New Video Card Recommendations for Battlefield 3

pparks1 said:

Thanks folks, I will check those cards out. The lack of SLI to me doesn't matter 1 bit, I have 0 intention of doing it. Never considered it in the past, never bought a mobo that even supports it.

In that case, the GTX 560 DCII should do you just fine. Though I still highly recommend the MSI GTX 560 Twin Frozr.

Keiichi25 said:

So I would agree with Stormy and see about waiting what some of the benchmarks say for BF3 for the cards to see if it is worthwhile to jump to a new card or not.

I would have to believe that without question it would be worthwhile to go for a new card based on the fact that I'm currently using an Nvidia 9800GTX+ 512MB card. But waiting for release to see which Nvidia card is out and gets better results on this particular game is a good idea. And the longer I wait, the more the price comes down.

I recommend the 6870 Vapor-X or MSI HAWK edition 6870. Those are both very quiet.

I think i'm pretty set on going with Nvidia for my card as my video editing software makes use of CUDA and this will cut down my rendering times.

It might be worth considering not only the 560 but the the 570 as well. Depending on what budget you want to allow for the upgrade.

Poking around at Tiger Direct, it seems the main difference will be:

560: $189-$229
384 Cuda Cores, 1024MB VRAM, 256bit Bus

570: $315-$329
448 Cuda Cores, 1280MB VRAM, 320bit Bus
(this was for eVGA though)

For me, the decision was basically for gaming performance and Phys-X support,since Im a avid gamer. Encoding via Cuda was not important to me.

And while the extra gaming performance in and of itself may not be a major point for you, the extra CUDA cores may be of benefit for the GPU accelerated video encoding.
I'm not really sure how much difference there would be for encoding though between the two, as I just use CPU.

We all have different expectations and needs out of our hardware, and this may not even be worth it it to you.
But I thought this was worth throwing out there for consideration.


You may already know this, but TigerDirect sometimes has deals to pull in new customers.
Usually a $10 off coupon for a purchase of $100 or more, and sometimes free shipping.
Just sign up for it, and usually takes a couple days to get it via email.

When shopping around for the best price, this may useful.

I usually use NewEgg myself, but on occasion TD just has better prices.

Wishmaster,

Thanks for taking the time to offer some suggestions. That's exactly what I was looking for with this post. I would have rep'd you, but apparently I did you recently and cannot do it again.

Hi pparks,

Don't think the specs have been discussed in relation to this game yet so I thought I would add them here -

Minimum requirements for Battlefield 3

OS: Windows Vista or Windows 7
Processor: Core 2 Duo @ 2.0GHz
RAM: 2GB
Graphic card: DirectX 10 or 11 compatible Nvidia or AMD ATI card.
Graphics card memory: 512 MB
Hard drive: 15 GB for disc version or 10 GB for digital version


Recommended system requirements for Battlefield 3

OS: Windows 7 64-bit
Processor: Quad-core Intel or AMD CPU
RAM: 4GB
Graphics card: DirectX 11 Nvidia or AMD ATI card, GeForce GTX 460, Radeon Radeon HD 6850
Graphics card memory: 1 GB
Hard drive: 15 GB for disc version or 10 GB for digital version

Based on these I am really hoping my 560ti will cut it. Time will tell I guess as I am really looking forward to this game!

Cheers

Paul.

Why would your 560TI not cut it...it's at or above the recommended spec?