Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hi,
I've been offered a 6 month old GTX 770 for £250 and am thinking of upgrading but I just heard about nVidia's new holiday bundle coming at the end of the month so am thinking of going for new instead. With that in mind I am not sure if the 770 is the best card to go for.

At the moment I game on 3x 20inch widescreen monitors (Samsung) at 5340 x 1050 resolution (including bezel correction, big bezels...) and am happy with the monitors so imagine I wont upgrade for a while. I am currently using a GTX 660 (not Ti) and while fine for the majority of games (with AA off or low) I am starting to feel the card is being really stretched. I know the 770 is a much better card than what I have now but is the 780 worth the extra at this resolution or should I just go for the 770 as the price difference is huge and it'll be a stretch on my budget? I also saw the new AMD R9 cards which seem like good value with the 3GB vram which should help with triple monitor but i'm reluctant to switch from nVidia and i've heard a lot of bad things about display port adapters etc..

250 pounds for a 6-month used 770 sounds awful expensive, but then maybe prices in your area are really high? /shrug

As far 770 vs 780, the 780 can be 15-24% faster at the limit, which could make the difference between playable and not in some cases, but could also mean going from 18 to 22fps which doesn't really benefit you. At playable frame rates I think you'll find the performance difference smaller, but the 770 is definitely the better value per pound.

The AMD R9 280X will give you similar performance to a 770, while being a fair bit cheaper. Active displayport adapters have dropped in price significantly, but buying them erodes much of the price savings. The 770, iirc, has 2 DVI outputs, 1 displayport, and 1 hdmi.

For what it's worth, I'm running a 670 right now at 6032x1080 (5760 + bezels) and I'm able to play Borderlands 2, Mass Effect 3, Dark Souls, Bulletstorm, and Spec Ops with most everything set to high and FXAA. The 770 is a fair bit faster than a 670, and I'm pushing 900K more pixels, so I personally feel that you'll be well served by a 770, and the money you save compared to buying a 780 would let you buy an 870 or 970 a couple years down the road.

Yep, I did think it was a bit steep but it was an excuse to buy new hardware so I was kinda ignoring that fact. However it does confirm that it's probably a better option for me to buy new especially if I can get a good games bundle! It sounds like I'm best to stick to the 770, I had wondered if it was worth paying extra for the 4gb version but a quick check reveals that even on ultra wide resolutions the fps gains are negligible at most. Thanks for your reply

you don't gain more FPS with more VRAM. on the contrary, you prevent FPS drops!
If you have huge resolutions, use downsampling or use a lot of AA you need more VRAM.
Right now you can play on 5760x1080 with 2GB. But few years ago some people had 580 SLI with 1GB VRAM.... you won't find much of them nowadays!
More VRAM = Futureproof.

Well I ended up not buying the card but as luck would have it there was a price drop on new GTX 770's anyway so I picked up a Gainward 770 Phantom OC, with AC4, Splinter Sell and Arkham Origins for £250, bargain!! I am pleased with it too, huge improvement on heaven benchmark scores and about a 30% increase in fps over my 660 too! Most impressive to me now though is that my PC actually benches higher than my friends new uber expensive £2k custom water cooled i7 rig he has just built (i7 4770k, 16GB, gtx770 etc) so i'm a happy bunny indeed!