I am looking at presenting my project to other client and although my development machine is quite high end, I would like to know what other developers would recommend to use for a graphics card, perhaps if mid-range and high end option would be useful.
If you’re buying RAM for a desktop today, there’s no reason to not get 16 GB.
If you’re buying value-for-money, a GTX 970 has more value-for-money than a GTX 980 IMO.
Or, put another way: a 16 GB RAM, GTX 970 based machine will likely cost less and deliver most if not all of the value of a GTX 980 machine with 8 GB RAM.
It’s possible you’ll be CPU limited anyway with those cards, so why pay $200 extra?
Get 16 GB ram and an SSD.
Get a GTX 970 if you want good value or a GTX 980 if you got money to spare.
If you got even more money to spare, get an i7-4790K processor for faster compiling and baking (default it i5-4690K).
Yes it is, any of the above options would make a great gaming system as well. The editor can require more performance than the actual game, so a system with the mentioned parts would work quite well, and you won’t need to upgrade it for a while.
A titan isn’t good for developing games nor playing them. A 780 ti has better game performance than the titan. The titan is a calculation card, it’s not made for gaming, but for science.
Titan’s a gaming card, it’s just that they’ve produced better graphics cards since then. Quadros aren’t for gaming, but the Titan isn’t like the Quadros. The gaming cards can actually be faster with GPU rendering, the benefit of the Titan is that you get 6GB of memory, which is important since the entire scene has to be loaded to the card to be able to render. But it’d still be faster than trying to do the same with a Quadro
It’s alright, an i7 would probably help a lot in reducing baking times, and rebuilding shaders. The 970 and 980 are better bang for your buck and wattage right now. Also build with a R9 290 uses pretty close to 400 watts from the wall, 430 watts is really cutting it close, if you had a bunch of hard drives, fans, or an all in one liquid cooler, you might exceed 430 watts.
If I was you , I would sped the few extra dollars and get the GTX 970 graphics card, nothing against AMD, but you can actually save money on your hydro bills in the long term, the 970 is much more power efficient (and quieter fans), I hear the R9 at full power sounds like a jet engine… So the extra 40 euros might be worth looking into.
I would go with the GTX 970 personally, but that is up to you.