Hi, Everybody:

I have some pretty big projects I have made over the years and they are slowing to a crawl. I am thinking of upgrading my system, but I wanted to start with the graphics card first. I am not certain what kind of impact it will have. If it doesn't make much of a difference, I would rather wait and upgrade everything in the PC altogether.

Can anyone give me an idea what kind of performance increase I might see? Here are the current specs to my system:
i7-4970K, 32GB RAM, GTX 770 4GB RAM

My larger projects are about 1 Million polygons with about 4GB of textures. Very painful to work on, even in "Quick Mode". Goofy me, I actually made a library once with over a 500 fully textured and unique books, sprinkling them around to number over 2,000, with all the furniture paintings, cabinets, pencil holders with pencils, etc. I ended up flat rendering the populated shelves and using those textures for a polygon face for each shelf. Looks OK from a distance, but the that project is still over 600K polygons.Oy vey!. 

If I put I replace the Geforce 770 with a GeForce 1080, will I see any difference when manipulating or working with objects? It seems like it would have to be at least 3X faster to be truly usable in the "High" quality mode, but even a 50% improvement would be welcome. What can i reasonably expect? I am not too worried about render times...

Anyone out there with practical experience about what to expect? Used GeForce 1080 and 1070 Ti cards seem pretty reasonable in price to upgrade to for even a modest improvement. Anything that can get me going a little better would be great for now.

Thanks, everybody. I look forward to hearing from you.

I can't speak from experience of going from the card you mentioned, but a 1080 card is a very good card indeed, and many of my projects are much larger than yours with no issues at all even when working with a 1070 card as I have on my secondary machine.

If you could post even one of your projects perhaps a person or two could load it in and give you an absolute answer -- since the sheer size of polygons alone might not tell the whole picture (while I have many projects with several million polys that are no issue to work with, I also have a project or two of much smaller sizes that bring my system -- a Titan card - to its knees.  I *think* it's a question of sub-objects there, but it also might be transparency, but in either case it's not the size of the project that makes the biggest difference).

Otherwise the best guess is you'll be very happy with upgrading.

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

I have upgraded an older system (i7 2600K) with a new GPU which had more VRAM, and that is the first change that is effective, especially in your case when you upgrade from several generations back.  

Your CPU is fine and it's good you have 32 GB of RAM. After a better GPU more RAM is also a good investment. 

Project size is a mix of polygons and texture size. With textures getting larger this often becomes more of a factor than polygon count. So it may help to consider reducing textures for some elements in your scene.

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I had gtx 980 a 2 years ago, i upgraded to a 1080 ti, and even though it wasn't a huge a generation jump i was very impressed with the performance and of course the extra vram. Your rig is good, if you upgrade the gpu you will certainly see a huge boost

And also a 1080 would probably have 3 times the performance of a 770, the 1080 is gpu is above 1.2 ghz and i would assume the 770 is well below the gigahertz

You have projects with millions of polygons? Wow. Well, ordered a 1080 card. I'll let you know how it goes.

I have a GTX 1080 (8Gb VRAM), which runs most projects with no latency. However, running a backyard party scene with multiple characters and a complex set, does introduce some latency.
I plan to upgrade to a card with at least 11 Gb of VRAM. However, with the new cards in play based on new architecture, I may wait because I definitely want RT raytracing ability, or some approximation thereof, so that I can use the IRay plugin for animation.

Nathan