Need advice on a video card purchase

I've been out of the game for about 2 years now so I'm not really sure what to purchase.

My system was pretty solid when it was new, but is obviously pretty old now however it still meets all of my needs for what I do. The only shortcoming is I would like to upgrade to a newer high resolution monitor. I was originally looking at a 27" QHD, but not am thinking of getting an UltraWide QHD or possibly even a 4k IPS panel. I've started doing a lot of photo editing and want the extra size as well as resolution since I'm currently working with a 22" 1680x1050 BenQ.

My current card is one I picked up off the classifieds here and is a 480GTX. It's fine for everything I do except that it maxes out at QHD and won't even support ultrawide (3440x1440).

My question is, what kind of card should I be looking at to run this monitor without any issues? Also, should I be looking to upgrade my whole system or can I just get away with a card for now. Money isn't as available for this stuff anymore and I'm going to be spending a good chunk of it on the monitor itself so I'm trying to minimize my expenses.

I very rarely game and when I do it isn't anything super intensive. Maybe some Diablo 3 or similar. I don't really intend to game at the monitor's native resolution as I'm sure that would require a pretty serious card or possibly even 2 in SLI.

Thoughts?

Edit:

Realized my current system isn't the one in my signature...
It's a i7 920 I have Oc'd to 3.33 ghz with 12gb of ram, an SSD + HDD, and the GTX480.

I say R9 290 or Nvidia 970 or 980.
Beast cards in their own right.

Expensive, but powerful yes
Assuming that the R9 290 is still a few bucks more than a 280x anyway.

Those cards were on my radar, but I was hoping to avoid spending that much. I don't game much, if at all, and definitely not picky about maxing out settings. Won't those cards be overkill for photo editing and maybe some light video editing?

tachi1247 said:

Those cards were on my radar, but I was hoping to avoid spending that much. I don't game much, if at all, and definitely not picky about maxing out settings. Won't those cards be overkill for photo editing and maybe some light video editing?

Click to expand...

Yeah, probably

I use my 7850 to game actually. Skyrim 1400X1050 with lighting mods and a few environmental mods = ~42-50 FPS. Maxed everything too.
The 270x I have would be better at that as well.

I don't know how a 270x would preform for video editing though.. maybe a 280x instead?


Nvidia might be better here because of Phys-x...
I'd wait till others chime in as well