this was once a 700 GPU but NVIDIA now
says you know what it's worthless it's garbage
but as they say one man's trash is another man's
treasure and with NVIDIA dropping support for the 700 series and older
gpus are they now effectively e-waste or
could this be an opportunity to score a deal as people rush to dump their old
graphics cards i mean surely this thing can still game right
the answer may surprise you though not as much as my segue to our sponsor will
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that's right ladies and gentlemen as of august this year NVIDIA will not be
providing any more game-ready drivers for their kepler architecture-based
cards so that's most of their 600 series and 700 series cards all the way from
the gt630 up to the titan black
so that doesn't mean that these cards suddenly can't run video games though
why don't we take a look at kind of a middle of the road kepler card like this
gtx 760 winforce you can snag a card
like this for as low as around 70 on ebay and if you guys are thinking
i mean who would still be running one of those no one uses those anymore well
then you're being a bit of an elitist douche because steam's hardware survey
shows that the 760 is still being used by .25
of users that doesn't really sound like a lot until you consider that that only
puts it a few slots lower than the rtx 3090 also consider that steem had 120
million active users as of last year so
even if only half of them agreed to the hardware survey that's still a hundred
and fifty thousand steam users who are running gtx 760s so one of the most
compelling use cases for a budget GPU like this is to take your existing
pre-built throw a few bucks at a graphics card and boom turn it into a
gaming rig the only thing you're gonna have to consider is that this one uses
an eight pin and a six pin power connector so that's a little more than
the reference card's dual six pins and it'll need about 107 watts of power
which means you might need a power supply upgrade if you were to install
one of these in a pre-built because they typically have very tight power budgets
not to mention tight cases so make sure
you've got enough space for this long ass shroud so there's some challenges to
overcome but you gotta ask yourself what are your other options if you're looking
to save a buck you can get a last generation console like an xbox one or
playstation 4 but those are still selling in the 200 to 250 range so
assuming you have some kind of computer already
this could be a fantastic option if you just want to game yeah cs go might be a
9 year old game but as of today it is still the top played game on steam so
it's hardly irrelevant and you can see yeah we're running at 1080p but we've
got this game maxed out in excess of 100 frames per second and that's with our
5600x CPU handling all these bot simulations this is
not a real match so we're just going to turn everything
down there we go now we're getting 250 300
350 frames per second look at that we
can watch me die at 200 FPS we've got everything cranked to low now and it's
flipping fly in here oh wow it doesn't mean i can aim
please die how are you still alive whatever
there but really again again
of course one game doesn't prove anything so here's rocket league running
at 1080p uh i mean we're running at 200
FPS here dog they're not gonna get nothing because
they don't have a hundred and oh shoot i forgot to shift
wow that was really awkward okay then esports games maxed out
absolutely no problem but that's not exactly a surprise both of these games
are from around the same era as the 700 series graphics cards not to mention
that esports titles are generally tuned to run on the widest range of computers
possible so 180 FPS absolutely maxed out
in this game yeah but yeah there's all medium presets
running at right around 50 FPS on the fairly busy monaco map i mean it's not
like f1 2020 is the most challenging aaa
game but i mean hey it's a modern game and it's
running fine just fine at least until i
break it there you go unfortunately the same is not
necessarily true in every game turning
apex legends up to high with anti-aliasing enabled at 1080p
we are looking at about 35 FPS and this
is on the training map not an actual larger map with other characters running
around causing problems for your FPS's
which isn't to say we can't get the game running reasonably smoothly we are now
at 50 55 FPS
the difference is that unlike f1 2020 we
had to absolutely dump all of our
settings so you're gonna see weird stuff like this
mountain appearing to be made out of clay and the thing about a competitive
game like this is that having a better graphics card is about more than just
smoother animations if you've got objects and textures just popping in the
way your caveman eyeballs work is you're naturally watching out for motion in
your peripheral vision so you're going to be walking around on the map and you're going to have things going like
look like holy smokes that had me over there and then it's not it's just a rock
take that rocks i got no ammo we managed to hit anywhere
from 70 to 90 FPS by dropping down to 1600 by 900
but by this point this is looking like a game from like 10
years ago moving into an even more demanding aaa game do maternal
was a bit of a weird one when we booted it up it actually defaulted to ultra
nightmare even though you can see that clearly that vastly exceeds the mere two
gigabytes of vram that are available on our gtx 760. and in fact if we dump it
all the way down to low we are still 900 megabytes over our
budget which leads us to kind of an
interesting point we'll talk about what we wait for the game to load these cards
started coming out around 2013 and that was long before 4k gaming was a real
consideration and long before games needed more than two or three gigs of
vram that's right even the top-end
consumer card the 780 ti only ever shipped with three gigs of video memory
you had to step up to a titan to get six
so it's probably enough for the kinds of titles that you would play on these
cards but it's clearly going to become more and
more of an issue in modern games that have far more aggressive vram
requirements so we're getting 25 24 oh as we come around
this corner you can see we're dropping all the way down to mid 20s frames per
second yeah in a fast-paced shooter like this this is not a great experience 19 FPS i
saw a drop down to i'm not it's not even registering my
clicks sometimes and remember this is like the first level so there's no way
that you're playing at a high difficulty in like the later levels like this this
is not um this is not a very good experience
so okay you're not playing do maternal but
still a lot of game left in this thing and the 760 is not even the highest end
card that NVIDIA has dropped game ready driver support for now let's chuck on a
780 ti and see how that goes
now you might think that's a
lot to spend on a whole GPU that's not getting any new drivers but with a
little bit of patience a 780 ti can be had for as little as around 150 to 160
us dollars and it's a lot faster like in some
situations it can be as much as 60 faster than the 760 that we just looked
at obviously if cs go and rocket league run great on the little brother the 780
ti is not going to struggle with them so let's start with f1 2020 where
confusingly we're running at just about exactly the same frame rate high 40s low
50s ah except for one small detail
f1 2020 automatically detected that we were running a better card and cranked
everything to ultra that's right my friends
anti-aliasing is on super ultra high details are on so all
the shadows are looking as good as they can look and it doesn't look that
different but there's definitely fewer jaggies so
that's that's an absolute benefit let's throw it at medium there we go not
freaking bad running at the same detail settings as before we are now at 90 FPS
and yeah that is markedly smoother as for doom eternal it's a lot better
than it was i mean this is
it can run the game you know there's your 80 90 FPS
but as soon as
even though technically we squeeze in under the vram requirements for all low
you can tell it's struggling yeah it's the it's the
rapid swings between you know really honestly good frame
rates or like 80 90 FPS and just
tank like close to 20 FPS
it plays well enough that i kind of forgot i was evaluating graphics cards
since just started playing the game so that's that's it that's the threshold
it's playable since we've had some more success why don't we kick things up a
notch here and try dirt five
and cannot find a compatible graphics
card the reason for this is that the 700
series while they have support for directx 12 they do not fully support the
entire directx 12 feature set which unfortunately is the minimum graphics
API available in dirt 5. so if you look at the dirt 5 minimum specs they
actually call for a gtx 970 or better
and that's a real consideration for something like this because as directx
12 becomes more ubiquitous certain games like dirt 5 may simply stop supporting
lower versions now esports games as i mentioned before
designed to run on the widest variety of hardware possible so it's likely they'll
support these older apis for quite a while longer so if cs go or valrant is
your jam these older cards could be pretty appealing
let's try something else like civ6 that's not bad for medium details 2x
anti-aliasing i mean depending on how busy the scene is or anywhere from 100
to like 60 70 FPS that's
that's very respectable i mean we could probably turn this up it's not like this
is a fast-paced game or anything no offensive
enthusiasts i'm sure you're like going all the actions per
minute let's turn it to high though
okay that dropped us down to like 45 FPS
when things get busy but in a game like this that is absolutely playable
absolutely and the shadow details are way better
even though control calls for a gtx 780
as its minimum graphics card we are running it like
well 60 FPS at pretty decent details on
a 780 ti okay that makes sense i mean the
developer did say it'll run on this so yeah they can still game which means
what then we should be outraged in videos dropping game ready driver
support for these well
not quite we got to remember NVIDIA has supported cards like the 700 series for
the better part of eight years which in a world where Android phone
manufacturers will drop support in as little as two years makes NVIDIA look
like absolute rock stars i mean yeah a graphics driver
is likely less complicated than an entire operating system but i still say
they're doing pretty darn good and there are some real world actual reasons for
them to drop support for these cards we already saw a couple of them in the form
of the vram limitations i mean that's just the hardware on the card they just
can't keep up and API limitations where modern games are simply not going to be
able to run on them also there are some reasons that it
might not be practical to continue to run these cards the 780 ti for example
draws about 250 watts which doesn't sound like a ton
compared to something like an rtx 3090 at 350 watts but you should also
consider that a much newer gtx 1060
which is roughly performance comparable and actually even faster in some cases
draws less than half that amount of power
now at the moment gtx 1066 gig cards may
be a bit price inflated due to crypto mining but you can get a 3 gig card for
around 180 to 200 us dollars that is 20
to 50 dollars more than a 780 ti but when you consider the power savings it
could actually be cheaper in the long run for example let's say you play for
two hours a day five days a week and you pay on average 22 cents per kilowatt
hour because you live in let's say los angeles over the span of a year a 1060
would save you around 14 dollars in power and that could be even more if you
gain more often or if you pay more for your power
14 doesn't sound like a lot but give it three years and you have basically paid
the difference and the entire time you've had game ready drivers along with
a host of other benefits 10 series cards have HDMI 2.0 which means they can do 4k
60 over HDMI they've got displayport 1.4
which can handle up to 4k 144 hertz they've got support for freesync which
the 700 series does support g-sync but does not support freesync not to mention
that while the 700 series also has nvinc
the 10 series has a more feature-rich end bank encoder with support for h.265
better color and higher resolution so if you're just using your graphics card
to encode a live stream it probably won't make a difference but if you're
into editing your videos after the fact or creating HDR or high resolution
content that might matter to you with all of that in mind though the
actual driver cutoff hasn't happened yet so if you're looking for a deal on a GPU
today these kepler cards aren't a terrible
idea if that price premium for a use 10 series just isn't in your budget but
keep in mind that the prices will likely continue to drop once NVIDIA actually
cuts off support in august of this year so in particular if you were looking for
you know a secondary rig to you know land with when your friends when they
come over yeah a sunsetted kepler card could look
like a pretty good deal and as for the folks out there who are
already running a kepler-based GPU if you can't afford to step up to something
like a 1060 does the lack of game ready drivers mean that you're just sol
well not necessarily i mean we just showed you guys these cards can totally
still gain and NVIDIA will still be providing security updates as needed for
the time being so it doesn't suddenly turn your GPU into a brick because you
don't get a game-ready driver in fact a lot of the time older gpus that NVIDIA
has already deprecated can still play a fair number of lightweight modern games
as long as you turn the settings down and in fact we're going to be testing
out exactly what that's like in a future video so make sure you get subscribed
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if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out uh hey why don't you check out
NVIDIA gpus through the ages we looked at uh how much their performance has
improved over time it was a while back but maybe we need to do a new one look
at the new one