (and I dont want a used card that maybe was hard raped by some mad overclocker and only lasts half a year)
980GTX is too expensive for one year and 4GB memory seems too less for longer usage.

Some advice what you think / would do would be very nice

ps.
Sry for my eventually bad english (especially grammer). I dont write/speak it very often.

 

The 980Ti is more like 150% faster than your 680




I plan on getting one to replace my 670 SLI as it is about the same performance as a 690 and you can see the performance difference in this chart.

 

I know plenty of people that have no issue filling up 4gb on a 970.

 

@Loophole35 Ok I had the stock clocked 980ti in my mind. That was a little bit faster as 100%. But you are right the custom ones are even more faster.

Well another thing that makes me think about all this is whether the 6GB on the 980Ti would last for ~3 years. In some Batman Arkham Knight reviews I read the 6GB of the 980Ti were almost fully used at full details... @ only 1080p!!! Thats insane... Dont know whether this is only due to a bad console port or whether a lot of upcoming titles within the next 3 years will need more that 6GB too. I think Pascal will start with 8GB up to 16 GB on the X80(ti) card. Questions over questions :-/

 

Btw I read Maxwell has a lot of issues with coil whine (dont know whether this is the right word for what i mean). Im have a very nice ear and if this is already below 1XX Fps it would annoy me a lot. Does anybody have this issue? Especially at custom designs with better components than the nvidia stock 980ti?

 

From my experience only: Coil whine (if any) can be heared if

- gpu is rendering extremely high numbers of fps (for few times I've heared it was due to V-sync OFF for testing and above 500-600 fps up to 2000 fps,then is was audiable).

Not produced with normal fps.

 

Personally I'd just get the 980ti now and overclock the 3770k a bit higher, get a better cooler if needed.. then stash a little away each month till I had enough saved to upgrade the rest in a year, year and a half.

That's just me tho, I know I'll always be upgrading so I budget for it.

 

I face the same situation with my 770 but i'm waiting for Pascal. It's not weak of a card that games would be unplayable right now. Pascal will bring HBM and a new architecture. Personally i'm not in a hurry to upgrade, as next year with Pascal i'm aiming for 4K.

 

I hated my 3770K to death, was a real crap to oc. Needed 1.4v to stable at 4.6ghz

 

I think the 980Ti is a pretty good buy. Maybe pascal is too far off, you'll get impatient.

 

I saw a huge leap in performance (around 300%) when I went from Voodoo 1 to Voodoo 2 in 1998. I have never experienced another leap in performance like that one, from one generation to another generation.

 

I heard Batman was not that great of a pc release. I'm on a 780 and probably gonna get a 980 classy for fallout 4 later in the year, even though I've gotten constant advice they are reasonably cheap now hitting up 400$ with a slot of them unregistering and typically transferring the warranty. If money want an object I'd hit the ti but can't bring myself to spend 400-500$ for an upgrade on 1080p. For you upgrading now would be good for a ti since you want max settings.

 

T

This happened up to around the 8800gtx, after that the monster upgrade for your money was never to be again and it wont be ever again.

 

In that chart it shows *well* over 200%? Hell, it's closer to 300!

CDJay

 

680 to 980ti is a no brainer. Do it. I would suggest waiting for Pascal if you were on 970 or something similar, but going from 680, it'll be a massive upgrade.

 

Would be nice to know which resolution/Monitor you play at/with ?.

Personally, If i read your post right, I would either get a very cheap/used upgrade for your 680, be it AMD or Nvidia to last you thru, at least if you already plan to upgrade entire system in ~1 year.

Should be able to get fairly cheap 780/970's or AMD equivalent at this point.

Getting a 980ti will no doubt make you able to migrate that card over to a new system, BUT... if you are already looking at Pascal/HBM card as plan for new system, you'll have same problem when those comes out

I can tell you that i went from 670 to 980 in this rig, and the performance increase was HUGE and i haven't regretted it, so if if you go from 680 to 980ti you'll have equal performance boost.

Guess it's down to purse size vs Need/Greed size

 

I too am looking to upgrade from my 770 but at this point I'm going to wait. I can still play everything at acceptable levels so we'll see what Pascal brings.

 

I was going to upgrade my 670 sli to a 980 but held off, the increase just isn't worth it for me at 1080p so I bought a G-Sync monitor instead, the 980 TI on the other hand would be a no brainer if it wasn't so bloody expensive, i'm currently selling a laptop on ebay just to raise the cash, Pascal is too far away for me to think about and if it is a huge leap over Maxwell you can always sell the 980TI when it's released or if you buy EVGA use the step up program.

 

Wait, 1 more year up or down.

There is nothing really that demanding @1080p, unless you want every slider to the max..
MSAA and foliage is no1, then shadows, ao, postfx.. It was always like so, still is e.g. GTA5, DyingLight, Witcher3, TESV, Stalker1 custom grass, etc.

 

if AMD is ok with you, go for 290x as a temp card to wait for the release of Pascal possibly sometime next year. the 290x is dirt cheap considering the amount of value youre gonna get out of it, if you can get one under $300.