I use an i5 7600 and a 1050 Ti. The i5 is enough for even the most demanding Wii games. The Last Story runs perfectly on it and my 1050 Ti is the real bottleneck as far as game speed is concerned. Even in Lazulis City, the most demanding area of the game CPU-wise, I can get 40 to 50 FPS with the framelimiter turned off (full speed is 30 FPS). The days when you needed a 4.3 Ghz overclock to run demanding games at full speed are long gone.
The 1050 Ti isn't as good as I'd hoped it would be. 3x internal resolution and 8x MSAA are no problem for it, but it really struggles with even 2x SSAA on The Last Story and Xenoblade Chronicles.
I would recommend an i5 7500 (no need for expensive RAM like Ryzen) with an RX 570 for high quality anti-aliasing. Nvidia GPUs aren't a good choice anymore since they struggle with Ubershaders on anything but the Direct3D backend.
*Thank you* - this is what's been lurking in the back of my mind - it might be worth going for something a bit more powerful than a 1050ti just to have complete confidence that I'll always have headroom in every circumstance. Nvidia GPUs aren't the best choice at the moment? I'm looking for something that would allow me to use a reasonable amount of SSAA (if used with the i5-7600). Would a 1060 not be a good choice? If not, what other option would you suggest?
Hey recently pushed a fix for the Nvidia cards with ubershaders on other backends. Haven't tested it myself but it seems to have performance increases.
The global shader locks still exist on nvidia and GL/Vulkan.
Is that likely to get sorted at some point soon?
that's up to nvidia.
Direct3D works fine without locking.
Ahh - Apologies for my ignorance but what are the alternatives to Direct3D and why would they be better? I've noticed that the guys here recommend a GTX1050/ti in general - so is it really a handicap only being able to use Direct3D?
The 1050/1050 Ti recommendations were from before Ubershaders were introduced. Because of Nvidia's driver issues with Ubershaders, you can only use Direct3D with a GTX 1060, while AMD's RX 570 will be able to use both Direct3D and Vulkan. Being able to use more than one backend is good because sometimes they'll be bugs in a game with Direct3D that won't be there in Vulkan, or bugs in Vulkan that aren't there in Direct3D.
Direct3D is missing some features like GPU Texture Decoding, which reduces CPU load, and Post Processing Effects, which are mostly just gimmicks like making the screen pixelated or swapping the colours. Vulkan also has a multithreaded GPU option which should offer a speedup on quad core CPUs. Other than that there's nothing wrong with Direct3D, it's just good to have the choice of Vulkan since it performs better.
This is great, thanks a lot for the info - so could you suggest the ideal non-Nvidia GPU that can use both Vulkan and Direct3D that would give *plenty* of overhead while using a nice amount of SSAA and using Hybrid Ubershaders? I want to run demanding games like the Galaxys and Skyward Sword.
EDIT: After some research I'm guessing an RX580 might be the one & should provide a bit of headroom?
Yes, an RX 580 would be as much power as you'd ever need. I'd recommend the XFX GTR or MSI Gaming X models for proper cooling.