So I'm planning on saving up in hopes of getting my partner a new graphics card for their computer for their birthday in August... what would you guys recommend based on their specs? They have an i5 4690k @ 3.5GHz and 16GB of RAM on Windows 10 Pro. They're running on a GTX 970 at the moment, which is struggling to play Minecraft currently. :( I'd like to get something good but also something that's not extremely expensive but something that'll run well. I hope this is the right sub-forum, since it's technically asking for advice? EDIT: fixed a typo
Minecraft's actually more CPU-heavy, at least the Java edition. And unfortunately, this CPU is getting pretty old already (which I can confirm as I'm currently stuck with the non-K version). If you don't want to get an entire new motherboard and probably have to reinstall your OS, I guess you could upgrade it to an i7 4790k. As for the actual question, I've seen a few people recommend either a GTX 1060 or an AMD RX 580. Though with the new Nvidia stuff, I have no idea if that's still up to date, especially given that used GPUs off of Ebay are probably coming from cryptocurrency miners and way too used in my experience.
Hmm. They’ve had this processor for like 5 years, I think they said? Maybe a new processor is the way to go, as opposed to a new gpu...
The new AMD CPUs are coming out in July, I think? But anything that's not a fourth-gen Intel Core CPU's gonna also require changing the motherboard, unfortunately.
If you feel up to it, you could see if overclocking the cpu would help, you would probably want to get a new cpu cooler for that though, a high performance one.