What do you consider the best deal in used graphics cards?

[Madpacket]

Async compute won't be much of a factor through this current generation, as far as major and indie titles are concerned. They have to account for the 100s of millions of Keplers, Maxwells, and even APUs in the installed base. It'll matter for benchmarks, but that's more of an epeen thing. I'm still rocking SLI 980TI Lightnings @1500MHz, and they have no problem with keeping up with SLI 1080s, for half the price.

That may or may not be true, too hard to tell at the moment. And depends on what you mean by "current generation" Given the nature of the existing but more importantly upgraded gaming consoles, async will likely play a bigger role. The older GCN hardware was limited with dedicated hardware asynchronous computing, much more so than the latest GCN hardware. I suspect more emphasis will be put on using asynchronous hardware in the latest console GPU's, especially on the Neo paired with the anemic Jaguar based CPU. Also developers have had some time to get a better handle how to develop with Vulcan and DX12, so we should start seeing games created with this in mind rather than DX11 created games with crappy DX12 ports tacked on.

Doom may be one game but it's a shining example of what's capable and a glimpse at what's coming. The industry doesn't care about old Caymen, Kepler, Maxwell, and to a lesser degree GCN 1.0 based hardware, they'll design with the strengths of the consoles first and then the leftover optimzations go to PC ports. The more work required to optimise for PC ports the less likely it'll be implemented.

However Maxwell 2 based cards should fare well with some optimisation due to the quasi hardware based async implementation (Nvidia has the resources to optimise and they generally only optimise for the current architecture to keep the planned obsolescence moving) but I suspect anything older will suffer, including those 980Ti's and my 970

 

[gammaray]

Grab what your money allows you to buy according to your need. Waiting to save 10-20$ is a bad idea imho.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

So, would it even be worth upgrading from some 7950 3GB cards, if that's what I already have?

Was looking at GTX1060 (MSI Gaming X 6GB) for $290, and RX 460 (Gigabyte WindForce 4GB OC) for $135.

Just picked up a used GTX 980 ti for $325.00 shipped and at stock speeds i can generally expect to double the performance of my 7950 (and my venerable 7950 aint no scrub).

My 7950 lasted me a little over 3 years (and will live on in my wife's sims rig) and i would expect the 980ti to do the same (given that Pascal is largely just a shrunk + sped up Maxwell and 6 gigs of ram should prove plenty for the timeframe).

 

[MagickMan]

And depends on what you mean by "current generation"

Async compute won't matter through Pascal, it isn't even on 99% of devs' radar. Projects that started with the updated tools won't be released into the wild until late 2017 at the very earliest, more likely 2018-19. Gearing up for that now is sheer folly. It's better to put your $ into what's good bang for your buck now, like a used or refurbed top-end Maxwell, overclock the sh** out of it, and save for Volta.