An nvidia GTX970 is a good workhorse. You can spend almost as much or as little as you like on GPUs but that's a good baseline to work from.(Not too weak and not too expensive, meets the min spec for VR, runs things well ~1080p)
As an owner of a phenom II black I don't 100% agree.. Some games run absolutely fine on the old AMD quads. I don't use it it my main PC (built my daughter one from trimmings) but a game like Gears, or Resident Evil, etc etc might well work... It's stuff like GTA and The Witcher 3 with open worlds/lots of multithreaded stuff that suffer most from an old CPU.
TBF we're both being over cautious and now is a perfectly fine time to get either, as both will always have new stuff on the horizon. Eg: AMD's Zen CPUs are coming later this year. Depends what price range he's into spending. At least with a new GPU it's just a single component whereas a new CPU (in his case) demands almost everything switched out.
Not really. They'll work fine. As previously stated he doesn't need "the best." And GPU provider fanboys will argue both directions anyway. It's inevitable.
Yes, they do. So far highest ratio of compute-graphics on DX12 games is 20:80. And There will be titles where everything might be procedurally generated(including textures, objects, etc), so it will have 80:20. What will happen then, when Nvidia GPUs are not able to switch context between graphics and Compute?Not really. They'll work fine. As previously stated he doesn't need "the best." And GPU provider fanboys will argue both directions anyway. It's inevitable.
And yes, we were talking about DX12. Similar situation is with rest of DX12 games, and new DX11 games, like Killer Instinct.
LOL. Yes, 340$ GPU beats 190$ GPU. By 6%. Both GPUs use similar amount of power. R9 380X is the same die that is in R9 380, but R9 380 is cut down. It is the same chip that is in R9 M395 and M395X from iMac.
