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I was thinking of upgrading my video card as a Christmas present to myself, and I wanted to spend around $150. However, I'm not sure if I should do that now or wait until I've saved more money and do a mobo/CPU/RAM upgrade instead. I plan to buy Star Wars: TOR and Batman: Arkham City soon (as well as Diablo 3 whenever that finally comes out). I may also pick up Dirt 3 and Crysis 2 if I find good deals for them. Newegg has sales on the 6850's right now (and free copies of Dirt 2). Any suggestions?

HIS Radeon HD 4870 512MB
Windows 7 Pro 64-bit
OCZ GameXStream 700W
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L
Patriot Extreme Performance (4 x 1GB) DDR2 800
Intel Xeon E3110
160GB Western Digital EIDE
640GB Western Digital Caviar Black SATA
Antec Nine Hundred case
24" monitor 1920x1200

If I had to choose I would say save up a little bit more and wait for Ivy-bridge to come out and then upgrade to that. Your current hardware wouldn't really be able to take advantage full advantage of a current gen card + a 4870 (besides heat issues) is actually powerful enough to hold you off for awhile. By the time you get your ivy-bridge setup and have the money for a GPU 7xxx series will be out anyways!

Do things not run fast enough on your system with that card? I upgraded from a 4830 to a 6950 and found it to be a good speedup, but if you're starting with a 4870 I'm not sure if it'd be a big jump.

If you're not able to run games at the settings that you want, then you could upgrade, but I would go with a 6950 instead of a 6850. The 6850 is a minor improvement over your current card, so I don't think that it would be worth getting. The suggestion to wait until the 7xxx series is probably a good one.

GPUs fabricated at the 28nm process node are going to be very appealing compared to current GPUs. We've been stuck at 40nm since the Radeon HD4770 appeared in April 2009. The process shrink should allow future GPUs to be faster while using less power and generating less heat and noise than currently-available products.

If you're buying a new GPU today, the Radeon HD6950 provides good bang for the buck (as little as $200 after rebate). It should perform well at your monitor's native resolution of 1920x1200.

Since your video card has lost the majority of its resale value at this point, the answer is 'Not until you truly need it to play a new game.'

TurtlePerson2 wrote:

Do things not run fast enough on your system with that card?

The only game that's given me significant trouble is Crysis towards the end. However, from talking to folks here, it seems that was more an issue with the game than my video card. I guess I'll just wait and see how my new games run and only upgrade if I'm truly dissatisfied.