The Video Card Has Arrived

After attempting to get an nVidia GTX 1080 for a few months, I realized it probably wasn’t worth the extra $250, so opted for a GTX 1070 instead. What’s been crazy about this rollout of GPUs is that it’s still next to impossible to get any of the cards, and the places that do have them in stock are mostly marking them up 80-100%. Oh, and in the interim to fight off new, cheaper Radeon RX 480 cards from AMD (at half the performance), nVidia just released a paired down GTX 1060 for $250.

That said, the GTX 1070 should be fine for driving the Oculus Rift… when it finally gets here. The shipping window for the Rift has come and gone and no sign of the thing is in sight, despite having pre-ordered at the beginning of January. Apparently you can just go buy one at Best Buy though, which just seems wrong. Good job, Facebook.

In terms of performance, it seems like you can crank all of the settings up in any game and play at 1920x1200 and they work great. The problem here being that I don’t really have any of the new block buster triple-A titles which can really take advantage of the GPU. I fired up Portal 2 and Rocket League and both were great at max settings. The problem though is that both ran fine on the old GTX 660 (although not maxed out), and Portal 2 came out more than five years ago. I also tried out Elite Dangerous, which I’m told is really awesome on the Rift. At high settings the GTX 1070 didn’t seem to even break a sweat. I’ll have to do some more bench marking and get concrete numbers.