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When it comes to gaming PCs — real ones, not repurposed college laptops forced to run Overwatch, badly — graphics cards are often the most expensive component in the box. The problem is, GPUs feel like a major investment, so you're often tempted to stick with old faithful as long as possible, extracting, it feels like, the maximum bang for your buck.
From a gaming experience perspective, though, this can be a mistake. Sure, that older card can technically run the latest games, but its performance decreases with every passing month. Graphics technology continues to advance at a brisk pace, and as months become years even a top-of-the-line pixel-pusher devolves into a min-spec water-treader.
So you start making compromises, lowering the texture detail here (not enough graphics RAM!) and forgoing SSAO there. But framerates continue to decay until you're lowering graphics settings to depths you never would've considered two years ago, just to try and maintain that magic 60 frames per second. And when your card's finally old enough, "try" is the key word, because nothing’s going to coax those 60 frames outta the GPU equivalent of grandparents (sit with that metaphor for a moment).
That all in mind, why not break the feast-or-famine cycle by upgrading to a midrange GPU? Opting for mid-market GPUs lets you run current and upcoming games with excellent performance (crank those textures!) without killing your wallet (hooray, food and shelter!).
A good example comes in Prey, the latest hybrid first-person shooter / immersive sim from Arkane Studios and Bethesda. Prey is an awesome, open-ended sci-fi adventure that lives up to its immersive-sim pedigree, including genre royalty like System Shock 2 and Deus Ex. Arkane did an amazing job, and fans of those older classics should absolutely give Prey a shot. (Just watch out for all the aliens that camouflage themselves as innocuous objects, leading to tense explorations and numerous jump-scares.)
Prey is quite a good-looking game, using its fancy-pants 2017 engine tech to render a very convincing, massive, fully explorable space station that compares favorably to the legendary locales of the Shock franchise. But how does it run on yesteryear's technology? For the sake of argument, say a Radeon R9 380 from 2015, a midrange 2015 card which a lot of folks still run today.
On a testbed R9 380 system Prey achieved an average of 68 fps at 1080p resolution and Very High presets. Good, but cutting it close. At the increasingly popular 1440p resolution performance decreased to an average of 39 fps, well below what many PC players — a demanding lot, to be sure — consider ideal, or even playable.
So the R9 380 doesn't afford much headroom for sprucing up Prey's impressive visuals. 1080p is the sweet spot, with higher pixel counts and refresh rates out of the question. Playable? Absolutely. But the R9 380's days of ultra-setting, no-fuss 60 fps seem to be nearing their end.
Exhibit B: Try running the game on one of today's midrange cards, like AMD's Radeon RX 580. These cards, which hit about a month ago, come in 4GB and 8GB varieties and average around $250, the very definition of midrange. (For performance enthusiasts, the 8GB seems the obvious choice.)
Installing the RX 580 in the same system as before, Prey performance shows marked increases at Very High settings in both resolutions. Maxed-out 1080p kicks out an average of 110 fps, opening the door to increased refresh rates, such as on a FreeSync-compatible monitor. 60 fps is undoubtedly nice, but there's much to be said for the increased fluidity and responsiveness of higher-refresh graphics.
If you prefer resolution over refresh — it's cool, many people do — the new RX 580 delivers again. At 1440p / Very High it averages 69 fps, handily staying over the 60 fps baseline while drawing 1.7 times the pixels as at 1080p. Details pop more and aliasing becomes less apparent, improving the visual experience that much more.
Folks who don't own a 1440p monitor can still use the RX 580's extra horsepower to downscale from 1440p to 1080p via AMD's Virtual Super Resolution feature, resulting in greatly decreased aliasing.
As Prey shows, two years of GPU advancements can make all the difference between an acceptable experience and an impressive one. For many, the improved experience and additional futureproofing will prove well worth the cost of upgrading.
While the R9 380, a midrange card from two years ago, can still deliver a solid Prey experience at 1080p, it's definitely reaching its limits, and as new games continue to debut it will start losing the ability to hit that magic 60 fps. Meanwhile, today's midrange RX 580 runs Prey approaching twice as fast, with room to pop up to 1440p or indulge in enhanced refresh rates at 1080p.
That's a nice choice to have! And compared to ultra-expensive flagship GPUs, it's not so painful to replace a two- or three-year-old midrange card that didn't cost your past self an arm and a leg.
So that's the case for upgrading a two-year-old GPU. Sure, oldie-but-goodie still does the job in many cases, but even if the end of its useful life isn't imminent, it's certainly on the horizon. When surprisingly fast yet reasonably priced cards like the RX 580 are providing much better experiences, maybe it's time to think about makin' that upgrade.
Click here to read more about the RX 580.
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