Railworks America

The old Radeon 4800 series card in this PC seems to be showing its age. Therefore, I'm thinking of buying a new one. I don't want to spend more than around $250 though.

Does anyone have any suggestions for decent brands that would improve the visuals in TS2016? I need it to meet specs for modern games like the Evil Within etc as well.

Give us a quick run down on what the rest of your machine is like please. Contrary to popular opinion putting a really high end video card in a machine that doesn't support it is largely a waste of money. I just built a pretty racy machine and it's working really well with a GTX650ti certainly way way less than $250.

I guess it would help if I mentioned the specs.

Intel Core i3-3220 CPU @3.30GHZ
ATI Radeon HD 4800 series
8 GB Ram
Windows 7 64 bit

In your price range the Nvidia GTX 960 is your best bet. It's also a good match for your CPU.
Good brands are
EVGA
ASUS
Gigabyte
MSI.
I'm partial to MSI and Gigabyte built GPUs.
I currently have a EVGA GTX 780 and the current version of MSI Afterburner fully supports it. Not all brands are fully supported by Afterburner.
Gigabyte makes great cards, but their OC software is funky sometimes and MSI Afterburner has not had full functionality on a Gigabyte GTX 660 that I used to own.

I have been running an Asus Nvidia GTX 960 Strix OC 2gb card for 6 months and are very pleased with it.

You can overclock a EVGA card and light it on fire and they will replace it.

OK Rich,,,that sounds great, but what about the rest of your computer!

DapperDan wrote:OK Rich,,,that sounds great, but what about the rest of your computer!

It then shortly catches on fire also.

Got a EVGA Geforce GTX 970 a few months ago. Very happy with Railworks as it looks now. Had a GTX 460, so that will tell you where I was at.
Got a free game out of it too. Rainbow6 Seige.

DapperDan wrote:OK Rich,,,that sounds great, but what about the rest of your computer!

Make sure your home insurance is up to date.

I would like to add that, the only reason I didn't go out of my way to push a EVGA card, is that they'd been having trouble with their coolers rattling for over a year.
Mine is one of the "buzzing" ones. I've got some self stick Velcro across the ends of the buzzing heat sink fins. That BTW is actually a fix recommended at EVGA's forums. Strangely enough the 10 cent fix works like a charm.

trev123 wrote:I have been running an Asus Nvidia GTX 960 Strix OC 2gb card for 6 months and are very pleased with it.

The GTX 960 is a very popular card right now in the video editing community because of it's built-in accelerated H265 encoder/decoder. H265 (HEVC) is notoriously very computationally intensive (due to it's high compression). My laptop can playback H265 video in 720p and 1080p resolutions with no problems, but it chokes and stutters badly with 4K video. On the other hand... my laptop has no problems playing back 4K video encoded in H264.

The integrated GPU of the new 6th generation Intel Skylake CPUs also have H265 encoder/decoder acceleration built-in.... although the Intel speeds up the rendering of H265 by a factor of about 2.4 times...Vs.... 3.3 times faster for the Nvidia GTX 960 over non-GPU (CPU-only) encoding alone.

A couple reasons the new H265 codec will eventually overtake H264 in use is it's roughly 2:1 compression ratio advantage (roughly half the file size with no loss in image quality) and also it can be at a lower bitrate (great for streaming over the internet) while maintaining that image quality.

The disadvantages of H265 is higher hardware spec requirements for smooth playback and much longer render encoding times (that's where the GTX 960's H265 encoder drastically shortens rendering times). Another disadvantage is that most video streaming sites including YouTube don't currently accept videos uploaded with H265 encoding. So you must convert the video to another codec like H264 (and thus increasing it's file size and upload time) for those sites to accept it.

The Samsung NX1 is one of the only cameras to record video in H265 right now and many video editors don't fully support the codec yet. My Sony Vegas doesn't yet support it officially... although there is a rigged-job German 3rd party freeware plug-in out there that at least lets you load, playback and convert the video to other formats... but does not encode in it.

My PowerDirector 14 editor on the other hand officially supports loads, edits and renders in the format with no problems.

Ericmopar wrote: they'd been having trouble with their coolers rattling for over a year.

My 980 is only six months old. It has the ACX 2.0 cooler with double ball bearings. Super quiet, I can't even hear it over my case fans.