670 v. 7970, assume for a moment

[Rvenger]

Both are great cards, if you plan on keeping for the long haul, the 3gb of VRAM and 384bit bus might help you out.


That powercolor PCS+ you linked is a beast for the price. It should equal or best a 680 at its stock clocks. Forget the lightning at $599.

 

[Elfear]

Not 100% sure, but it's not like the number shown by Afterburner&Co. are meaningful either. One would have to check for stuttering and fps drops to be absolutely sure about a possible VRAM limitation.

Well the jury is still out on that then because I haven't seen any benchmarks by 6950/6970/670/680 owners. Until someone does, the 2GB limit is still a valid point for people planning on playing modded games (Bethesda in particular) at 1600p.

 

[Dbdynsty]

I also don't buy that the 670 is quieter during 95% of the OPs time on the PC. If he's only gaming a few hours a day, then yes, during that time the 670 will be quieter, however, under idle, the 7970 is silent and then 670 has a weird fan sound that's hard to explain. It was enough to make me keep the 7970 even at the 60 dollar price premium. I play about the same amount of games as the OP so the silent solution was a better option for me because price and power consumption weren't an issue to me.

 

[RussianSensation]

I also don't buy that the 670 is quieter during 95% of the OPs time on the PC.

The Asus Direct CU for $420 is quieter than any HD7970 in idle mode, so it will be quieter in all cases.

ASUS 7970's 3-slot design is too much for me, btw.

If you don't want coil whine noise, the PCS+ has "Platinum Power Kit" with better components sounds like an easy choice among HD7970 cards < $500.

It also has a backplate so it won't sag like the Sapphire OC:

While the Gigabyte Windforce is excellent for the 670 since it consumes far less power, it becomes obnoxiously loud once 7970 is overclocked (since 7970 consumes 100W more power in OCed states):

The downside to the PowerColor card is that it doesn't have memory cooling so it won't have good memory overclocking.

Noise levels for the PCS+ are better than GTX680 Phantom edition. But that might be totally different once the card is overclocked to 1200mhz.

A stock GTX670 beats HD7970 in SKYRIM and all Blizzard games, even with 3 monitors:

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2012/05/10/nvidia-geforce-gtx-670-2gb-review/7
Even overclocked, it's hardly faster than a GTX670 OCed. Is it worth $80-100 for that 2-3 fps difference?

If you want to keep this card for 3 years, and use high rez texture mods, then sure get the HD7970. I doubt that 7970 will be able to play next gen games that utilize 3GB of VRAM since those games will have much more advanced shader, tessellation effects, etc. --> slideshow most likely. If you plan on upgrading next year, I'd get a $400 Windforce 3x or Asus DCU $420 and pocket the $80-100 difference and upgrade to a much faster HD8000/GTX700 card. You'll notice much more than a 5% performance difference. There are certain cases where spending $100-150 is well worth it like going from HD7850 to GTX670. Spending $100 over GTX670 yields very little performance increase for games.

Further, regarding future proofing -- a single HD7970 is simply not fast enough for 2560x1600 gaming in demanding games today (Metro 2033, Witcher 2, Crysis 2) and for future games there is no way it will be since in 2-3 years we'll be on HD9000/GTX800 series, etc. Thus, it's unlikely that it will fair better against the 670 for say Unreal 4.0 Engine games. GCN 1.0 has worse tessellation and texture performance and thus it stands to run out of GPU power way before 3GB of VRAM becomes a tangible benefit. The future proofing argument is just not solid enough. More likely than not, both cards will be too slow for next gen games, but 670 saves you $80-100 towards that next GPU upgrade where it will actually matter.

Also, if you are comparing GTX670 to HD7970 (Almost $500), it's odd you aren't comparing the 680 to the 7970.

Honestly, if the decision isn't yet clear to you, that in itself shows that 7970 isn't worth its $80-100 price premium. If it was, you wouldn't even have to think about it. The difference in performance between GTX670 OC and HD7970 OC is far less than it was between GTX580 and HD6970. So how is HD7970 suddenly worth $80-100 more for gaming?

You can wait a couple more days until Max Payne 3 benches leak to get another data point. :awe:

 

[blastingcap]

Enough with the b.s. that 79xx is worse in tessellation when the opposite is true. If in some games 79xx is slower, it is due to some other bottleneck, not tessellation. http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=33486315&postcount=60 in three real games with tessellation 7970 was faster than 680 let alone 670 when all were max oced

 

[RussianSensation]

Enough with the b.s. that 79xx is worse in tessellation when the opposite is true. If in some games 79xx is slower, it is due to some other bottleneck, not tessellation. http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=33486315&postcount=60 in three real games with tessellation 7970 was faster than 680 let alone 670 when all were max oced

With all due respect, the benchmarks which you have linked not only have overclocked 7970 cards but are synthetic in nature. The case where 7970 beat 670/680 in Unigine used 8AA which stresses the memory bandwidth of a videocard, a weak spot for GK104. In AT's benchmarks, 680 pulled ahead in Unigine beause of tessellation. If we shift from synthetics, in more recent games, GTX670 tends to be just as fast as the 7970. On that account, it's difficult to make a case for why HD7970 would prove to be more able to handle next generation of games. Even in today's demanding games, HD7970 runs out of GPU processing power before it runs out of VRAM.

3GB of VRAM isn't a strong a selling feature for a single display. HD6970 certainly didn't benefit from its 2GB of VRAM over GTX580 1.5GB since the GPU ran out of power before it ran into the 1.5GB bottleneck (this may be different if you ran 2 of them in SLI). I predict a similar situation with GTX670/680 vs. 7970. Most games aren't even pushing 2GB, nevermind 3GB.

It's hard to imagine that mainstream games will soon use 3GB of VRAM. HD8000 series is rumored to launch in 2013 already. Instead of 'future proofing' on the high-end, why not buy a 670 now and roll over $100 for HD8000 series with much more GPU processing power?

As we have seen with HD4890 vs. GTX285 vs. GTX460 OC and with HD6970 / GTX580 vs. GTX670/7950 OCed, the best case to future proof on the high-end spectrum imo is to upgrade more frequently. In this particular instance, the HD7970 is not tangibly faster than a 670 but costs $80-100 more.

For example, in 15 months that 670 can be sold for $250 and lopri will have $350 to spend on a next generation GTX770/HD8950 (or whatever they may be called). Surely both of those cards will beat HD7970/GTX670. I don't see why for today's games the HD7970 warrants an almost $500 price.

It will be interesting to see Max Payne 3 benchmarks.

 

[Shmee]

Hey, would you be overclocking the cards? If so, I would go with a 7970, between that and a 670.

Now, consider a third option, the 680 as mentioned, assuming only +50 dollars and in stock. As mentioned, the 670 or 680 are only a 7970 +- 50 bucks or so in terms of price, so I would think it would also be an option for you.

Also, what resolution do you play at? For very high res, some games might hit a Vram wall with 2GB.

EDIT: I reread your OP and notice you have a 30", so I assume 2560x1600, but do you game on the multi monitor setup? For this, if single card is a must, I would go with either a 680 or Oced 7970. 680 OCed would be even better, provided no VRAM limitations.

 

[MrK6]

They're all the same performance-wise, to be honest. I wouldn't get a stock GTX 670 as some of them are apparently loud and have poor QC on the fans (grinding sounds at idle, etc.). I think the $400 investment for a Gigabyte Windforce is a good one. The 7970 really only takes off once you start pushing the clocks, and at that point you should be under water to still really enjoy it. Yeah, it's faster, but eh, for $50-80, probably not much difference to a casual gamer.

 

[blastingcap]

With all due respect, the benchmarks which you have linked not only have overclocked 7970 cards but are synthetic in nature.

I ALSO linked to actual games including hardocp playing 4 popular games, 3 of which have tessellation. 7970 beat 680 let alone 670. If you dislike anandtech's synth tests that is fine but you do the same thing with links to synthetic tests. Yes, canned benchmarks are synthetic as well. I find that hypocritical. See this for why real life tests matter more than canned benchmarks: http://hardocp.com/article/2008/02/11/benchmarking_benchmarks hardocp has my respect due to their real life testing, e.g., pointing out that bf3 is more cpu intense in Real Life situations like multiplayer as opposed to single player.

This was my full post sans quote (and with a typo, ugh):

Can't jump to conclusions like he did about why what's happening is happening. For instance the 7970, even at stock speeds, does fine in the punishing Unigine 3 even with Extreme tessellation. See, e.g., the Extreme results here: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1925/12/ They clocked the 7970 to something more realistic by using the Lightning and it actually matches/beats the GTX680 at 1080p or higher. That's with everything turned up, too... 8x AA 16x AF.

I haven't a clue what the coders of that MMO that I never heard of did in order to get those awful results.

P.S. Anandtech's results at stock clocks are below. You can google for more results and they will say the same. A mild overclock on the 7970 and it catches up to or beats the GTX 680 at Unigine with extreme tessellation and 4x or 8x MSAA and 16x AF at 1920x1080 and especially at 2560x1600, and Anandtech has already shown the stock-clocked 7970 to have faster tessellation than GTX680 in synthetic tests of tessellation power alone, without any other bottlenecks that Unigine may have such as shader power bottlenecks. Even the crappy stock clock of the 7850 allows it to out-tessellate a GTX 580, and if it were clocked like a 7870 it would be within striking distance of the GTX 670 in terms of sheer tessellating power.

I have never heard of The Secret World which is apparently an MMO in beta that apparently runs vastly better on NV hardware right now (I'm guessing NV has delivered better developer support as usual, so we won't see them fix the problem on AMD hardware until later in beta), but in actual games with tessellation like BF3 and Batman:AC and Deus Ex, when all cards are max-overclocked, the 7970 manages to match or beat GTX 680: http://hardocp.com/article/2012/05/14/geforce_680_670_vs_radeon_7970_7950_gaming_perf/3 I think it's an exaggeration to keep saying that Nvidia's architecture is soooo far ahead of GCN. GCN is actually on par in terms of tessellation (even at its pathetic stock clocks the 7970 beats the GTX680), and yes it's slight less efficient at MSAA but it's not the catastrophe as RS made it sound like. (HWC had a MSAA on/off comparison but unfortunately their site is still experiencing problems. And see here for a real-life, non-canned benchmark comparison between stock clocked HD7970 vs GTX680 results: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/03/22/nvidia_kepler_gpu_geforce_gtx_680_video_card_review/5 (GTX680 was 15.7% faster with just FXAA, but drops to 11.9% faster with MSAA, so in your favorite game BF3, adding MSAA actually hurts GTX 680 more than HD7970)

 

[ZimZum]

7970

Its slightly faster out of the box, has better scaling when over-clocked. Plus I would never buy a high end card that lacked voltage control as the 6XX series does.

 

[Cookie Monster]

Im going to say the Asus GTX670 DCII is probably the best card to get at this moment in time.

-Custom built PCB for much better overclocking (1.3GHz should be easy at relatively low fanspeeds but YMMV)
-Custom cooling and backplate for sturdiness
-Low power consumption and less "jumping" around in temperature like Fermi cards (GK104 cards are very cool).
-Memory management on the new nVIDIA cards seem MUCH better than the previous cards hence I doubt we will see it hitting the vram wall anytime soon.
-Its a personal preference but I prefer nVIDIA control panel vs what AMD offers in the form of CCC (Used both before).

Id grab this even if the HD7970 was the same price unless you go watercooling.

When we go back and talk about GPGPU capabilities, I think both are rubbish. On one hand, the GK104 cards have gimped capabilities while for the GCN, the software support is non-existant. By that I mean AMD as usual haven't done anything meaningful for software devs to take advantage of the GPGPU capabilities. They do a lot of talk but when it comes to the real deal they haven't really done much outside of a few things like bitcoin.

 

[SolMiester]

It's funny how this post reads:

If you don't take anything into account, which one would you buy? Well, if I don't take anything into account, I would buy nothing.

If I take into account that a GTX 670 gives me lower price, lower power, lower heat, lower noise, and additional features (phsyx, AO, TXAA), it's pretty obvious which one I should choose.

And I love the "build quality" bullet point. Define build quality please. Is it that feeling you get from trying to flex your card from it's ends and thinking "Hmm, seems pretty sturdy"

Is it that feeling?

My thoughts too!, there is also the 4th monitor if using 3 for surround, and for me, the driver team!

As for build quality, well at only 6mth out for the 7970 and 6 weeks for the 670, i think its a bit early to be assessing that!

 

[SlowSpyder]

Given the criteria in the OP, I don't think there is too much to think about. The 7970 is every bit as fast (faster at reference actually, though not by much) and for a 30" monitor I think 3GB gives you some staying power if you want to crank the eye candy. The problem with the 7970 (and it's not even a problem since we're talking about a couple CCFL bulbs worth of difference) is that is uses more power. OP said he didn't care about, and wants to ignore price. Given that, unless there is some need for CUDA, I don't see how the 7970 isn't the answer.

 

[lopri]

I'm sorry it's late here so I can't post long at this time. I will try to get back with more tomorrow. But it wasn't my intention to turn this thread into yet another typical 7970 v. 670/680 thread where $$ and power consumption matter. To be sure, they are very important factors for just about everyone and for me as well. (Who knew that Charlie got it totally right?)

But I do have a different need/thought and I am not playing those dozens of games benched around the web. (Do you really need to remind me that I'm getting older) I wanted to make that clear in my first post, but apparently I failed to communicate. I know the performance/dollars, performance/watts of these two cards across the board. There is no need for you guys to crop charts alll around the web to convince me because I already know those.

Anyway, time to bed here but will definitely be back with more.

 

[lopri]

I also don't buy that the 670 is quieter during 95% of the OPs time on the PC. If he's only gaming a few hours a day, then yes, during that time the 670 will be quieter, however, under idle, the 7970 is silent and then 670 has a weird fan sound that's hard to explain. It was enough to make me keep the 7970 even at the 60 dollar price premium. I play about the same amount of games as the OP so the silent solution was a better option for me because price and power consumption weren't an issue to me.

At least one person who experienced both cards replied in the thread. I appreciate your input, Dbdynsty. Did you have a reference design 670?

 

[lopri]

-Memory management on the new nVIDIA cards seem MUCH better than the previous cards hence I doubt we will see it hitting the vram wall anytime soon.

How do you think so? Could you back it up a little? It doesn't have to be numbers or charts. Your subjective comments would suffice. (e.g. compared to my previous XXX cards, GTX 670 behaves differently in such such way in game XXX)

 

[Cookie Monster]

How do you think so? Could you back it up a little? It doesn't have to be numbers or charts. Your subjective comments would suffice. (e.g. compared to my previous XXX cards, GTX 670 behaves differently in such such way in game XXX)

Well since I had a GTX480 before, I found testing heaven 2.5/3.0 to be an excellent stability program as running it in default and then maxed would stress the card pretty well even more so than the OC scanner/OCCT/Furmark w/e. By maxed I mean all the settings turned all the way up which was a perfect way to test your memory.

On the GTX480 with max settings on heaven, I noticed it would use up all 1.5GB of Vram i.e. thinking that it was a great tool to test video memory overclocks (similiar to HCI memtest for CPUs).

Now with the GTX680, Im only using 1.1GB after observing it not so long ago when I was fiddling around with overclocking. I think its the same with games, SCII for instance use to chow down 700~800MB of Vram, but now a meager 400MB.

Can others chime in?

 

[Magic Carpet]

Also did you know that with nvidia cards you have external tools such as Inspector to force a lower power state? Up until the 690/670, nvidia raised the clocks when two monitors with different timings are plugged into the same card (AMD does the same thing), which was necessary in the past to avoid flickering, but it is no longer necessary because there's enough performance even at the lowest power state (in fact it is fixed in the GTX 690 and 670, but not in the 680 believe it or not) and the power usage and heat increases significantly. With an nvidia card, I have the flexibility to control power states, with AMD I don't.

For me, one more reason not to go AMD.

Apparently, you have never used ATI Tray Tools? :whiste:

OP,

Get what you want. Each card has its cons and pros. Longevity-wise, I suspect.. the extra 1GB of VRAM will help 7970 to remain more competitive, though.

 

[scaramoosh]

It's a pretty easy choice...

The 670.

AMDs shitty drivers hold the 7970 back.

 

[Tempered81]

I like the Gigabyte 670 OC on the 680 reference board from Nvidia, and the Sapphire 7970 OC Dual X board or VTX3D OC-X board for AMD

 

[JAG87]

Apparently, you have never used ATI Tray Tools? :whiste:

I have but not for a while, but I can assure you it's capabilities are no where near that of NV Inspector.

Example: two monitors, different resolutions. This causes either Nvidia or AMD cards to remain in multi display clocks (which is usually the same clocks used for DXVA)

With NV Inspector, you can force the the card into the lowest power state, and then trigger the DXVA power state using a VPU usage threshold and trigger full 3D power state using a GPU usage threshold.

Scenario:
XBMC running on the second monitor, requires full 3D clocks for rendering it's menus, and DXVA clocks for decoding 1080p smoothly. With NV Inspector, I can:

1) Force my card into 2D clocks with two monitors plugged in
2) Set the usage thresholds at 95%
3) The moment I launch XBMC and the GPU usage goes over 95% (i.e. the menus are not able to render smoothly at 60 fps) Inspector will trigger the card into 3D clocks
4) The moment I launch a movie, the GPU usage drops below the threshold, and if at 2D clocks the VPU usage ever goes over 95%, the card is triggered into DXVA clocks
5) The moment I quit XBMC, card goes back to 2D clocks

Good luck doing that with ATI tray tools. Maximum power saving and minimum heat production, and it's not even necessary anymore with the 670 because the card always runs at it's 2D clocks (nvidia must have finally figured out that it's more than sufficient for everything besides 3D gaming)


Proof:

Not fixed, Multi-Monitor: 550 MHz 1502 MHz
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_680/31.html

Fixed, Multi-Monitor 324 MHz 162 MHz
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_670/32.html

Power consumption:
http://tpucdn.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_670/images/power_multimon.gif

Result:
GTX 670 15W
HD7970 45W
GTX 680 46W

 

[lopri]

Just a quick note @CookieMonster: Framebuffer size are determined by the application. (Unless driver AA is applied) Graphics cards cannot magically reduced the amount of memory needed to render a scene developers coded.

What you're seeing is likely less driver overhead from GTX 680 compared to previous generaion NV cards, which indeed had lackluster memory controllers. (admittedly those are some huge difference which makes me wonder) It is a valuable information you've provided, however, and I appreciate it much.

And @Jag87: You've got clearly what you wanted/needed, but your experience isn't exactly helping me. (see post #1) I kindly request you start a new thread with regard to NV inspector and multi-monitor.

 

[lopri]

@MrK6: Do you know what the average expectation for 7970 OC? I haven't paid attention to it much since I haven't been a fan of GPU OC (for daily use), but your clock is unbelievably high. (1350 MHz? Wow) Is there a thread or database as to how others fare when it comes to overclocking Tahiti?

 

[Elfear]

@MrK6: Do you know what the average expectation for 7970 OC? I haven't paid attention to it much since I haven't been a fan of GPU OC (for daily use), but your clock is unbelievably high. (1350 MHz? Wow) Is there a thread or database as to how others fare when it comes to overclocking Tahiti?

I'm sure MrK6 will chime in but, from what I've seen, most 7970's will hit 1150Mhz pretty easy. A non-reference card with better VRMs and a better cooler will probably hit 1200-1250Mhz. For 1300+ you'd probably need an aftermarket air cooler or watercooling. On the stock reference cooler, mine did 1225Mhz@1.185V.

No convenient database unfortunately but this thread has a lot of overclocking results.

 

[lopri]

Thank you Elfear, always helpful.

Also thanks go to lavaheadache for his thread although he hasn't posted here. I ran into his thread

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2248637

Powercolor PCS+ is out. I thought that card was way too exotic anyway.