2x GTX770 SLI --> New card

Question

Dear hardware enthusiasts, I need your advice.

My 4 years old gaming PC is currently running 2x GTX770 in SLI. I plan to upgrade to a single powerful gaming card. My budget is enough for GTX 1080 Ti, RTX 2080, or below.

I'm considering two aspects:

1. I wanna feel major performance improvement (fps) in games, and
2. I wanna avoid that another PC part will become a bottleneck so that the new card won't be used effectively.

I do not plan to do another major investment so I will rather buy a lower card if the more powerful would make no sense on this setup. What card would you recommend me and why?

My current setup:

• Motherboard Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming 5 + 850W power supply
• 32 GB RAM Kingston 4x8GB DDR3 1600MHz CL9 HyperX
• 2x GIGABYTE GTX770 OC, 4GB DDR5 in SLI
• CPU Intel Core i7-4790K
• HDD SSD CRUCIAL MX100 512GB
• using Philips 298P4QJEB screen with 2560x1080

Any feedback will be appreciated.

Answer 1

Get a used GTX 1080 Ti

Used 1080 Tis are easily available at ~$600 and frequently $400-$500 for local listings, where even the cheapest RTX 2080 will run you $700. Given that the two trade blows in benchmarks, that extra couple hundred is going exclusively towards a promise of raytracing—at least as far as gaming is concerned—and slightly better power consumption, with the slight benefit of getting a new card. These, IMO, are extremely weak benefits.

Regarding the rest of your setup, at least for gaming, nothing should bottleneck the GPU (except in a few select CPU-heavy titles such as CS:GO and sims.) More and faster storage is always a nice creature comfort though; given your motherboard has support for M.2 SSDs, you could get a new boot SSD, or even just a small SSD (maybe one with 3D XPoint?) to use as a cache for your HDD.

Answer 2

If you have the money, go for the 2080. It has a smaller architecture, meaning it has lower power consumption and it runs cooler, however all of this is in theory, your mileage may vary. However the 2080 has better support for Real time Ray Tracing, and has support for a bunch of other technologies including DLSS. So if I were you I’d go for the 2080. And it would be pretty hard to have bottlenecks with the 4790K especially at high resolutions where the graphics card would be more taxed than the CPU