Video Cards that work on Sota for $120 or less. Plz help!

Ya, everyone is shafted by cryptocurrency miners right now. I actually had to buy my son a gaming laptop to take to college instead of a PC because I could get a GTX1070 with 8 gig of GDDR5 cheap versus the PC card that was practically half to price of the whole laptop.

My general opinion is that you should have at least a gtx1060 to play this game. They seem to be around the $250 on newegg, I know thats more then you wanted to spend but in the end, dont go cheap on your video card of you are not going to have a great gaming experience.

 

Woot is having a Woot off today and is slated to have a 1050 Ti on sale for $119. Problem is, it's unknown when it will actually go on sale.

Link below:

Spoiler

https://www.woot.com/category/sellout

I'm not endorsing the site, but if you're fast and vigilant you might get one. They're likely to sell out in seconds as happens with woot offs.

 

So, here's the real answer. Wait and save up to avoid having to either buy something that'll barely work, or something used that can be extremely risky. Bide your time and do it right, otherwise you're going to end up making potentially good short term decisions, and very poor long term ones that are going to make you more unhappy about the situation than you are now.

 

I’m glad to see I’m not the only one @TheBalance.

Sure. You could buy a cheaper card that barely runs it and one day it also won’t be enough. The crapper the card is compared to today the sooner that will happen. It’s better to wait. Get the one you want. Because you know full well in computing that at some point you need to throw it away and get a new one but you can’t recoup that cost.

When’s the next likely holiday for sales? Maybe save till then and see what you can get. After all if you spend 120 now you get a poor card. If you can spend 180 next month you get a better card but if you can save say 60 a month and they do like July 4th sales or something then you got 200+ to spend on a card that’s now like 20% off.

 

I obviously disagree with some people.
It is a good idea to buy a card that is close to the minimum specs with $120 now and if you are unhappy with it in a long run, then you can always buy a new one 1 or 2 years later.

 

Plus he wants to play the game and does not want to wait for months. With the card he has now he cannot stay in game. So thank you for honest opinions everyone. I know he appreciates the advice being given here.

 

Just thought I'd mention that Amazon has a 1050Ti in its gold box daily deal for $180 right now.

 

Also on Amazon for only 149.00 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M64G435/ref=psdc_284822_t1_B01MF7EQJZ

 

Yup, crypto has driven the market through the roof for demand and pricing on GPUs. Theirs a very good reason why NVIDIA stock in 2016 was trading roughly around $28.5 a share is now at around $222.5 a share. For any fellow traders out there I would definitely add NVDA to your watchlist. High market indication for a potential Put sale before they report.

Having said all that the prices are insane. This is the graphics card I got for my rig in 2016 for $250 and it's now between $500-$600. It has really gotten to the point where you are better off saving up to buy a gaming desktop/laptop that already has a high end GPU included. https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-lis...0?ie=UTF8&condition=all&qid=1524760554&sr=8-2

 

You're not taking into account the multitude of factors that go into this kind of purchase. Being able to play the game at a minimum is far from the only consideration here. I'm assuming this person isn't the savviest tech shopper, so instructing them to wait for various sites to have sales, where to check, etc. won't be much help because by the time they find the sale, it's likely going to be too late before they can bounce the sale off someone else and see if its worth taking advantage of.

Cryptomining has destroyed the supply of any graphics card worth having.

Can we get specs for this person's computer? The GPU is important, but a newer one might not help at all if the supporting hardware cannot utilize it, or if something else is actually the bottleneck. I'd be willing to wager if the GPU is this old, and the user not tech savvy enough to find this stuff out on their own, that a new GPU might not even help.

There are MANY ways to solve this problem, what most of us advocating patience are trying to get across is that settling for less is dumb and you're going to be in this spot again very soon with even less money. OR you buy used, which is a literal gamble that could leave you with a card that performs worse, not at all, or damages everything else in your rig and leaves you with a repair bill on an even-tighter budget. Getting into a video game can't be the driving force behind this decision - people in this situation need to wait and make the right move. There are many free, less taxing video games to enjoy for a few weeks while you make a decision that'll yield months or years of enjoyment with minimal risk in the investment.

 

Hello everyone. I have news about our player who was asking for help. He said he got a good deal on a card. So here is in his own words. See below:

"Alitar said: Hi, Got a sweet deal on a Sapphire R9 280x Vapor......so it exceeds the specification ofthe game...cost me $150 plus shipping and handling but I will just feel a bit of a pinch this month....worth it methinks....."

So *crosses fingers* this card will work in the game.

 

Depends on the PSU.

 

Hi folks, no longer a "Visitor" as I can play! I ended up buying a used Diamond AMD R9 280x GC for $150 plus shipping...gota steal and it works great! I wanted to thankall of you for your kindness and suggestions on what I should consider as my card. This is a great community and I'm proud to join you guys in forming a world!

 

When I looks for graphic cards i tends to check tom's hardwares gpu hierarchy
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html
go from the top check prizes until I find one I can afford.

 

Graphics cards depend on what resolution you are trying to push.

A Radeon RX550 is perfectly fine for basic gaming if you are only running 720p or 900p resolution. I would highly recommend getting the 4GB model.
The RX560 would be preferable, but it is a tad more expensive.

For nVidia cards the GTX950 or GTX1050 is similarly a good choice for a low end card. I would not recommend a GTX1030 like some other people mentioned. at minimum a GTX1040 would be needed.
Similarly, the GTX750 is way too old, and is surprisingly a power hog for the amount of processing power it has.

I don't know why so many people don't like the AMD cards. They are perfectly good.

Yes, nVidia currently has the highest performance desktop cards on the market. However, their low end cards are no better than AMD's, possibly worse per a price. Additionally, nVidia is one of the most dishonest and monopolistic companies short of Microsoft, and I understand anyone not wanting to go near them.

If you need to know why some people don't like nVidia, Just remember how only a few months ago nVidia went from claiming the RTX Ray Tracing was a HARDWARE feature exclusively in their RTX line cards, only to just a month later go and support the feature in the higher end GTX cards. It was vendor lock, pure and simple. It's still vendor lock, as other developers have found how to do the same thing on pure Vulkan without any hardware specific routines.

SoTA relies far more on memory bandwidth and texture transfer speeds. It also relies on a large number of graphics assets. This means if given the choice you want the models with higher video memory bus width and larger video memory over faster GPU core clocks.

As a note, I tend to go by the Passmark GPU benchmarks. They are incredibly comprehensive.

 

Well for some time AMD was not compatible with Unity could be the reason some like to avoid them or at least some of their cards since I am not sure exactly if it was all AMD cards. I personally never would go AMD but that's just me.

 

Curious, why is crypto currency driving up the prices of graphics cards? I'm a crypto currency newb.

 

Nvidia 950 gtx runs shroud very well on max settings but i think its still over 200$

 

Bingo! This is why I will never go amd. Incompatibility. Nvidia is always supported.

My nvidia gtx 1050Ti runs Sota great.

 

I guess the reason I never ran into it is the issue never affected Linux users as they used a different driver. I remember the old FGLRX driver had some serious issues with Unity. However, the FGLRX driver was broken in almost every app except a short list of professional rendering applications that it was originally designed for.

The issue affected cards from the ATI to AMD transition era when using older drivers. These were the same buggy generation of drives that somehow ran faster and D3D9 than on D3D10 and OpenGL. People still think AMD cards run faster on D3D for this reason, when this hasn't been the case for years.

AMD has since re-written their entire driver codebase for all HD-3000 and later cards. The Linux Mesa codebase for the AMD cards was also rewritten after AMD provided documentation and assistance.