As others have mentioned the 3gb R9 280 or 280x are also worth looking at if you can get them at the right price...
2GB GTX 760 or 3GB Radeon R9 280 (for £15 more) What do you think? Tech specs here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-4.html
A tough one, I personally think based on PA's love of memory (both system and graphics) I'd lean towards the 280. The 760 is going to be the faster card in PA due to Nvidia's somewhat better support for OpenGL, however once you play on a map that needs more graphics memory than the 760 has it's fps will crash whereas the 280 will keep going. Edit: Also based on other peoples comments I think the performance for the 280 will be ample to play the game well.
If I'm understanding you correctly, the 760 will be better for smaller games with less people and the 280 better for larger games with more people. Sounds like it has to be the 280 for me. And now i'm £50 over budget .
I once tried to clean my iphone, it's now a paper weight. I'd rather avoid being put in the position where upgrading a new pc would be necessary. But if upgrading is possible and necessary, I'd probably do it. My current pc is so old though, I can't upgrade it any where near enough. It's not compatible.
Personally I can't recommend AMD hardware for PA due to poor OpenGL support with them, but if you also play other games a lot you likely will get better performance in them with AMD GPU just because those are cheaper. Not really. Both GPUs should be more than enough for PA because you can always adjust video memory usage using "virtual texture" option. I recommend to get GPUs with more video memory because currently all software going to use it. E.g your OS, web browser, video recording software, graphics/video editor, etc. Having more RAM and VRAM guarantee you won't need to close other apps when you want to play game on higher settings and also will benefit you a lot if you decide to get something like 4K display in future. So it's just good thing to have because you can't upgrade it.
As I understand it more graphics ram should enable you to hold more textures in memory for planets- thus reducing disk caching on very large systems and delays where you get black patches on planets as the system loads in the textures. So more graphics ram should improve performance on systems with larger numbers of planets. SXX is correct that you can adjust the 'virtual texture' setting down if your system doesn't have much graphics ram (as my GPU only has 1 gb I have to have this set to minimum to avoid problems). Note the number of people / units aren't really effected by graphics ram- that is more a system memory / cpu performance issue.
iPhones and PCs are very different beasts. People build custom PCs all the time and there's a large community of people who can offer help and advice - trying to get inside an iPhone is like trying to get inside a bank vault with nothing but a damp sock. Adding RAM and installing hard drives is particularly easy these days.
There is no disk or RAM caching for textures. Some basic assets actually stored in RAM, but most of textures you see generated on the fly all the time you change camera position. You might check more tech details on this here: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/question-to-devs-about-vram-usage.51325/ http://www.mavorsrants.com/2013/02/planetary-annihilation-engine.html
Ah ok, I'll have a read. I think disk caching is very much a thing though (where insufficient system ram is available perhaps) given how PA runs on my machine....
Okay, the final package looks like this: Case InWIN G7 BRUSHED EFFECT DARK GREY CASE Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i5 Quad Core Processor i5-4460 (3.2GHz) 6MB Cache Motherboard Gigabyte H81M-D2V: Micro-ATX, LG1150, USB 3.0, SATA 6GBs Memory (RAM) 16GB KINGSTON HYPER-X FURY DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz (2 x 8GB) Graphics Card 3GB AMD RADEON™ R9 280 - DVI, HDMI, mDP - DX® 11.2, Eyefinity 1st Hard Disk 120GB INTEL® 530 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 550MB/sR | 520MB/sW) 2nd Hard Disk 2TB 3.5" SATA-III 6GB/s HDD 7200RPM 64MB CACHE 1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive 24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM Power Supply CORSAIR 550W VS SERIES™ VS-550 POWER SUPPLY Processor Cooling Super Quiet 22dBA Triple Copper Heatpipe Intel CPU Cooler Extra Case Fans 2 x 12CM Black Case Fan (configured to extract from rear/roof) Sound Card ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD) Wireless/Wired Networking 10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT (Wi-Fi NOT INCLUDED) USB Options MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 4 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS Power Cable 1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead) Operating System Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit w/SP1 - inc DVD & Licence DVD Recovery Media Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) DVD with paper sleeve Office Software NO OFFICE SOFTWARE Anti-Virus NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE Warranty 3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour) Delivery STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI) Build Time Standard Build - Approximately 7 to 9 working days Quantity 1 Cost: Case InWIN G7 BRUSHED EFFECT DARK GREY CASE Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i5 Quad Core Processor i5-4460 (3.2GHz) 6MB Cache Motherboard Gigabyte H81M-D2V: Micro-ATX, LG1150, USB 3.0, SATA 6GBs Memory (RAM) 16GB KINGSTON HYPER-X FURY DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz (2 x 8GB) Graphics Card 3GB AMD RADEON™ R9 280 - DVI, HDMI, mDP - DX® 11.2, Eyefinity 1st Hard Disk 120GB INTEL® 530 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 550MB/sR | 520MB/sW) 2nd Hard Disk 2TB 3.5" SATA-III 6GB/s HDD 7200RPM 64MB CACHE 1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive 24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM Power Supply CORSAIR 550W VS SERIES™ VS-550 POWER SUPPLY Processor Cooling Super Quiet 22dBA Triple Copper Heatpipe Intel CPU Cooler Extra Case Fans 2 x 12CM Black Case Fan (configured to extract from rear/roof) Sound Card ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD) Wireless/Wired Networking 10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT (Wi-Fi NOT INCLUDED) USB Options MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 4 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS Power Cable 1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead) Operating System Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit w/SP1 - inc DVD & Licence DVD Recovery Media Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) DVD with paper sleeve Office Software NO OFFICE SOFTWARE Anti-Virus NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE Warranty 3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour) Delivery STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI) Build Time Standard Build - Approximately 7 to 9 working days Quantity 1 Cost: £850, excluding new printer.
my 2 cents - I have a nvidia gtx 760 2GB and it runs almost flawlessly almost all the time, I have seen too many complaints about AMD on here for me to recommend it, so I wholeheartidly recommend you keep everything except change the GPU to the 2GB 760
Intel Core i7 4790K 4GHz TURBO 4.4 GHZ Quad Core Processor 16GB Memory DDR3 1866 Mhz Corsair 2000GB SATA 3 hard drive + 240 GB Sata SSD NVIDIA GEFORCE 770 GTX 4GB DDR5 Graphics card Gigabyte Z97X GAMING 3 USB 3.0 motherboard SLi AND CROSSFIRE READY 24 Speed DVD-RW Dual Layer Multi-Format 300mbps Wireless N Adapter Stylish ZALMAN Z11 PLUS USB 3 CASE 650 Watt CORSAIR Gaming Power Supply Unit Windows 7 Pro 64 bit OR Windows Pro 8.1 Licensed and configured and ready to go PLEASE SPECIFY AT CHECKOUT OR EMAIL US WHICH YOU PREFER Just won this beast on ebay, only £121 over my budget of £800. (Could have got it for 820 if someone hadn't bidded it up, grrr. Damn you stranger.)
I Think I'll have to modify my computer desk to fit in the tower though :O And By modify I mean whack away at the shelves and partitions with a mallet until there's just a big hole.
