Nvidia 1070 with 8 GB VRAM or Nvidia 2060 with 6 GB VRAM?

[Grail]

Did I just buy the wrong card? I paid 385 for my MSI Aero ITX 1070. Still unopened and in the box with a good return policy. Not being up to speed on everything tech, I only see now that the 2060’s that I thought were coming, are out. And for the same price or less. The FPS in many games is way up, but what about for five-boxing WoW? Will the 33% extra VRAM of the 1070 be more beneficial for me versus all the neat tricks the 2060 can do? I am hoping to run high settings on my main and low on my team. 60 FPS on Main, 20-30 FPS on team is fine. How much VRAM should be allocated to main and slaves these days for a quality experience on “Reasonable” settings?

I went with an Intel i7 8700 and will have 32 GB memory. SSD for harddrive.

Oh, and resolution? 1080 or 1440 or less is fine actually. I don’t need high resolution for some reason so can be flexible there.

Thanks for any thoughts!

[MiRai]

When you compare the two cards in terms of performance, I'm not sure what you consider "way up," since you can pick several benchmarks where the 2060 is barely ahead of the 1070:

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_RTX_2060_Founders_Edition/11.html
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_RTX_2060_Founders_Edition/15.html
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_RTX_2060_Founders_Edition/24.html
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_RTX_2060_Founders_Edition/28.html

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13762/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2060-founders-edition-6gb-review/7
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13762/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2060-founders-edition-6gb-review/8

https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/geforce_rtx_2060_review_(founder),12.html
https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/geforce_rtx_2060_review_(founder),19.html

These are eight random games I chose out of the three sites' lists, and I didn't avoid any result that didn't fit my initial statement. You can see, in the 3840x2160 benchmarks, that the 2060 is 10%-15% faster than a 1070, and is essentially a 1070 Ti.

On the other hand, and I don't mean to sound like I'm blowing this off, whether or not you need the small bit of extra performance from the 2060, or extra VRAM from the 1070, is something only you can check by monitoring your hardware (http://isboxer.com/wiki/HOWTO:Tweak_your_framerate#Identifying_framerate_b ottlenecks) based on the video settings you want to use, and in the environments you will be playing in. You're more than welcome to hook up the 1070, try it out, and then if you see you're sitting at high loads, but have VRAM to spare, then I guess switch it out for a 2060 (or better).

[Grail]

Thanks MiRai! I am going to stick with the 1070 for the extra VRAM. I am a little tempted to move up to a 2070, but need to save some money for game time and ISBoxer!

[eternaldrk]

I 5-box on a 4K monitor with a 1070 8GB, a Ryzen 7 1700x, and 32GB of RAM. The 1070 is still not the bottleneck with WoW. I have the 5 instances spread evenly across my cores, with the 1 remainder logical core added to my master instance. I run my master at 7 in WoW, and my slaves at 3. 59FPS foreground setting, 21FPS background. My CPU is still the bottleneck because WoW is just so much more CPU intensive. My GPU breaks 50 or 60% usage in more recent and busy zones, but even running the higher resolution the 5 instances don't use more than 4GB of VRAM.

I guess the point is your 1070 is more than enough, especially below 4K resolution. If you want to upgrade, wait until the next gen of NVidia cards comes out, or the AMD Navi series since that's an actual brand new design made specifically for their new 7nm manufacturing process, whereas the Radeon VII is just a shrunk down version of their older design. I'm pretty hopeful the new Navi design will (eventually) be truly competitive with NVidia's high end.