Bumping up texture quality has no noticable effect on framerate in 99% of games unless you hit your card's VRAM limits. The fallacy that you're not going to be using the extra VRAM on a card like this is baffling, frankly. Even if you keep every other setting the same, you'll be able to crank texture quality up on a 4GB card for an image quality boost at basically no performance hit, whereas doing the same on a 2GB card would introduce stuttering.

And that's even before considering some of the more awful PC ports which can barely run on a 2GB card at all, such as Arkham Knight and AC: Unity. Digital Foundry just posted a video on the updated Arkham Knight that shows it to be basically unplayable on a 2GB 285 (which the 380 is a rebrand of), but runs reasonably on the 4GB version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiHnM6mMbEc

Yes but to future proof you will want 4gb, games are starting to need more than 2gb e.g. GTA 5

Was £120 for a 380 2 weeks ago.

In before "Can't rewind time!"
Seriously, not a good price though. Better to wait for another £120 one to come around

​please stop talking as if you think you know you know your stuff when you clearly don't.

AMD CPU and an AMD GPU is ripe for CPU overhead problems in DX11.
I would stay clear combining them personally.

It's different with their GPU's because their performance is hampered by DX11 not just CPU's. They have more to give as we can see in the few DX12 games.

DX12 will give AMD CPU's a boost because there's less time in the driver thread and the CPU doesn't have to be stressed so much keeping the GPU fed. Saying that, IPC still matters. It's not the holy grail for AMD CPU's sadly

In most games, no. In something CPU heavy like a Civ game maybe to a degree, but these components look a pretty good fit.

In theory directx 12 should be helpful to AMD's CPUs which have worse performance per core but more cores than Intel.

Digital Foundry did a good article on this so you may get more bang for your buck soon with this CPU if new games can take start to utilise it better.

I'd say go for a 550 watt PSU or more, it's only a few extra quid and 430w is borderline. Never buy a no name one though as they can (I've experienced this myself) blow up if you push them too hard and they are never able to supply anywhere near the amount of power they claim on the box.

I would always say (if you haven't already) get a 120GB or more SSD as your boot/OS drive as though it won't help with frame rates it will save lots of time waiting for things to load.

This is my current build - http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/fLZjcf
I presume I'd need to upgrade some things like the PSU?
Would my CPU bottleneck performance if I upgraded the graphics to something better like a R9 380?

Many thanks for the reply.

I don't personally feel there's a lot of good value in the GFX card market at the moment. There were 290 and 290x cards under £200 before the Fury launch and things have gone up a lot since then.

Similarly performing cards to those are now going for 30%-50% more than they were a few months ago.

This other deal has a similar spec XFX card for £20 cheaper but I can't vouch for the cooler. Could be good could be not good. I would find a review on it before buying as I had two XFX 7850s and the coolers were a total joke. Worst cooler I've ever seen.

The Nvidia 970 is in a really good sweet spot for price vs performance but is a lot more money. AMD seems overpriced at the moment to me but I'm sitting on 2x7950s in crossfire waiting to get a decent single card replacement for not stupid money so...

I agree with some of the other sentiments here, 4GB is overkill on this card if you're not crossfiring a pair of them.

You can argue that you can bump the texture quality at 1080p fine, but you're going to want anti-aliasing at that resolution unless you like jaggies. At which point performance penalties increase beyond this card's ability to run 60fps at decent settings.

3GB maybe, but 2GB is probably too little and 4GB is such overkill that you may as well save some more £s and go up a bracket in performance.

Edit:
Also the title: 95% of people buying from Overclockers are not going to get the collection price. The delivered price should be in bold and then the collection price in brackets for the minority who can get it.

Oops, silly me. I counted what is literally a 4GB card as... a 4GB card. Please accept my apology for this oversight.

It literally has 4GB VRAM. (And the other 512MB
OK. I pick Shadow of Mordor.

"What is interesting to see is that the 4GB version utilized over 3GB memory here, the 2GB version obviously can only utilize 2GB. That has no effect on FPS or game rendering experience whatsoever though."

Your turn. (My money is on you choosing Unity, probably the second-worst PC release of the last three years!) :wink:

What am I missing? Seems to be listed for 149.99 today

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/xfx-radeon-r9-380-dd-dual-fan-4096mb-gddr5-pci-express-graphics-card-r9-380p-4df5-gx-228-xf.html

So take your pick from Wolfenstein, Far Cry 4, Assassin's Creed Unity or Shadow of Mordor!

GTA Online regularly maxes out the VRAM on my crossfire R9 270 2GB's.

If you can afford it get the 4gb version, unless you can only afford the 2gb version. Simple. No harm in having some extra VRam under the hood is there?

I have the MSI Twin-Frozr 4gb version of the 380 and it's a great card. It runs around 45-50 degrees when playing directx 11 games at factory overclock and the performance has been great so far. The only downside is that AMD is really slow to release drivers - months and months apart and even then they are lacking, unlike NVidia who release new drivers as soon as a game needs an updated version.

Other than that - Hot.

It could be argued that 2GB isn't enough in some situations where this card could also keep up.
The variables aren't absolutely linear and can deviate from the general correct statement that greater than 2GB serves no purpose.

No, I can't reference any games where that is true, but the situation is fluid.

For VR headsets you will likely require 4gb... for best performance. Oculus rift coming soon...

Apparently there is. You see, despite das5665 already having stating why they believe the card not to be future-proof, somebody says the card will be future-proof (without elaborating). das5665 is trying to share a perspective, sometimes repetition is desirable when it appears an important point has been missed.

Yes, we heard your opinion first time. No need to repeat it like a sledgehammer to the brain.

the r9 380 is a better card than a gtx 960, also have 2gb more ram, nowdays to be buying 2gb ram on a graphics card is stupid when you can get 4gb for the same price with better performance.

also this is a STRIX series so will run very quiet and coo.

The 970 does fine with 3.5GB effective VRAM.

Bumping up texture quality has no noticable effect on framerate in 99% of games unless you hit your card's VRAM limits. The fallacy that you're not going to be using the extra VRAM on a card like this is baffling, frankly. Even if you keep every other setting the same, you'll be able to crank texture quality up on a 4GB card for an image quality boost at basically no performance hit, whereas doing the same on a 2GB card would introduce stuttering.

And that's even before considering some of the more awful PC ports which can barely run on a 2GB card at all, such as Arkham Knight and AC: Unity. Digital Foundry just posted a video on the updated Arkham Knight that shows it to be basically unplayable on a 2GB 285 (which the 380 is a rebrand of), but runs reasonably on the 4GB version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiHnM6mMbEc

I picked up a 780ti Classified for about this price on eBay a week or so ago, is this better?

GCN 1.2 has improved VRAM efficiency a lot. I still think 2GB is a bit low now.

Games will start to require more VRAM in the future so i would get this to future proof
P.S. You probs wont get a £120 deal for quite a while

A few 1080p games need more than 2gb ram to run at max and it's only going to increase so worth buying the 4gb for that reason unless you don't mind running at lower settings

GTA doesn't require more than 2GB for high. It may for ultra but you wont be getting decent fps on a 380 with 1080p ultra

Yes but to future proof you will want 4gb, games are starting to need more than 2gb e.g. GTA 5

Fair enough about it being 2GB but you dont really need more than 2GB for 1080p on 99% of games. And for higher resolutions you wont use a 380.

And paying £60 more for a "Strix Edition" doesn't really justify itself. 2 or 3 degrees cooler isnt worth £60 more in my opinion

Thats 2gb edition... and its the lower end version of MSI Cooler...

Was £120 for a 380 2 weeks ago.

In before "Can't rewind time!"
Seriously, not a good price though. Better to wait for another £120 one to come around