Glad I made the plunge

With my failed attempts of squeezing more performance from my EVGA GTX 760 SC 2 GB graphics card, I've been researching for a replacement card. I've been on the fence for the past few days, since it's not a necessary upgrade. I'm able to play MHW on low with about high 30s/low 40s FPS. There's minimal lag, and graphics are equivalent to playing on a 3DS.

Among the research I've done, I narrowed it down to a specific Nvidia cards (I've heard that AMD's Vega series is pretty respectable, but I wasn't sure if my PSU would be able to handle a card efficiently since I cheaped out on a PSU). Both were beyond what was needed for MHW and any other future games that I have in mind to play once I have some spare time (ie: Winter Break). After combing different sites to price match with the store I go to purchase computer parts and peripherals (ie: Memory Express), I finally found some great sales on Amazon. However, whether the computer gods are honing in on me, the sale immediately disappeared when I was showing it to others. I went and researched some more, and decided it was probably worth upgrading to an even STRONGER card. There was a sale on Amazon, in which there was a price difference of $100 (meaning that Memory would price match and beat by 10% = $110 saving), but lo-and-behold... it doubled in price after I showed it to my brother.

The card in mind was a MSI variant. Seeing that I tried EVGA, and my brother tinkered with EVGA, Asus and Gigabyte, I thought I would try a new company. Due to the lost sale on Amazon, and the lack of stock at the NE location, I ended up going for the Gigabyte variant of the Nvidia card that they had on sale at Memory (almost 30% off their regular price). They also had 10 cards left, so I didn't have to comb around the city for a store with stock.

Installation was relatively straight forward, and the drivers were installed quite quickly. My computer did crash while installing a driver, but it didn't seem like there was any harm done. Strange thing though, was that Nvidia Geforce Experience suggested that even with this new card, I should play MHW on the lowest settings... which irked me since my cpu is still relatively quick (i7-4770K... not overclocked yet, but it's on the verge of being so).

I benchmarked my new card and found that it aligned with what other people were getting with my setup. I did a quick stress test, knowing that it's pointless since it's running on stock settings. I then proceeded to open up MHW, ignore Nvidia's suggestions, and set everything on the highest setting.

And boy, am I glad that I made the plunge. The game seems to have so much detail that I've been missing out on by playing it on low. FPS on 1080p resolution was averaging 90+, far more than what my monitor can handle. Either way, I was awestruck by how nice everything looked, which brought back memories of when I upgraded from playing SC 2 on a Macbook Pro on low settings to my current rig and playing it on ultra.

Though it is time to save up, for I spent quite a bit on my computer this month! This new gpu though should be future proof and transferable if I decided to go for a new build in the near future!