Best video card for AC

Okay so I've just spent $1000 updating my PC and not long before that my video card Gigabyte GTX960 OC 4GB. I'm thinking I should have gone higher on the card, would a better video card matter much on AC or is the 960 good enough. On Dirt Rally I have to turn a lot of stuff down and even on Forza I have to cut back a little.

Would AC look any better with everything turned up to Ultra, if so what card would you suggest.

 

Nvidia are about to release the 1070 and 1080 cards and the performance increase from these cards is quite impressive. Bang for buck will be the 1070 and if you order from nvidia.com you get the TitanX cooler which won't be available in retail stores or so it seems. The 1080 will be available on the 28th of May and the 1070 will be available on the 10th of June.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/05/nvidia-gtx-1080-1070-pascal-specs-pricing-revealed/
http://www.mobipicker.com/nvidia-gtx-1080-directx-12-benchmarks-async-compute/

According to Nvidia the GeForce GTX 1080 will be roughly 20% faster than the GTX 980 Ti and the GTX 1070 will be slightly faster than reference GTX 980 Ti cards

In the case of the GTX 1080, Nvidia claims it's twice as fast as the Titan X in certain VR applications and three times as energy efficient—it even says it's faster than dual-SLI 980 setup.
Nvidia claims the GTX 1080 will push around 9 TFLOPS of (likely single-precision floating point) performance from a chip built around 7.2 billion transistors. By comparison the Titan X pushes around 7 TFLOPS from its 8 billion transistors. The GTX 1070 is said to push 6.5 TFLOPS.

While that's not a huge increase over the Titan X, the more efficient Pascal architecture has allowed Nvidia to dramatically increase the clock speed of the GTX 1080 to 2144Mhz on air cooling. That's well over the 1075MHz speeds of the GTX Titan X and GTX 980 Ti, and—if Nvidia's real-time demo is to be believed—the card hits only 67 degrees under load, leaving plenty of headroom for overclocking.

 

I was looking at the GTX1080, wow, makes my 960 look ancient, only problem it will be over $1000 in Australia but I suppose you can't take it with you.

 

I can feel my wallet starting to open up already, don't you just hate PCs, it's a never ending climb to the top. Man that thing looks beautiful, it would look good in my case next to my giant cooler, I'm not sure if the CPU is still in there, but I definitely know the cooler is.

 

980 Ti can almost run AC maxed out on triple screen. I think my benchmark results were avg. 65 Fps when everything was maxed out. That would mean it still dips under 60 on some places.

Don't know what kind of display you're running but even the 980 Ti is overkill for anything other than triple screen or 4K gaming.

 

I'm just running a 1080p monitor, but looking at 4k screen in the future, I shouldn't have cheap skated on the 960, I like to be able to run everything at max or really close.
The 1080 looks relatively cheap for what is, and certainly pretty future proof. I also love playing Rally games and the new Dirt Rally destroys my 960.
I'll look at what sort of price I can get the 1080 for in the next couple of months and try to talk myself into it.

 

If you're looking into 4K the GTX 1080 could be very nice choice. Or.. ..I think if nVidia doesn't lie about Pascal performance, at soon there will be a lot of second hand Ti's on sale.. And Ti is still a m o n s t e r .

 

Even though I dont mind buying some stuff secondhand, i rarely buy secondhand PCs or parts unless its to build a PC to sell, though i think you're right there will be some good bargains to be had.

 

980Ti is currently the fastest card. You can also wait for the new cards, as the market settles by the end of July hopefully.

Otherwise, your 960 is more than enough for AC with medium to high settings. Specially if you don't have a fancy monitor, then no real need for more than 60fps. Just find a good compromise that allows you stay above that mark.

Btw, you should be able to play Dirt Rally on ultra settings too, just turn off Advanced blending and you will see.

Cheers!

 

Yeah in DiRT Rally there are some true fps killer settings giving unnatural looking results too. Advanced blending and shader quality just to name some. Especialy the latter one. Cannot believe how anyone would want to run that blurry mess when shader quality is set higher than low.

Lowering those two and dropping AA to 4X but keeping everything else on Ultra and Ti is rocking +100 Fps on triples!

 

I didnt really think a better card would make much difference to AC unless I switch to a 4k screen, but I was a bit annoyed when Dirt Rally went Version 1.1 and the way it slowed my machine down.
Thanks for the tip on Advanced blending, I'll give that a go.

 

Even though I've turned down a fair bit of stuff, Rally still looks pretty good on my machine, but naturally it would look better with higher settings, I'll try some of your suggestions.
I love Rally but Im not sure the amount of concentration is good for my brain or whats left of it.

 

Hey thanks a lot guys, wow, it really looks good now, I didn't know this card had it in it, turning off blender and reducing shading, certainly made a difference. Now it feels like when I actually drove through Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

 

Wow. You need to double-check your settings! O-0

There isn't Denmark nor Norway in DR.. Sorry, I had to..

 

I'ts just that same sort of country side up through the mountains, even like Canada. I live in Australia, its nearly winter and the temperature is still 30c during the day, don't get to see snow and those trees here.

 

I had a GTX 960 2GB not long ago, it was able to run AC in triple screen 1080p x3 and most of the time hit solid 60fps when hot-lapping solo. This is using a i3 4160 CPU. When running with multiple cars, the FPS was usually on the low 50's. This triggered me to upgrade to a GTX 970 and now I get 60fps with grids having less than 12 cars. On grids with 12+ cars, the i3-4160 struggles a bit sometimes dipping slightly below 60fps (this is due to the CPU but not because of the 970). All this is in 3 X 1080p, max details and PP off.

 

Yeah AC likes a pretty powerful CPU, thats why I got the 6700k, I can get over 120fps with 12 cars, but just run it at 60fps. I've just learnt how to get more out of Dirt Rally so I'm in no great hurry now, but if I see a good deal on the GTX1080 I would probably grab it, I wouldnt mind running some stuff in 4k.

 

I always compare videocard performances here: http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

 

@Theobris I have just upgraded to the same card you have (was a freebie) and I must admit, I have almost ultra on everything with AC. The only thing I did do was set Vertical Sync to Adaptive in the NV Control panel, but DIDN'T set this in game, and I get constant 60fps, full grid, no stutters, no tearing it's wonderful, and I came from a 750ti. You run the same monitor as me (I think, I run a 27" in full 1080p)

Unless you have money to burn, I cannot see anything wrong with the card you have. I am yet to test a few more games, but testing Sniper Elite III and was able to max that out as well.

Shaun