Originally Posted by
Prothescar
My 2c concerning GPU:
GTX970 is currently a remarkably efficient card from a PPI standpoint. $330-$400 depending on the manufacturer/PCB, and quite strong for that price point. 10-15% better at stock than a GTX780, OC'd 780 can press a reference 970, but then you go into overclocking the 970 and realize that, on average, those chips OC nearly effortlessly to double the maximum of a 780. Add in less heat and power consumption and, well... yeah. Excellent GPU, especially if you decide later on to stick in a second one (Maxwell chips scale 10-30% more effectively in SLI than Kepler/Fermi).
One downside, though: the last 512MB of VRAM on a 970 runs off of a significantly slower bus than the first 3.5k. This means that if you go above 3.5k MB of VRAM often (which is... hard to do and I'd question exactly wtf it is you're doing), you will experience slowdowns as the slower VRAM is accessed. Still faster than if you cap out on VRAM entirely and the GPU needs to try to slug its way over to system memory, but worth considering if you're like... idk, running 3 4k displays in surround with extreme ultra textures on some game. Needless to say XIV won't encounter this issue.
Also worth noting: DX11 is extremely likely to improve your framerate rather than decrease it. Turning on some of the more advanced settings like improved environmental and actor shading may cause some stress, but the API itself runs much better on modern hardware, and streamlining the workload away from the CPU and onto the GPU will improve things as well. Less stress on the CPU will actually improve the performance of certain settings such as reflections (including the new ones coming with DX11) and character LoD/quantity (i.e., better performance in larger groups).