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I need some help choosing a graphics card. I searched a lot about this but still haven't found a good answer. I want to be able to play AAA titles and work with game development, graphics design, programming, and video editing. I'm really new to computer components.

I was thinking a GTX Titan X and GTX 980 Ti (maybe SLI/).

Some people say to stay away from SLI (compatibility and driver issues with games), others say it's only worth it for video editing, others say it's necessary for game development. I'm really confused.

I'm building a new PC — 3,000$ is my budget. The only item that I wrote on my list to buy is an Intel i7-6700K (which I don't mind changing if need be).

I don't plan to overclock anything unless it will provide a lot of benefit without too much risk.

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  • Can you give us some examples as to what games/software you use?
    – timuzhti
    Nov 14, 2015 at 11:51
  • Blender, Photoshop, Maya, Lightworks, Unity, Unreal Engine, Gimp. Skyrim with mods, I don't have any other high end games because my current computer can't run them ( Far cry 4 is a good example).
    – Marcus Vinicius
    Nov 14, 2015 at 13:29
  • 3ds max, gta 5, audacity
    – Marcus Vinicius
    Nov 14, 2015 at 13:42
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    Have you tried to look at this site : pcpartpicker.com/builds/#G=2,4&X=0,306523&c=213,299,266 They seem in your budget and pretty powrefull
    – Rudra Matroja
    Nov 17, 2015 at 11:23
  • @RudraMatroja Yes, that is a good site, but the Website Recommendations beta failed, so I can't really recommend you a place to put that comment.
    – Rubydesic
    Jan 8, 2016 at 11:41

2 Answers 2

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If you are making a true workstation with fast speeds(so not for gaming) but for working with unreal 4 and DirectX 12, I would go with a Titan X because of the RAM benefit and the double float point RAM so you can be sure your not going to get RAM corruption while you are building your game world. I would not pick a socked 1151 but an 2011-3 because the capability for more RAM and RAM disks because I would think speed is your game.

If you are going to game on it hardcore, I would pick the SLI GTX 980ti setup because its just faster at pushing the pixels for gaming. For the ones who think 6GB + 6GB = 12GB so more RAM that is not how it works. Then I would go with the socked 1151 because it's cheaper and you don't need 64GB of DDR4 for gaming.

Unreal 4 and Unity 4.X do NOT support Sli

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    hum, I see. I think I'll stick with two 980 Ti. I think GPU will be more necessary to play games than content creation. And this won't be a professional designer workstation anyway ( I only need something to work with mods and small projects). thanks for the help!
    – Marcus Vinicius
    Nov 17, 2015 at 19:37
  • Yea, then Defenetly go for the 980 TI. also be sure to add an Samsung 950 Evo SSD or an intel 750 SSD for virtualy no lodingtimes
    – Thomcdrom
    Nov 18, 2015 at 8:03
  • They don't support SLI. OK, but do they support multi-GPU rendering? I know Blender does.
    – Rubydesic
    Feb 2, 2016 at 21:31
  • @RubyJunk I'm not an expert on that but if you do multi-GPU rendering your Game WONT benefit for it because most if not all games don't support mulit GPU rendering.
    – Thomcdrom
    Feb 6, 2016 at 15:05
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    @RubyJunk SLI and multi-GPU rendering can be defferent things. a video game can utilize SLI but cain't use multi-GPU WITHOUT an SLI bridge but some programs can. Adobe media encoder is one of those programs I believe. When they said on the blender forum that is supports multi-GPU setups I was not thinking of SLI. SLI shares the workload on a card. multi-GPU doesn't. the videocards can get different tasks. also if SLI wasn the only thing why do the tesla cards exist for servers
    – Thomcdrom
    Feb 9, 2016 at 12:42
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I would say if you have that much budget, go for it!

The GTX Titan X ($1,000), is probably not what you want, probably a better alternative is 2-way SLI GTX 980 Ti (~$1300).

If you have issues with SLI (I doubt you will with only 2 way), you can always just use one of them when playing games.

Using the SLI with Blender and probably those other render engines, is most likely going to work beautifully. I know for a fact that Blender does not even require SLI to use two cards

Benchmarks (BF4 4K):

SLI GTX 980 Ti - 67fps

One Titan X - 40fps
One GTX 980 Ti - 37fps

As you can see, if you don't like SLI, you can just turn it off and still get Titan X like performance. As for 3D rendering, you won't have any issues with SLI, trust me.

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