Graphics card....?

Hertsman

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Mark
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Do they make any difference in photography use ? If not, then whats the best basic add on card for pc gaming, without setting everything on maxiumum ?
 
Depends on the software. Some features on some software uses it so it is hard to answer that.

As for gaming it all depends on budget, what resolution you use and how new or complex the games are.

I have a gtx 980 that are about £200 used and its very good at 1080p with new games but I still turn shadow detail off of a couple of other un-needed graphics card hogs
 
Depends on the software. Some features on some software uses it so it is hard to answer that.

As for gaming it all depends on budget, what resolution you use and how new or complex the games are.

I have a gtx 980 that are about £200 used and its very good at 1080p with new games but I still turn shadow detail off of a couple of other un-needed graphics card hogs

Not sure I understand tbh,,,,,,

I download via steam and "it" sets all that up "automatically".......

Budget is as small as possible before purely relying on onboard GFX.....
 
As above it depends on the software and what you are doing with it as some will make use of hardware acceleration.

As for gaming then again depends on your budget and what what res you are running it at. Also what other hardware you have in the PC, pointless getting a good GPU with a terrible CPU that will bottleneck some games etc.
 
Using LR cc for pp and current, soon to be binned pc is old i3 3.2/4gb ram...

Updated pc will be 16gb ram and i5 /6 core.....

Res will be autoset as I only play games for fun.......
 
Using LR cc for pp and current, soon to be binned pc is old i3 3.2/4gb ram...

Updated pc will be 16gb ram and i5 /6 core.....

Res will be autoset as I only play games for fun.......

Mmm ideally you want to use it at the native resolution of your monitor, and then if it can't handle it drop the settings down.

Maybe look at something like a GTX 1050 or 1060 unless your budget can stretch :)

However, it may be worth holding off a few weeks, rumour has it Nvidia will release their new 1180 (or whatever it will be called) and prices of previous cards may drop.
 
While lr and ps have gpu acceleration it's only for certain things. And providing you have a good cpu to start with it probably won't make that much difference anyway.

In fact most say lr performs better with gpu acceleration off.

As for gaming, that's another kettle of fish. What games and what quality do you want to run them with. Worth noting that most good gaming gpu will need a decent wattage power supply. What's your budget for gpu?
 
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While lr and ps have gpu acceleration it's only for certain things. And providing you have a good cpu to start with it probably won't make that much difference anyway.

In fact most say lr performs better with gpu acceleration off.

As for gaming, that's another kettle of fish. What games and what quality do you want to run them with. Worth noting that most good gaming gpu will need a decent wattage power supply. What's your budget for gpu?

The quality issue is one I dont really understand tbh. I use a Dell Ultrasharp monitor, and have played the Half Life series and a some COD etc without actually "setting" anyhting up, I just load the game and blow s*** up lol......

Budget wise...as little as possible I think.I know some people spend shedloads on twin cards and all that stuff, but I really dont see the need for it.

Current PC will not run some of the new stuff using onboard gfx so want to be able to play anything that I fancy from Steam...
 
The quality issue is one I dont really understand tbh. I use a Dell Ultrasharp monitor, and have played the Half Life series and a some COD etc without actually "setting" anyhting up, I just load the game and blow s*** up lol......

Budget wise...as little as possible I think.I know some people spend shedloads on twin cards and all that stuff, but I really dont see the need for it.

Current PC will not run some of the new stuff using onboard gfx so want to be able to play anything that I fancy from Steam...

Surely you know what resolution your monitor is, it's an important part of the purchase decision.

Really you need to say what your budget it, as little as possible will get you a used GPU for £20 which is no use. So is your budget £200, £300, £400 a £2000

Here's some choices:

GTX 1050Ti £179
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/msi-...ddr5-pci-express-graphics-card-gx-335-ms.html

GTX 1060 £289
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/evga...ddr5-pci-express-graphics-card-gx-30b-ea.html

GTX 1070 £480
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/msi-...ddr5-pci-express-graphics-card-gx-32a-ms.html

GTX 1070Ti £529

I'm guessing you do not want to pay more than that, so choose something above that is in your price bracket.
 
Resoltuin I believe is 1920x1200...

Sub £200 budget wise.

Loads on Amazon for £60-£100, what will a dearer card do that they wont ?
 
Resoltuin I believe is 1920x1200...

Sub £200 budget wise.

Loads on Amazon for £60-£100, what will a dearer card do that they wont ?

Go for the 1050Ti then....

It will run things better ie faster with more detail.
 
Got a 1050 (not a Ti) in my i5-2500k machine, fantastic card for the money, would’ve got a Ti version had they been in stock when I wanted one
 
Loads on Amazon for £60-£100, what will a dearer card do that they wont ?

No, rubbish for 1920 x 1200 resolution gaming.

They would be ok for 1280 x 720 resolution gaming.

The higher the resolution the better the graphics card needs to be.

Even a £200 1050 Ti will need to have setting toned down to play Assassins Creed origins smoothly at 1920 x 1200.

But you can change the resolution that a game in run at in the game settings.

Sometimes people will lower it deliberately because their PC is not capable to run games smoothly at the maximum resolution their monitor has.
 
How about something like a a GTX 970?
You can get them for around £120-130.
 
Im thinking a GTX1050 fro balance of budget/performance
 
As others have said, it entirely depends in what software you use and what you want to do. For straight photographic viewing and editing - no you don't need a fancy graphics card. The built in graphics (typically from Intel) that come as standard on most motherboards will do just fine. I would say for photography, your priorities should be 1) lots of memory and 2) a multi-core processor. Photographic editors use lots of memory! Photo are stored internally as uncompressed bitmaps and, with a modern DSLR producing something like 6000x2000 pixels at 16 bits per channel, that takes an awful lot of RAM and many operations may make one or more copies in memory whilst they are working. Also, quite a lot of operations - focus stacking and panorama stitching would be good examples - make very good use of parallel processing on multiple CPUs and the completion time will scale almost linearly with the number of CPUs, and even if you don't do this sort of stuff, editing you photos whilst listening to music or not seeing you current operation stutter when an email arrives will benefit from a multicore CPU.

Gaming is a different issue entirely and uses graphics in a completely different way - although again modern games generally benefit from lots of memory and multi-core CPUs. If you go for a GTX 1050 you will find that it is hardly used by photo editing and viewing applications (watch the core temperatures and fan speeds, for example, to see how heavily it is loaded).
 
@StuartUK -new pc will be i5 6 core with 16gb RAM plus whatever I end up with gfx card wise.......
 
Im thinking a GTX1050 fro balance of budget/performance

I've got the Ti version of the 1050 and it's a great card for the money and I've not felt the need to upgrade for quite some time now. It will run WoT at 4K on high settings nice and smooth, although my i7 3770k and lots of RAM may help with this also.

I had a 560Ti before it but it eventually started to struggle a little.

This is quite a good site for some rough guides not only for GPU but processors etc.

https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
 
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