Upgrade GPU or CPU? and other questions

[Dakpilot]

I have a little budget for an upgrade....but having a hard time deciding where the money will be best spent (current specs in sig)

 

At the moment I am getting very reasonable performance with nothing really to complain about, however I use a 40'' Sharp quattron TV as my monitor so with graphics at lower settings some things are more noticeable and annoying, such as shimmering on trees and city ground textures at distance and blur against clouds.

I can turn up video settings and reduce these and get a great picture with 12xS [Combined: 2x2 SS + 4x OGMS (D3D only)] and Supersampling under Anti-aliasing transparency supersampling settings in Nvidia inspector, but these heavyweight settings are  just slightly too much for my GTX 770 2GB at native 1920 X 1080 res, and way too much if DSR X 2 is used (although it does give a Very pleasing graphic result which obviously I would like to use all the time  )

I am guessing that an upgrade to GTX980 4GB will be able to run these settings with ease and get playable FPS.

If I drop my resolution now, to 1600 x 900 Fps goes up across the board and even further if played at 1366 X 768 with not too much picture quality degradation which surprised me, indicating that some of my bottleneck is GPU because even at ultra with the aforesaid supersampling settings I can get decent fps at the ground over forest and zoomed with these lower resolutions

 

However I can get a new MB and CPU for the same price as the GTX980....and retain RAM etc.

 

My i5 3750k is overclocked to 4.42 Ghz stable and I am very happy with it, an uprgrade to Z97 and a i7 4970k gives a significant boost in single core performance (x4) which is where BoS needs the horsepower for AI FM and environment/unit compute functions.

Devil Canyon Haswell chips are the first ones where the i7 has a real performance increase over the i5 out of the box, even disregarding hyperthreading which is not used and I generally do not need. to confuse the issue more the i7 does not overclock well but is 4.4 Ghz stock so I could get an H97 board with i7 4790k or a Z97 board with i5 4690k (significantly cheaper cpu) and hope to O/C it to i7 performance...but not sure if that is possible.

 

So the quandary.. I was going to wait for Broadwell/skylake as the next logical CPU/MB upgrade from 3570k because it performs so well and Haswell series was not THAT much of an improvement until 4790k....and release of next gen intel architecture seems to be delayed.....will I get much more real world performance moving to Devils Canyon Haswell CPU?

 

Sorry for the rambling but maybe someone else has faced these similar thoughts

 

So to upgrade CPU for (possible?) overall  MIN FPS headroom improvements, or new GPU  for better eye candy at higher resolutions, perhaps a GTX970 o/c 3.5/4 GB is enough...?...   however there is a special on GTX980 right now that makes it very tempting  against a 970

 

Cheers Dakpilot

[VR-DriftaholiC]

I saw a bigger improvement going from my GTX670 to my GTX980 than I did going from my i5 2500k to my i7 4770k

[Dakpilot]

Thanks for info....looks like there maybe a 980 in the near future  and  maybe wait for broadwell or skylake next year

 

Cheers Dakpilot

[AvengerSeawolf]

 

 

So to upgrade CPU for (possible?) overall MIN FPS headroom improvements, or new GPU for better eye candy at higher resolutions, perhaps a GTX970 o/c 3.5/4 GB is enough...?... however there is a special on GTX980 right now that makes it very tempting against a 970

 

 

 My opinion is to upgrade the GPU Good CPU's can take it along with a 6GB ram you are OK , it then your GPU is  a good performer it will deliver all you need.

 I have a phenom X4 3.4ghz and can take it easily with my RadeonR7 260X 2GB only problem is my ram as it is 4GB and the mobo cannot stand more.That;s what my prformance monitor tells me , the only thing that at the moment loads ups ia the  RAM which I need more. But anyway even with my ram at 80% loaded I can run the game in high settings with  very smooth ( I have not measured) fps. I am happy camper.

 Upgrade your GPU but make sure the  Power unit can take it.