Good videocard for StarMade?

[Malacodor]

I'm planning to buy a new videocard and wanted to ask for some advice. I'd like to play StarMade with a decent framerate, even when large ships and planets are involved. I have an Intel Core i7-3930K CPU @ 3.20GHz and 12 GB RAM. Any recommendations?

 

[NeonSturm]

Do you think this fits into "General" discussion?

What did you pay for your current / are ready to pay?
Do you use Linux?

I think you should get a graphic card with good Open-GL and driver support.
Don't look for cards with just the highest GDDR-ram amount or best shader-support, look for a good overall and descriptions which tell a lot of details.

1. Discard unwanted price ranges.
   
2. Sort offers by those which have HDMI-support and interfaces (they support a higher screen resolution).
3. Check nanometres for chip-production and select the newest 2 models, ignore others (they suck less power if build smaller and need less cooling / have more circuitry on them).
4. Discard offers which have lower stats than all others of the price range.
5. Google for driver-support and known problems of your offers.

This should eliminate 95% if not all offers except a few.​

 

[jayman38]

Bottom line: NVidia is preferred by the devs over AMD/ATI. That means that a NVidia card will definitely support the game. An AMD card may or may not support features. This advice goes double on Linux due to the fact that drivers for NVidia on Linux are better than Linux drivers for AMD.
You should be safe picking out a 900 or 1000 series NVidia GeForce card. I wouldn't recommend getting anything with a smaller model number, although the 750 TI might be OK with game features turned down a bit.

Example:
EVGA 1060 3GB (strange VRAM amount)

This other thread also goes into some detail on video cards, among other components.

 

[kupu]

Bottom line: NVidia is preferred by the devs over AMD/ATI.

While sort of true, i think it's purely over driver compatibility, not a case of coding for one over the other.

That means that a NVidia card will definitely support the game. ~ This advice goes double on Linux due to the fact that drivers for NVidia on Linux are better than Linux drivers for AMD.
You should be safe picking out a 900 or 1000 series NVidia GeForce card.
Example:
EVGA 1060 3GB (strange VRAM amount)

This other thread also goes into some detail on video cards, among other components.

Good advice for more than just Starmade (of which those cards will give ample performance), the 900 / 1000 series are really great cards able to play most modern titles with high to max settings at 1080p.

 

[Gonzalo]

in my opinion:
right now you'll just about get around with a gtx 1080
however 1080 ti when it comes out will be optimal

 

[SmilingDemon]

in my opinion:
right now you'll just about get around with a gtx 1080
however 1080 ti when it comes out will be optimal

yeah .. no ... you cant answer the question "what would be good for x" .. with x not being the most graficaly demanding thing on earth with .. get the most powerful card on the market (which would be the Titan XP then i guess)

 

[NeonSturm]

I would be interested about power-costs when you run starmade 2 hours a day for a year too.
Additionally, should I buy one time an expensive card and 5 years nothing or every 3 years a cheaper card? I think cheaper cards are better, because the old ones I can give to the older generation of my family which play Tower-Defence at most.
The cheaper card may have the advantage of being old enough for Linux to catch up on driver support.

 

[jayman38]

I would be interested about power-costs when you run starmade 2 hours a day for a year too.
Additionally, should I buy one time an expensive card and 5 years nothing or every 3 years a cheaper card? I think cheaper cards are better, because the old ones I can give to the older generation of my family which play Tower-Defence at most.
The cheaper card may have the advantage of being old enough for Linux to catch up on driver support.

These two pages talk about power consumption for these types of cards. Generally, I think you are talking about 120 watts per hour per card for Starmade, on top of your computer's baseline wattage. So if you are talking about 2 hours a day, you are talking about one-fourth of one kilowatt-hour of power each day. If you play an average of 300 days per year, that averages out to about 75 kilowatt-hours. Plus another 100 or so for the rest of the computer, depending on if you shut the whole computer down at the end of your gaming session.

I tend to agree with you that it is better to get a slightly cheaper late-model card, than to get the highest-quality card possible. The highest quality tends to demand a premium, and if you look at the price/performance ratio, you get a card that is only 15% weaker for half the price. (And it doesn't really seem very weak.) Then if you try to go even cheaper, the price/performance ratio gets worse again, as you start looking into older, less efficient cards with weaker technology. Plus, if you do want to upgrade video performance, you might want to invest in a motherboard with SLI support. When one video card won't be enough, you can buy a matching, SLI-compatible card and hook the two together on the same motherboard for better performance than even the premium card.

If you don't game on three monitors at the same time, you really don't need the premium cards.

As far as catching up on driver support, also consider that the dev team won't have the time to code their game on the bleeding edge of video card features, so a bleeding-edge card will not really net you anything special, at least in terms of playing Starmade. Starmade has a rather old OpenGL standard as the baseline and will shortly be updating their minimum requirements to a middle-level OpenGL spec, which all the 900 and 1000 series cards will already support.

 

[Master_Artificer]

in my opinion:
right now you'll just about get around with a gtx 1080
however 1080 ti when it comes out will be optimal

Actually the 870 or 780 would be optimal, for optimized optimability in an optimal rig.

 

[SkylordLuke]

Rx 480 is cheap and its a beast for this game.
But if you have spare money,go for 1070,its overkill for starmade,but its not that expensive either
(proud owner of one)

 

[NeonSturm]

If I calculate with 30€ a year (40$) because I don't run SM all the time but have my PC on longer,
and also assume 3-5 Years I get 90..150€ or 120..200$

And for the cheaper with 60% power consumption, it seems like a cheaper graphics card every 3 years is saving me 60€ compared to a more expensive every 5 years.
And also the more expensive doesn't have double power.

 

[Calhoun]

RX 480 is pretty much the king of price/performance right now. That said, I do believe Starmade favours Nvidia cards, so a 1060 (3GB or 6GB) would probably work well.

Still, Nvidia have been playing dirty tricks with their pricing of the 1000-series and that annoys me. Ultimately, It'll come down to your budget: <$250 - RX 480 (I assume you'll be playing other things than Starmade)
>$250 - GTX 1070 (Unless you have a very large budget, in which case the 1080 is your better option)