I still have an AMD HD 6870, which is somewhat okay for Dolphin but with 2560x1440, 4xIR and 4xAA I’m not at constant 60 fps in Super Smash Bros. Melee. CPU is i5-2500k and current OS is Win7 x64 (will move on to 8.1 soon probably).
Do any of you have experience for 6870 vs GTX 960 or the new 950? 950 seems really attractive to me, with the affordable price, low power usage in multi-monitor idle (I’m running all my monitors except the primary 1440p Displayport one from my iGPU so that 6870 doesn’t draw 30+Watts in idle currently) and low-lag technique. Also, the NVENC is supposed to be really good by now, which is useful to me for streaming / recording with OBS (both from Dolphin and from console, though I guess I’ll have to reduce settings in Dolphin so, together with NVENC strain, my GPU isn’t limiting).
950 has somewhat lower shader count and Memory bus (256-bit vs 128-bit) than 6870, so I’m somewhat unsure whether it will be good at 1440p with 4xIR and 4xAA, which I suppose require quite much parallel calculations. But to be honest, I know pretty much nothing about which hardware features are important for proper Dolphin performance.
Would it be better for me to upgrade to GTX 950 or GTX 960? Or will their performance gain over 6870 be negligible (if so, I’d stay with my 6870 two more years)?
I won’t be playing any other games except in Dolphin, if that matters.
Also, I live in Europe, where GPUs are expensive. 950 is 160€ here, 960 is 210€.
Do any of you have experience for 6870 vs GTX 960 or the new 950? 950 seems really attractive to me, with the affordable price, low power usage in multi-monitor idle (I’m running all my monitors except the primary 1440p Displayport one from my iGPU so that 6870 doesn’t draw 30+Watts in idle currently) and low-lag technique. Also, the NVENC is supposed to be really good by now, which is useful to me for streaming / recording with OBS (both from Dolphin and from console, though I guess I’ll have to reduce settings in Dolphin so, together with NVENC strain, my GPU isn’t limiting).
950 has somewhat lower shader count and Memory bus (256-bit vs 128-bit) than 6870, so I’m somewhat unsure whether it will be good at 1440p with 4xIR and 4xAA, which I suppose require quite much parallel calculations. But to be honest, I know pretty much nothing about which hardware features are important for proper Dolphin performance.
Would it be better for me to upgrade to GTX 950 or GTX 960? Or will their performance gain over 6870 be negligible (if so, I’d stay with my 6870 two more years)?
I won’t be playing any other games except in Dolphin, if that matters.
Also, I live in Europe, where GPUs are expensive. 950 is 160€ here, 960 is 210€.
