With recent news about the new 1080/1070 Nvidia gpu's about to be released I found myself feeling that upgrade itch. You know the feeling. You begin to review and nitpick every performance issue your current rig has to justify making the jump to the latest and greatest. Currently running a 3570k and a 980. This is at 1080p on a single monitor which is my big screen. Yes I know it's overkill and in reality there is no reason to upgrade at all cause my machine smoke's everything I throw at it so far. Just wondering how other PC heads keep disciplined about not giving in to what essentially are useless performance upgrades.

1080p there is no good reason to upgrade yet unless you have 144hz monitor or something.

Im not disciplined at all and got a 4k 60hz tv with hdmi2.0 the other month and will probably get a 1080 if it can max games at that res. If not then ill be able to safely wait longer.

I stay disciplined by not having enough money to frivolously spend hundreds of dollars on a new graphics card when I'm not going to be able to take advantage of it.

...OK, smartassery aside, I was considering building a new rig not too long ago. Mine has an i5 3470, 8GB DDR3 RAM, and a 970 in it. After the 1080/1070 comes out, that's pretty much going to be mid-range. It's not an expense that's totally out of my grasp, but that's a ton of money to spend when my current computer isn't having any issues, hasn't for a long time (had to replace the HDD a few months ago), and still plays pretty much everything on high-ultra settings at my monitor's resolution of 1080p at 60+ FPS.

I'll build a new machine when this one breaks or when I'm playing everything at medium and barely reaching 60.

I do have a 1080p 144hz monitor, but the main advantage of that is that I don't have to turn VSYNC on for anything, which usually means games run a lot smoother.

Don't buy AMD. :(

Dunno. This thread makes me want to upgrade.

I could have set aside some cash for a 1070, but I bought a Surface 3 instead for school related reasons, so I can easily fight off the urge to upgrade when I have higher priorities.

Gsync? I haven't ever ran a game on anything higher than 60hz, but even when I get perfect 60fps with no drops the screen tears like crazy without vsync.

If gtx1080 can get 4k 60fps i just can't help but upgrade, i don't know where to sell my 980 though and I think I want to wait until the MSI models are released. I'd love to try and game at higher refresh rates but the tv i use should be able to get 1080p at 120hz but either the firmware wont' allow it, or my card won't output through hdmi. It does get 4k at 60hz though so my guess is it's firmware.

You have a 980 and want to upgrade? That's not how it works, lol. If you buy a enthusiast GPU, you should expect to use it for 4-5 years (or GPU generations).

Pascal/Polaris will likely fall by the wayside by time DX12 is the norm. Since by time DX12 is the norm, there will be 2-3 new GPU gens.

I do my PC gaming on a 3-4 year old laptop with an i5 of some description that runs at 2.5Ghz and a 630M...it has a nice matte 1080 screen and Blu-Ray and it might be my favourite object in the world...but...while I generally only use it for strategy games and a little bit of emulatin' here and there, of course it is now no longer able to properly run the latest and greatest games I want.

Namely, XCOM2, Stellaris and Total Warhamming.

So, I now need to decide my next play. I love having the laptop on my lap in front of the TV, idly playing something turn-based but a gaming laptop capable of running those new games lusciously is probably going to cost £900 at least. The alternative is a desktop, for the same budget I could get something far beefier, but the slight problem there is I don't have space for it.

I upgraded this year from a 470 to a 770.

#Ballin'OutaControl

TVs - not computer monitors, TVs - that say 120hz often don't actually have a refresh rate of 120hz. They sort of fake it by putting an extra frame in, which is fine for movies and TV and sports and stuff, but that plays havoc with PC games. Also, the 144hz monitor I have does have an HDMI port. When I plugged an HDMI cable into it and my PC, I couldn't get any more than 60hz, either. I had to use a DVI cable.

It's not a GSync monitor. I can still get screen tearing, but it rarely happens these days because of the high refresh rate. I used to use a slightly bigger 60hz TV as a monitor and without VSync on, games would tear so much that they were almost unplayable.

You should upgrade your screen, THEN you'll have a reason to upgrade your card.

...am I not helping?

@mr402: It is very easy. All you need to do is use the same computer for at least 5 years. That way, when it's truly time to get a new computer, you won't have to worry about spending money on useless performance upgrades. It's what I did and now I can't wait to get a shiny, new Nvidia 1080 this summer. Hope this helps!

Just wait a month for the Nvidia Pascal cards to get reviewed, then wait another month for the AMD Polaris cards to get reviewed, then wait another 3 months for the AMD Vega cards to get reviewed, etc.

You could continue like that for quite some time.

I just want to run Witcher 3 at 60 fps with everything up. My 970 can't seem to manage that :(