New graphics card on a budget

[Mr_Random_Guy]

I have always used a nvidia geforce gt 640 in my desktop since i got it, its always ran the games i needed it to without a problem. However i am planning to get Mirror's edge catalyst when it comes out and i fear that the 640 just wont be able to run it. With that in mind i'm thinking of buying a new gpu basically solely for this game and as such i will paste the minimum and recommended gpu settings below. Any advice or suggestions on a new gpu would be appreciated but please bear in mind price is a big factor for me so somewhere closer to the minimum requirements would probably be better although i do want to be able to run it smoothly without it looking awful.
Minimum: NVIDIA GeForce® GTX 650 Ti 2GB or better / AMD Radeon™ R9 270x or better
Recommended: NVIDIA GeForce® GTX 970 4GB or better / AMD Radeon™ R9 280x 3GB or better

 

[keynes]

Without budget and psu it would difficult to give advice. Also knowing the rest of your spec will help.

 

[Mr_Random_Guy]

Amd 6 core 4 GHz or there about (I can't remember the name of the top of my head) 16 GB of ram and a 500w psu. Budget...I don't really know definitely no more than £200 and preferably towards the £100 - £150 mark but like I said I would like it to run smoothly without looking awful

 

[Oussebon]

If you right click My Computer and select properties, it will probably tell you your CPU


A budget would be very useful to know as well. There are GPUs from £90-100 kind of area (GTX 750 ti) which slightly exceed the minimum, while a GTX 970 might be more like £250+

 

[Mr_Random_Guy]

Someone suggested a nvidia geforce gtx 960, its in my budget and you can get it with 4gb of memory
oh and cpu is amd fx(tm)-6300 six core at 3.5ghz
Budget...I don't really know definitely no more than £200 and preferably towards the £100 - £150 mark but like I said I would like it to run smoothly without looking awful

 

[Oussebon]

Mmm.. prolly not what you want to hear, but your CPU's technically below min spec:
http://hexus.net/gaming/news/pc/92267-mirrors-edge-catalyst-pc-system-requirements-published/
(your cpu vs min spec) http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/699?vs=1281
Not by much, and I would imagine it will still run the game, but maybe not terribly well.

Someone in the Hexus comments was saying they played the beta and it was pretty taxing on their CPU. Although a) that's just one person and b) it was a beta so the release product might be more optimised.

It does, however, beg the question of how good a GPU you should bother getting. If you're buying it just for this game and your PC chokes on the game due to CPU performance, you might not get as much extra benefit from a £200 GPU over a £100 one. I'm sure there'd be some, but not as much as you'd be paying for.

I would suggest you wait for the game to be released and see what people say about it then. You can often find benchmark-reviews of titles that show you how much it's affected by CPU performance.
e.g. http://www.techspot.com/review/1148-tom-clancys-the-division-benchmarks/page5.html
and http://www.gamersnexus.net/game-bench/2182-fallout-4-cpu-benchmark-huge-performance-difference
You can see some games aren't too fussed, while others really do care about how good the CPU is.

If it turns out that your CPU would actually be fine for that game, then perhaps treat yourself to one of the R9 380x GPUs you see for just under £200 (many are more than £200 but if you shop carefully you can see some for less). If your CPU is going to struggle, perhaps a GTX 750ti at about £90-100 would make more sense

A word on GTX 960s. The 4gb version of the GTX 960 rarely offers any advantage over the 2gb version. Another way of looking at it is that it's, say, 10% more expensive and won't give you 10% more fps most of the time. See:
http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/1888-evga-supersc-4gb-960-benchmark-vs-2gb
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-nvidia-geforce-gtx-960-2gb-vs-4gb-review
If you're buying a card just for this game, check to see if the 4gb version offers any advantages before making the purchase. Which would mean waiting for release and for someone to benchmark it

 

[Mr_Random_Guy]

Wow I never checked the CPU minimum I just assumed mine was powerful enough... This game really is going to be taxing to run. I think my CPU should be fine and I was going to wait for the initial price to come down anyway so I'll keep an eye out for benchmarks etc and go for the gpu to suit. The game is meant to look really beautiful though and I feel like getting a cheap GPU and running it at lowest settings will diminish that and take away in my opinion what is going to be one of the beat features of this game.