How Many Years Do You Expect To Use a Card(s) in Your Main Rig?

[DooKey]

I voted 1-2 years, but it's not unusual for me to upgrade after less than 1 year. It just depends on market availability for the next best thing.

 

[Lepton87]

I'm going to skip the prehistoric times of Voodoo1 and start with at least some capable of pixel-shader.


Radeon 8500 (it was an unpopular choice back then and GF3ti200 was all the rage but I didn't want to have what everyone else and I considered the radeon to be superior)

Radeon 9500pro (I wish I bought Vanilla 9500 and modded it to 9700)

X800XT (everyone recommended 6800GT to this day I still don't know why as X800XT was clearly the faster card)

7900GTO@GTX (GTO was the same card as GTX just with underclocked memory, 1900XT was clearly superior at the time but it was much more expensive)

8800GTS512 (A very good purchase at the time, the biggest leap I have ever seen in a single generation and to boot I bought it at launch for less then the price inflated undercooled 8800GT were going)

4890 (kept it for 2 weeks then it broke down)

5870 at launch wanted the best 480 and 5970 still unavailable
5870CF
6950@6970CF
6990+2x6950@6970CF (QuadFire)
2x7970s (kept those for like 2 days, the coil wine was unbearable)
Titan
Titan SLI
Burning Titan
980Ti + Titan
Burning 980Ti

Such a bad luck as of late....

 

[Sonikku13]

Lately, I've upgraded more often than once a year... 7970, 3x 7970, 290X, Nano, all in the past year or two. I voted one to two years though, as my next GPU will be Vega or Navi based... or the NVIDIA equivalent.

 

[HeXen]

Usually it's ever other gen for me, about 2yrs but sometimes if the card has enough bad assery and my current is starting to struggle...I just go ahead and bite with a smile.

 

[exar333]

I'm going to skip the prehistoric times of Voodoo1 and start with at least some capable of pixel-shader.


Radeon 8500 (it was an unpopular choice back then and GF3ti200 was all the rage but I didn't want to have what everyone else and I considered the radeon to be superior)

Radeon 9500pro (I wish I bought Vanilla 9500 and modded it to 9700)

X800XT (everyone recommended 6800GT to this day I still don't know why as X800XT was clearly the faster card)

7900GTO@GTX (GTO was the same card as GTX just with underclocked memory, 1900XT was clearly superior at the time but it was much more expensive)

8800GTS512 (A very good purchase at the time, the biggest leap I have ever seen in a single generation and to boot I bought it at launch for less then the price inflated undercooled 8800GT were going)

4890 (kept it for 2 weeks then it broke down)

5870 at launch wanted the best 480 and 5970 still unavailable
5870CF
6950@6970CF
6990+2x6950@6970CF (QuadFire)
2x7970s (kept those for like 2 days, the coil wine was unbearable)
Titan
Titan SLI
Burning Titan
980Ti + Titan
Burning 980Ti

Such a bad luck as of late....

Nice!

x800xt here too...grabbed the PCIe version and it was FANTASTIC. First video card I ever paid more than $500 for. The 6800GT was a good performer for the $ but paled in comparison to the x800xt. Especially for HL2.

Never had coil while on any card except my GTX 260s and 285s. Those cards were TERRIBLE and sounded like a screaming dolphin when playing FO3. Was so happy to ditch them and get the 5870...

 

[deanx0r]

Looking back at my purchase history, I used to upgrade almost every 1-2 year. It wasn't until recently that I started to slow down on the upgrades. I have noticed I tend to buy mainstream cards from NVIDIA and top end cards from ATI/AMD. NVIDIA cards purchases are more frequent where as ATI cards tend to last longer.

Voodoo 3 3000
GeForce 256 DDR
Voodoo 5 5500
Radeon 9700 Pro
GeForce 6600GT
GeForce 7800GT SLI
Radeon X1900XT
GeForce 8800GT
GeForce GTS250
GeForce GTX460
Radeon HD6970
Radeon HD7950 (died after a week, returned).
GeForce GTX970

I think overall, I've been happier with NVIDIA cards in general. But buying mainstream cards always left me wanting more from higher tier cards, which lead to more frequent upgrades. My current 970 runs everything smoothly and doesn't make me feel envious of Titan, Fury X or 980Ti cards. I'd only upgrade it when I see 100% better performance from a card of similar range or cheaper, and with Freesync support.

Radeon cards have been disappointing to me. I don't really have hard numbers to quantify this, but they never felt as 'smooth' as NVIDIA to me despite topping benchmark charts. It's just the lasting impression I got out of them, but that's probably because I held so long on those cards.

The most satisfying cards I have owned are:
Voodoo 5 5500
It may not be the fastest cards of its generation, but it ran glide games the smoothest, and I never had hiccups with it. It is just one bad ass card of its time.

GeForce GTX970
I think it is truly the first card I have owned where I could crank everything up and still get butter smooth frame rate.


The most disappointing purchases:

GeForce 256 DDR
That card was a disaster when it came to 3dfx glide games The inferior Voodoo 3 would render perfectly smooth glide games when this one was a choppy buggy mess.

Radeon 9700 Pro
I know it was a revolutionary card for its time, but I didnt think it lived up my expectations. It was a fast card no doubt, but it didn't feel as smooth coming from the 3dfx glide experience.

GeForce 780GT SLI
Baby, that set up was smoooooooth as butter from what I can remember. Too bad it had to be SLI.

Radeon X1900XT.
It's the most I ever spent on a card. I think I bought that card for around $600 at the time, and never got much gaming value out of it. Something about it never lived up my expectations, and I don't ever remember running it smooth in any games.

 

[Lepton87]

Nice!

x800xt here too...grabbed the PCIe version and it was FANTASTIC. First video card I ever paid more than $500 for. The 6800GT was a good performer for the $ but paled in comparison to the x800xt. Especially for HL2.

Never had coil while on any card except my GTX 260s and 285s. Those cards were TERRIBLE and sounded like a screaming dolphin when playing FO3. Was so happy to ditch them and get the 5870...

Glad to see someone agrees with me about 6800GT and X800XT. 6800GT advantage was SM 3.0 but people way overvalued this. First reason is that people compared SM 3.0 to SM 2.0 and always concluded that this was a big deal but X800 series weren't SM 2.0 but were actually 2.0b which narrowed the difference significantly. The second reason is that once SM 3.0 were used more than in a few corner cases I already had the next card that is 7900GTO@GTX which was about 80% faster. About the coil wine I couldn't even run the whole benchmark suite on those two 7970s they were so terrible in that respect needless to say I returned them the next day and that was only because I picked them up from the retailer in the evening.

 

[BFG10K]

I used to buy a new flagship GPU whenever they launched, but I've had this Titan for the last three years, and I'm not even sure I'll bother with Pascal.

Seeing a 970 come out a few months after the Titan and offer the same performance at one third the price gave me an epiphany.

Also due to the fact that I wait for games to be $5, I no longer purchase new releases at launch. I've also voluntarily lowered my target from 1600p / 120 FPS to 1080p / 60 FPS, which means I only need 25% performance of what I needed before.

Combine this with the fact that I replay a vast amount of older games, it's likely I'll only be buying mid-range cards from now on.

 

[Snowshredder102]

I've had my dual 6970's since December, 2011. So close to 5 years now. It will be the last time I keep cards even remotely that long in the future. I haven't been able to max out games at 2560x1600 since probably around late 2013. I'm likely going to be upgrading very soon to the 1070 when it comes out.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I have a HD7770 I have been using for 2.5 years. I play very few demanding games, so am living with it. I may replace it with a current mid level card in a few months when y
they get cheap because of tbe new generation. Overall though, seems like every year or two for the average user is about right.

Edit: No offense meant to those who can afford it and buy top end cards, but I just am not willing to pay more than a hundred or maybe two for a card. I play mostly older games and am willing to live with lower res, settings, and framerates. I am hoping to find a closeout on a current lower/mid level card for slightly over a hundred bucks in a few months. May have to up my ante when the upgraded consoles come out, but the only game I would buy when new are a new Elder Scrolls or Kotor single player games.

 

[crisium]

At this point I want to upgrade when I can get about 74% more performance or so on average. That may seem an odd number, but that means if I upgrade 74% twice I now have 3x the performance I used to. I don't have the discipline to wait for a full 100% between cards to upgrade, but I want a couple of upgrades to really be meaningful.

I have done smaller upgrades before, like R 3850 to R 4850 which is about 50%, and R 4850 to GTX 460 which was probably in the range of 60% at the time. The 4850 I got for super cheap ($95 about 6 months after launch) so I had no problem with such a relatively small upgrade.

But then I did GTX 460 to Fury which is a massive upgrade of several hundred percent. That was out of necessity though, as I would have preferred to have a card or two in between.

Though if the top Vega chip doesn't get me quite 74% I may make an exception if I feel the 4GB of VRAM is holding me back.