High end Graphics card

Hardware and technical stuff
1

The recent possibility of buying a 1440p monitor for very cheap has opened the really high end gaming road for me.

So I was wondering what sort of video card would be necessary to power such ungodly resolution. Help a budgety gamer.

Sifting through my games I note that I’ll keep playing my most demanding games, Arkham City and Witcher 2 on the TV at 1080p, so those aren’t the problem here.

Games that will be affected are New Vegas and the Stalker games fully modded, Civ V, and Deux Ex:HR. These are off the top of my head.

I’m rocking a GTX 460 right now, by the way.

2

My part-time enthusiast’s understanding is that at higher resolutions, video RAM can become the biggest limiting factor, especially as you start cranking up the OMGFXAAs and suchforth. People don’t generally recommend trying 1080p on anything less than 1GB v-ram; I’d imagine than ?x1440 is pushing you into the 1.5GB stage for newer stuff.

Total off-the-cuff, unresearched opinion, though.

3

A new GTX680 should easily handle that resolution.

4

Good luck finding GTX 680s at anything approaching a reasonable price. Also, AMD just dropped the prices on Radeon HD 7950s and 7970s, so you might also check those out.

5

If you sign up w/ Newegg’s auto-notify, and can act fast once you get the email, you can get a 680 for the $499 advertised price. I got an EVGA GTX 680 last week.

6

Newegg doesn’t ship abroad, unfortunately.

In any case I’m thinking a 680 is a bit overkill, for now.

Edit: I’m also thinking that at 1440p AA would be rather pointless.

7

It’s pixel density that would control your perception of aliasing rather than raw resolution, isn’t it?

8

That’s true, I think, but I’d imagine pixel density increases a fair bit when moving to a 1440p screen even if it is 27".

9

Have to admit I’ve never heard of 1440p - what’s the horizontal pixel count?

10

If it’s 16:9 I’d guess about 2800. That comes to a pixel density of 116, compared to 102 for 22/1080p.

11

2560 x 1440

12

I’ve checked and the pixel count is 109. Not that much of a difference.

13

Ah - we’ve caught up with 17" CRTs!

14

There were 16 x 9 17" CRTs?

15

I don’t know, but I think my Iiyama Vision Master managed 2560 x something in 95… Could be wrong of course, it was a long time ago :)

16

While I was being a tad snarky, I did have a 24-inch Sony GDM-FW900 CRT, and the best it could do was 2304 x 1440, so I’d be a little surprised if a 17-inch CRT could get that high. VGA bandwidth would be a limiting factor, if nothing else.

17

I’m probably misremembering, but that’s what I misremember. Driven off a Matrox Millennium 2D card…

18

Actually, with the 400Mhz RAMDAC’s in modern graphics cards and a good quality VGA cable, you can do 2048×1536 at 85Hz. Bandwidth issues are far more of a concern with digital connections. (You can get cards with faster RAMDAC’s as well, although that’s a little specialist…and you can’t combine them as you can digital connections)

19

Have you seen the post of the guy making a surround setup with 3 of these? It’s really impressive. Vega's Heavyweight display and computer; edition 2012 | [H]ard|Forum

Here’s a youtube linky where he removed the case & bezels and added freznel lens. Incredible.

20

17" CRTs could do 1600x1200.