It won't be by the time I can afford it.....probably end up dropping about the same amount that I dropped on the 6970. My limit is around 400 on a GPU and the 7 series will be out by the time I can dig up another 400 to drop on PC stuff.

Sounds like a plan mate. Think I'm going with the 570, then maybe get a 6xx card in a year or two

Ya I am just planning for next year end of this year around when Hitman comes out.

580GTX here on a 2560x1440 resolution, rock solid stable, no CTD. Running everything on ultra and a lot of things tweaked even further in the ini after using the nvidia tweak guide, such as ugrids (set to 9), etc. Currently I'm not running mods, but have run 15 or so before with negligible slowdown. The 1.5 patch did drop my FPS - presumably the grass shadows, however it's still nice enough for it not to be a problem.

Obviously your other PC components are going to factor into things, but if your sig is up to date then you shouldn't have any forseeable problems.

At launch it was a problem as you say, it used to constantly crash and textures were missing, but that was fixed by the 4GB exe for me.

Question for you Nvidia guys: Do any of you get the occasional flickering water bug after fast travel on your Nvidia cards? I would say it has like a less than 5% chance of happening and a little moreso if you are fast traveling to say Dawnstar right on the coast.

No, not that I've noticed on mine.

I assume it an ATI issue but def a known one since you can find a disclaimer on all Water texture mods.

Thanks for the post mate. Yea my rig is as my sig, pretty decent at the moment for all games, just fancy an upgrade to UP my visuals for the likes of bf3, batman AC, and more visual mods for skyrim

Only time and place I have ever seen the flickering water is .....after the 1.5 patch and so far only in Riften. Using EVGA 580's.The other thing i see on occasion in Rift is the Low rez textures, looks like soup...lol

I get it in Riften sometimes in Whiterun but most often in Dawnstar sometimes that low rez water like you said. Seems like a game bug then...def not a dealbreaker you can always go inside and back out tends to fix it if not a reload of the game def does. Thanks for the feedback Camaro..........sry to hijack Bigdaddy

It's cool I had been wondering myself

Ok so I can buy a Gigabyte GTX 560ti 448 model for ￡160 or Aria, or an EVGA GTX 570 super clocked for ￡216....

Bit of a pickle.

Gigabyte makes an ok MB but I have never had a card however my 8800 EVGA went through about a YEAR of played time in World of Warcraft(heavily modded) alone on top of all the other much more graphically dependent games that I played whenever not idling in Ironforge. Here is the best part....it is sitting in a friends backup rig and still works flawlessly going on like 7 years now. EVGA all the way imo.