Graphics Cards

What graphics cards are people running on their simulators?

I'm in a position at the minute where I need to move the old graphics card from my old gaming pc into my office pc just because I want to be able to play a few games on steam. The pc is a very basic office pc but has onboard graphics and sound. So it's a good excuse to use an old graphics card and upgrade my better pc.

My old Gaming PC will be the donor for my simulator. It's by no means up to date as i built it a few years ago but it was built with good components at the time. The graphics card was an 8800 GT which at the time could play everything including crysis when it first came out.

I'm just wondering now what the best kind of upgrade would be for my graphics.
I need HDMI out so I can use my tv as a monitor but most cards have that anyway. I don't want to go too crazy as I can't afford to completely rebuild my rig at this time to match the graphics. I'll probably build a VR capable PC next year.

The motherboard supports ATI crossfire so maybe I can use that and not spend too much money by using older cards?

Any suggestions would be great.

I concur, the GTX970 is a powerful GPU at a mid-range price (I know it seems odd to say that 300.00 USD is mid-range, lol). And of course it has native HDMI 2.0 support to run my 4k TV

As to using multi-GPU it depends on several factors. Will the games that you want to play truly benefit from it or even support it? After several SLI/Crossfire setups I have found that a good modern single GPU was far better than two last gen GPUs for the same price. Just my .02 USD (adjusting for inflation and price parity), your millage my vary (especially if you drive a VW Turbo Deisel)

EDIT: Yes, I know the VW TDI issue was with emissions but I thought it was funnier my way, lol.

What's the minimum sort of motherboard spec needed to get the benefit from a 970?

I would be concerned that I don't have enough processing power or ram to justify one.
The motherboard is an ASUS Maximus Formula so it's getting on a bit.

I am running mine with an i5 2500, I did swap it out with my i7 3930k to see if there was a significant difference (bottlenecking) but there was not that I could see. Some games picked up a few frames but that is expected considering the CPUs.

My CPU is a 3.0Ghz Q6600 quad core

Hi @Barry, you said that you build a new pc than this one will be used for the simulator, are multiple computers needed for the motion simulator?

Thanks @noorbeast, you are always helpful

I will need one PC for my simulator. The other is just for normal home gaming.

I figured a few things out last night and I rebuilt my old PC with the 8800 GT graphics card and it seems to be performing fairly well.
I shifted my steam software and account onto this one so my office pc will just be for web development and business work.

I'm going to hold off on buying any new parts until the time comes where I want to have a VR rig.

I'm using a GTX970 with an i7-4790. For all the tests I have done so far, the result is excellent, even playing with all the settings in Ultra.

If you want to use it in SLI mode, make sure that the motherboard supports it.

ok, so I need a graphics card. My 8800 GT is stretched to it's limits. I tried to play DIRT 3 at the weekend and I basically had to turn the graphics down to its absolute minimum to get it to run without stuttering.

So I've found something that might work.

Let me know if my options look good.

First, I'll upgrade to Windows 7 to make use of more of my RAM.
Then, I've spotted a few Gefore GTX 660 2Gb graphics cards for under £100.

I completely understand budget concerns. If at all possible get the most powerful GPU that you can afford. This way when/if you upgrade the CPU you will not be hunting for a better GPU to match it.

I had a Q6600 and gifted it to a friend in need, he is still using it with great effect today. From what I have read the processor does not badly bottleneck the GPU but it does suffer when games take particular advantage of the CPU and especially when only one core is called.

As to the GTX660, you might look into the GTX950 as it is in the same price range but twice the performance.

I'll certainly have a look for the 950. I see a few on ebay for around the same sort of price.
Thanks for the help.

GTX 950 Superclocked ordered

Now I think I'll probably back the machine up and install a nice clean version of windows 7. I'm currently running 3 hard drives on the machine so that won't be helping with speed on windows XP so windows 7 will probably handle it better. I think I uninstalled and deleted about 50Gb of useless crap from my machine. in the last few days.

Windows XP is still starting up incredibly slow so if anyone has any advice on that it would be good. It might save me having to do an OS upgrade and install everything again.

And OS upgrade was a very good idea

I have all of mine on Windows 10 and have had zero issues running any software/hardware so far. I did as you and formatted my simpit PC the other day. It had 7 years of misc "stuff" clogging it up (used to be my desktop).

Glad to hear that you have a new GPU on order, I look forward to your observations.