Need help building my first computer

[DarkHorror]

@Jezcentral;216825

DarkHorror, I appreciate you taking the time to provide me with these figures, but which are the ones you think support your case? He seems to be pushing the VRAM usage up by turning up the settings. Of course the frame rates will suffer. I also don’t trust SLI.

What he said for before going over 3.5gb and after going over 3.5gb. Frycry 4 was the best and still had stuttering above 3.5gb, where as others went from smooth to unplayable.

from the post
Watchdogs

At 3.4gb Vram usage and under, game was smooth. Only on very quick camera turns did the game slow down, and only slightly.
ABOVE the threshold of 3.5gb, the game was still smooth and playable… until you turned the camera. Massive freezes and stutters occured making it impossible to aim with a mouse. I’m pretty sure the maximum FPS is higher because I accidentally swung the camera into the sky a few times. The FPS was not representative of the experience. It felt MUCH worse than 42 fps.

Battlefield 4

At 3.3 to 3.4gb Vram usage, the game ran smoothly. The FPS was expectedly low due to the INSANE resolution scale I had to apply to raise the Vram usage 600mb, but it was still playable. I even killed some tanks, and I’m not very good at that.
ABOVE the 3.5gb threshold was a nightmare. Again, massive stuttering and freezing came into play. The FPS is not representative of the experience. Frametimes were awful (I use Frostbite 3’s built in graphs to monitor) and spiking everywhere.

Farcry 4

At 3.3 to 3.4gb Vram usage, the game was smooth and very enjoyable. However, I feel 4x MSAA looks noticeably better in game. TXAA blurs everything horribly, and I can’t stand it.
Above the 3.5gb threshold, Farcry 4 actually ran quite well. There was a stutter, but it was significantly lesser than the game breaking ones I experienced in the other games. You do lose smoothness in action packed scenes, but I still found it fairly playable, and the FPS fairly accurately represented the experience.

SHADOW OF MORDOR

At 3.1gb Vram usage, the game played smoothly. I expected higher FPS for the stock results but was very pleased with how much overclocking scaled in game.
Above the 3.5gb threshold, the game was BARELY playable. I believe it was even playable due to the nature of the game rather than the GTX 970 handling its Vram better in particular title. Only the minimum FPS was representative of the ****** experience. What was 55 FPS felt like 15.

Really shows that it should be thought of as more of a 3.5gb card than a 4gb card, as is the same sort of stuttering you get when you run out of VRam on a normal card. Having 3.5gb isn’t much of a problem right now for a single card, but in the future you will get more and more into vram and the problem will present it’s self more and more.

If you don’t mind it being a 3.5gb card, being lied to by nvidia, and spending more to get lower power usage then get the card. But you can get a quiet, fast R9 290 or 290x with 4gb of vram for less than a 970.