Is now a crazy time to upgrade video card?

I’m very tempted to upgrade, but it seems both AMD and Nvidia have new lines coming out this year. I have a Geforce 760 which has been mostly fine for the type of games I mostly play at 1080p and even 1440p, but I also have a shiny new 4k monitor arriving shortly and the 760 won’t have the guts to drive it at 4k. And a couple of new games, Witcher 3 and the Division, bring it to its knees even at more modest resolutions. So I would like to upgrade to a 970 or 980, but I fear regret in three months if new cards are twice as fast for the same price at that time? Or should I not expect performance versions of the new lines to come out til perhaps next year, in which case I’d just bite the bullet now?

Nobody really knows (who isn’t under NDA). It’s very possible that we see the Titan at $999 and nothing else until fall. It’s just as possible that they release the X70, X80, X80Ti, and Titan V all in the same round, or that they go bottom-up like the beginning of maxwell and release the X50 first. We just don’t know.

That said, I got the itch too, and I’m waiting. But I have a 770, which handles 1440p OK (but not great) and don’t have a 4k monitor coming.

Yeah, R9 280X here, itching to upgrade, but waiting, as 300 for a 970 is a bit much, knowing new cards are so close.

I, for one, hope the Canadian dollar reaches par again with the US one once our dreamboat PM has his way.

^ Yeah those “$300” 970s are unfortunately $450 Canadian pesos. I’m leaning towards just getting one now.

Unfortunately for you they only seem to upgrade their cards a month after I buy mine and I’m not in the market for one right now.
on the flip side, this should make it a safe time to buy a card.

Often new card generations do not move the performance per dollar metric for a few months (shortages etc), plus their upper-mid range card / 970 equivalent may come out after their high-price cards? Curious if anyone knows. But it could end up a longer wait than summertime for what you want at the price you want.

I am very tempted with these too. My 6950 is finally legacy status. With a new laptop I can play any game at the moment but I still prefer the desktop which won’t see an upgrade until sometime next y ear.

I’m in my “Mr Burns behind his desk, fingers folder, watching events unfold as planned” mode. Though I won’t be upgrading just a video card when I do it.

Ran a full upgrade late last year including a 970 to tide me over until the next generation rolls out. Was 50/50 on whether to do the 970 now or to wait but I don’t currently regret the decision (though there’s no way I would upgrade a video card at the moment, it was only worth it because I’ve gotten months of mileage out of it). Skylake i5, 16 gigs of RAM, SSD and all that fun stuff just waiting for me to slap an overpriced video card in there to round out the package.

Still not sure how overpriced I want to go just yet.

I got a 970 from Jet for about $250 last Fall. They still have a 15% off promo code for new customers I believe. No complaints here, but at this point waiting may be the wiser choice.

Yeah, I’d hold off until the 14nm cards hit if at all possible.

Ok, I’ve non-transitively cycled through “I should wait” to “I should get a 970 now” to “If I’m going to get a 970 I might as well just get a 980Ti now” to “I should wait.” I think I’ll see what’s announced in April, and if it doesn’t look the new line will be readily available this calendar year, I’ll suck it up and get a 980Ti.

I’ve tried running my 970 at 4K res on my 1080p monitor via DSR. Some older games do ok, but newer games generally don’t perform well at all. Not sure if that’s a 1:1 indicator of performance on an actual 4K monitor, but just based on my experience I wouldn’t recommend a 970 for gaming on it.

edit The Division was one of the games I tried BTW. It actually defaulted to 4K resolution, and I didn’t realize it right away. The frame rate was quite choppy, which had me concerned until I checked the graphics settings.

970 is definitely not beefy enough for 4k. 980 isn’t either-- you really need a 980ti, and even that can be marginal in some games.

Wow, looks like I’ve got quite some catching-up to do with graphic card technologies. Am currently on a GT 640 and was just thinking of upgrading to a hand-me-down 750 Ti that a friend is offering on the cheap. And that doesn’t even compare to the OP’s 760.

The 750ti handles 1080p somewhat worse than the 980ti handles 4k. Games will run generally OK in 1080p at low/medium detail and 30fps, of course depending on the game. It’s certainly many streets ahead of the 640!

If it makes you feel any better, I’m still rocking two GTX 460s in SLI. That I got for a total of $260 after rebate, in early 2011.
I’ve got a huge itch to upgrade but there’s nothing pushing me; I’d have to go to either 4K or VR to see a major difference, and then we’re talking close to a grand between a video card and a monitor/rift/whatever. Not feeling that.

Funny that this post was at the top of the forum, as I just popped in here to post the exact same question. I got an email alert today that the MSI GTX 960 Gaming 4G card I’d had wishlisted in my Newegg account has both a $25 price reduction and a $25 rebate card, making it $199, the cheapest I’ve seen it get to date. Sorely tempted…

…but then I also recognize that the combo of reduction and rebate may very well be a precursor to the release of the next gen cards that were supposed to be coming this year. I am on a strict budget, so there will be no $300+ Pascal or Greenland based scorcher for me, but that is fine as I don’t have the monitor to run those new cards at full potential anyway. I’m just looking for a $200 or less upgrade to my aging Radeon 7770 Ghz 1GB card that will allow me to play Witcher 3, Fallout 4 and other newer titles with decent quality settings.

In the meantime, I’ve got plenty of backlog games that look fine on my 7770, so if waiting another 120 days or so for current-gen cards to become last-gen cards might net me an upgrade from the GTX 960 4G I was considering to a GTX 970 4G for only a few bucks more (or reduce the cost of that GTX 960 4G another $50) then I can be patient.

Speculation is that Pascal will be official on April 5th with nVidia giving the keynote at the GPU tech conference.