New GPU for WoW only, 1080P

[Sorshen]

For 1080p WoW only, a 1070 is throwing money in the trash.

[Laqweeta]

For 1080p WoW only, a 1070 is throwing money in the trash.

A 1050TI could run WoW no problem, but with his current setup, like it needs a 1070 :/

[Sorshen]

No, he doesn't.

[Laqweeta]

No, he doesn't.

Alright, have fun letting him bottleneck his setup with a 1050TI. I tried. :>
EDIT: I just want to say that I know he wants this for WoW only.... It's highly likely he'll play other games in the future, so why not future proof your computer?

[chase_the_mofo]

Cheapest rx 470 with 3 year warranty.
I have asus rx 470 4gb and its peeing on wow ultra with np.

[DarkBlade6]

Think twice about that:
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/...X_1060/23.html

WoW has quite an affinity for nvidia graphics chips for some reason, the 3gb 1060 is what i recommend.

No it's not for a random reason it's simply because Nvidia's driver have far less CPU overhead than AMD's drivers and since WoW is mostly CPU bound it make a huge difference (I'm not talking about your FPS when you do world quests and what not, im talking about H/M Raid, Word Boss and City). If you only play WoW (or Blizzard games in general) go with Nvidia and don't look back, buy the best card you can buy and call it a day. If you buy an overkill GPU , you can turn on SSAA 4X and it will make the game look alot better.

[Nellah]

There is something to be said for a big monster of a GPU that can run SSAA at reasonable framerates. At 1440p, my 290 just can't. I'll test it and the RX 480 at 1080p, but I suspect they won't be able to either; SSAA looks beautiful, but it is an absolute resource hog as with 200% render resolution at 1080p you're effectively running at 4K and then applying a light post-processing layer to scale it down.

As WoW is a DirectX 11 game, it won't be able to take advantage of AMD's current lead in the DX12 pipeline unless they update their game's render pipeline yet again, but I wouldn't count on that for years if at all. It would benefit the game greatly, though, as draw calls are one of the limiting factor in raids with a crapload of spell effects going off.

Price is a factor though, as the GTX 1070 costs twice as much as a 4GB 480. What is your budget for this upgrade?

(EDIT: I'm sorely tempted to just grab a 3GB 1060, the purported competitor to the 4GB RX 480s I have, and run more recent tests. AMD's drivers have been updated heavily since the linked THG article in July, with incremental performance gains each release, and nobody seems to track recent driver performance compared to old.)

[entropism]

Budget is as cheap as possible. I can get a 4GB 480 for about $180 (MSI Gamer X), the 470 doesn't make sense because it's like a $10 difference. The 1060 is about 200 for the 3gb 250 for the 6gb. The $180 for the 480 is a lot easier to swallow right now than the $250.

[Laqweeta]

Budget is as cheap as possible. I can get a 4GB 480 for about $180 (MSI Gamer X), the 470 doesn't make sense because it's like a $10 difference. The 1060 is about 200 for the 3gb 250 for the 6gb. The $180 for the 480 is a lot easier to swallow right now than the $250.

Take it far down your throat and buy the 1060, please.

Infracted Mythbredor

[entropism]

Take it far down your throat and buy the 1060, please.

You had a lonely childhood, didn't you?

[DarkBlade6]

There is something to be said for a big monster of a GPU that can run SSAA at reasonable framerates. At 1440p, my 290 just can't. I'll test it and the RX 480 at 1080p, but I suspect they won't be able to either; SSAA looks beautiful, but it is an absolute resource hog as with 200% render resolution at 1080p you're effectively running at 4K and then applying a light post-processing layer to scale it down.

As WoW is a DirectX 11 game, it won't be able to take advantage of AMD's current lead in the DX12 pipeline unless they update their game's render pipeline yet again, but I wouldn't count on that for years if at all. It would benefit the game greatly, though, as draw calls are one of the limiting factor in raids with a crapload of spell effects going off.

Price is a factor though, as the GTX 1070 costs twice as much as a 4GB 480. What is your budget for this upgrade?

(EDIT: I'm sorely tempted to just grab a 3GB 1060, the purported competitor to the 4GB RX 480s I have, and run more recent tests. AMD's drivers have been updated heavily since the linked THG article in July, with incremental performance gains each release, and nobody seems to track recent driver performance compared to old.)

If you have a 1440p monitor you can run the game at 150% render scale instead of 200%. It will render each frame at about 8 mega pixel (or 4K) and then scale it down to 1440p, it will look pretty much the same as 1080p @ 200% scaling.

[Lathais]

Fair enough, but the question is where those frame rates are taken from. Is that 80FPS in an enpty starting area (most likely) or is that in a raid? Because honestly, all I do is raiding these days.

Likely not getting 80 FPS in a raid, because in raids, the CPU usually holds you back and even the most powerful of systems with SLI GTX 1080s can slow to sub-60 FPS depending on settings. I am pretty confident that the 1050 will get you near-60 FPS pretty much all the time though. Any time you are limited by CPU you will drop, but the 1050 is perfectly capable of handling WoW.

[Nellah]

Informal tests
GPUs:
Sapphire R9 290 4GB 1000/1300
Powercolor RX 480 4GB 1212/1750
Powercolor RX 460 1266/1750
Drivers: 17.2.1

Testbed:
i5-4670K @ 4200MHz
16GB DDR3-1866
Samsung 840 EVO 750GB SATA SSD
ASUS MG279Q 144Hz (all tests were run in 1920x1080 Windowed mode)

Dal flight path, standing on rock looking at cracked pillar, head touching first dark band, no more than two characters on screen at once, FRAPS algorithm smoothed framerate read:
1920x1080 Detail:	2	8	8	8	10	10	10	10
Draw Distance:		2	8	8	8	8	8	10	10
Antialiasing:		0	0	4xMSAA	4xSSAA	0	4xMSAA	4xMSAA	4xSSAA
FPS:
R9 290 4GB 1000/1300	280	84	82	42	84	83	57	36
RX 480 4GB 1266/1750	312	84	83	45	74	70	54	39
RX 460 2GB 1212/1750	330	55	50	19	50	45	40	17

Xavius Raid Finder 1920x1080 Detail 10 MSAA 4x (Fully zoomed out, maxed camera distance) Recording started as boss pulled raid into combat, ended when boss at 1%
FPS:			Avg	Min	Max
R9 290 4GB 1000/1300	69.17	53	148
RX 480 4GB 1266/1750	76.533	55	124
RX 460 2GB 1212/1750	63.806	46	95

Look at these scores as +/- 5%, as WoW is very difficult to perform repeatable tests with. I don't know why the Detail 2 scores are in the order they are, seems they should be opposite, but I repeated my tests to be certain.

Subjectively though the RX 460 posted average framerates near the other two GPUs the minimum framerate was easily felt. Judging by how antialiasing dropped performance pretty bad in the open-world tests, the RX 460 and its competitors will do just fine at about Detail 8 with no antialiasing in open world play, perhaps Detail 10 with draw distance dropped and/or shadows turned down.

The R9 290 and RX 480 were not affected much by multisampling AA and posted very similar framerates in raids. Though the RX 480's average was higher, a lot of variance is to be expected as each fight had different raid compositions. The cards felt similar and not at all taxed by the raid. The former card handles maximum details better - likely thanks to its 512-bit memory bus - so the RX 480 8GB will probably post higher framerates as well as maximum details seem to be more memory bandwidth limited.

Each fight was performed on a ranged DPS character standing at about 2/3 max range, trying to keep centered on the boss with as many players visible as possible. Noteworthy is the fact that when I performed the test on a rogue, average framerate for the RX 480 dropped to almost exactly 60fps while the minimum was a disappointing 42FPS; meleeing the boss will be rougher on the cards, I imagine because spell effects are closer and more detailed.

Also of note is the fact that this is my UI: http://i.imgur.com/H5OiHFA.jpg (some elements are misplaced due to running lower than my usual resolution.) It is not clean and it is not CPU friendly, having hardly been modified outside of mod updates since WotLK. With a cleaner UI and dropping antialiasing to 2x or disabled, the RX 480 and R9 290 should average well above 60FPS in raids even with a close-combat character. The minimum framerate - and FRAPS seems to take the 99th percentile here, because there were momentary spikes into the 40s for the 290 and 480 - is very satisfactory for a 25-man raid, though again, the framerates were noticeably lower when I tried with my rogue. Further testing will need to be performed to determine whether this is CPU or GPU related, though I suspect the latter.

I wish I had a contemporary NVIDIA card to test; alas, the most powerful card I have access to is a 750 Ti, which I'm sure would get pooped on by every GPU I tested.

[entropism]

Nellah, you're awesome, thank you. When you raided on your rogue, how much of a difference did you see? My main is a rogue, with my alts a warlock & balance druid, soon to be either a DK or ret pally. I'll only raid on two of them at most, and it'll probably be the rogue & the boomkin. I do, however, raid at max view distance on a permanent basis. I just like to view the whole battle.

Witht hat being said, a 1050 Ti doesn't look TOO bad, but the 480 is about $20 more. At that point, I might as well go 480.

[Nellah]

I only tried one fight on the rogue, and it definitely felt a bit choppier. I'll do a run tomorrow morning with details lowered to see if it was a CPU or GPU issue though.

Given the current prices of the 1050 Ti and RX 480, and given the performance expectation of the 1050 Ti with consideration to the RX 460 I tested, the RX 480 is definitely the better buy even if it's only the 4GB model.

However, the GTX 1060 (based on Newegg's pricing, counting rebates) is only $40 more than the RX 480. I don't have a 1060 to test with, but based on Tom's Hardware's review of the 1050 Ti (seeing how close it comes to the 470 in WoW, and how much faster the 1060 is compared to the 1050 Ti), I'll update my prior recommendation: the 1060 will probably be the better buy for WoW and WoW alone. When running my tests, GPU-Z recorded VRAM usage of about 2.5GB, so the 3GB 1060 should be okay for now... though there is a chance that if WoW is updated and starts to use a lot more VRAM the RX 480 will pull ahead again based on VRAM alone.

If you play ANY other games besides WoW, the RX 480 is a contender and IMO the better buy. If ALL you are EVER going to play with this PC is WoW, the 1060 3/6GB will suit you well.

[entropism]

So I have the option of getting an MSI Gamer X 1060, 3GB version. Open box with full warranty/Store return for $175. Think this might be the way I'm leaning.

[Fascinate]

MSI gamer is the best version of the 1060, under load it stays under 70c and around 28db (which is almost silent).

[entropism]

Yep, that's why I'm pretty much aiming for either the MSI Gamer or Armor, no matter which GPU I buy. Silence is VERY high on my priority list, and I'm willing to pay extra for it if need be.