Is 7870 the real no brainer for a 460 1Gb upgrade

[superccs]

I have been tossing around getting a 7950 or 7870 for the last couple weeks and cant quite decide.

My concerns are just to get some more frames without increasing my power envelope. My $200-250 budget will exclude the GTX 660 which IMO is a broken card...
(Retailers: Microcenter, Fry's, Newegg, Amazon or whatever in Los Angeles)

My current GPU is a MSI 460 1Gb OC'd to 800 (which is a very decent card BTW)
My CPU is an AMD X6 1055 Thuban @3.6Ghz

I play mainly World of Tanks at 1080p

Thanks, for your help.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

1090T + WoT = bottleneck

I wouldn't waste the money if your main intent is WoT performance gains, at least not on that platform.

 

[notty22]

What performs better on WOT"s, AMD or Nvidia? I don't know.

I just bought a gtx 660 at best buy, they are on sale for 209.00. If people don't know, starting Sunday BB are going to price-match on-line stores. Such as Amazon and newegg and some others. No ebay.

The 660 is a full chip with no disabled parts, built on the GK106 chip, by the way.

As GK106’s launch vehicle, GTX 660 will be the highest performing implementation of GK106 that we expect to see. NVIDIA is setting the reference clocks for the GTX 660 at 980MHz for the core and 6GHz for the memory, the second to only the GTX 680 in core clockspeed and still the same common 6GHz memory clockspeed we’ve seen across all of NVIDIA’s GDDR5 desktop Kepler parts this far. Compared to GTX 660 Ti this means that on paper GTX 660 has around 76% of the shading and texturing performance of the GTX 660 Ti, 80% of the rasterization performance, 100% of the memory bandwidth, and a full 107% of the ROP performance

 

[Midwayman]

Went from a gtx 470 to a 7870LE and its quite a upgrade.

 

[Dark Shroud]

If you can't manage a 7950 then yes you want the PowerColor PCS+ HD 7870 Myst Edition. It's basically a 7930.

 

[Keysplayr]

My $200-250 budget will exclude the GTX 660 which IMO is a broken card...
(Retailers: Microcenter, Fry's, Newegg, Amazon or whatever in Los Angeles)

How do you figure?
Just curious. Because for the money, it's one of the best cards I've ever owned.

 

[superccs]

1090T + WoT = bottleneck

I wouldn't waste the money if your main intent is WoT performance gains, at least not on that platform.

WoT performance has always been a mystery to me as essentially no one includes this game in their analysis, so you are saying the game is way CPU bound?

At what price point does the 7950 become a good option? What versions of the 7870 or 7950 should I avoid or go for?

 

[Midwayman]

WoT performance has always been a mystery to me as essentially no one includes this game in their analysis, so you are saying the game is way CPU bound?

At what price point does the 7950 become a good option? What versions of the 7870 or 7950 should I avoid or go for?

For some strange reason WOT seems to use a ton of cpu. I had a gtx470 and upgraded from a c2d e8400 to a i7-2600k and saw a *HUGE* increase in frame rate. Particularly minimum frame rate. It certainly doesn't look like a game that should be hard on hardware.
Here's a russian page with some benches on various CPUS. (lots of graphs, you'll hve to wade through it.)
http://www.overclockers.ru/lab/4994...ovlenie_0.8.0_-_novyj_rendering_i_fizika.html

 

[BallaTheFeared]

WoT performance has always been a mystery to me as essentially no one includes this game in their analysis, so you are saying the game is way CPU bound?

At what price point does the 7950 become a good option? What versions of the 7870 or 7950 should I avoid or go for?

It was, but they've updated the engine it seems... There are most definitely new graphical settings that weren't there when I had my i5-2500k and 470 SLI setup and necked badly.

I wanted to double check my "facts" so I loaded it up and with the new settings in my first game I didn't have much cpu necking and my 470 @ 800 was capable of keeping the game at 60 fps with sync for pretty much the duration.

I'm going to run another game or two, I'll post some cpu usage and osd info for you.

 

[Termie]

I upgraded from a GTX460-768 to an HD7870. It was a huge upgrade (~100% faster), but at current pricing, the HD7950 is more compelling.

That being said, I agree you might get some CPU bottlenecking with your current rig.

And if WoT is your game, why not get one of the Nvidia cards with free in-game credits? The 660 is a bit cheaper than the 7870, and will perform within 5-10% of it at stock.

 

[Midwayman]

So reading that, your current card will have 24 min and 44 ave at 1080p given enough cpu.
Your cpu will do 24/45. So they are really well matched for WOT. You'll have to upgrade both in order to see an improvement.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

So I ran two matches, the first I played aggressive and went into a large dog fight, the second I stayed back and sniped.

Match 1:

Match 2:

At the start of the match I was cpu limited, all the dust from the tanks starting off was dropping my fps into the 40s.

For the most part my i3 was capable of delivering 60 fps, though all my mins were directly related to cpu bottlenecking - they weren't drastically low however. My lowest outside of the start was 48 fps from the cpu bottleneck.

The 470 /w overclock was for the most part capable of maxing the game (As far as I can tell, you used to be able to get MSAA, maybe I'm missing a setting as now I can't enable it). A few times it would drop to around 58 fps with 99% usage, but that was the lowest direct gpu limited fps I saw.

Here are the settings I used:

I believe the i3-540 has a bit more IPC than the 1090T, what is your cpu running at? I think you would see a fair gain with a 7870, but I can't say for sure each system is of course different.

Edit: I see you are at 3.6GHz on your 1090T, you might be a more limited by it than I was with my i3 (it's not very threaded at all), but the 470 uses more clock cycles I think, well at least it did against the 40nm AMD chips, but I think this gen AMD actually has more cpu overhead than Kepler but I could be wrong. Something to look into for sure though

 

[Midwayman]

I believe the i3-540 has a bit more IPC than the 1090T, what is your cpu running at? I think you would see a fair gain with a 7870, but I can't say for sure each system is of course different.

From the Russian site analysis, it is heavily dependent on single threaded performance. They don't have your cpu but it looks like around 34/56 min/av. Intel cpus are a heavy favorite for WOT.

 

[superccs]

Well this is all shitty news :/ Very good technical advice (thank you), just crap news as far as my simple GPU solution is concerned.

@Midwayman: what site were you getting this info from?
@Ballathefeared: Can I do a system test to see where I am falling short with my set up? I have coretemp, and GPU monitor + dual monitors so I should be able to watch my usage in realtime. If I am cpu bound what should I look for with what settings and the converse if I am GPU bound, what should I set it to and look for?

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Basically to find out if you're cpu limited just play the game and watch your gpu usage, frame drops /w gpu usage drops as pretty much tell tale signs of cpu limited situations.

If your 460 isn't bottlenecked but your fps aren't very high either, a few graphical settings settings (take off vsync) can often be cpu intensive.

To test the cpu I would probably max everything, then turn off some of the more gpu intensive settings that don't also require clock cycles (like shadows do), try to lower settings like foliage/flora/postprocessing and such until you see a clear indication that you are not using your gpu fully.

At that point find out what your fps are, and then decide which gpu matches that best (if you aren't upgrading your platform) and go from there.


Just another thought, are you overclocking your cpuNB? That helps a lot of the times with Phenom II, and the 1090T has a really good one typically they can do 2.8-3.2GHz.

 

[superccs]

Basically to find out if you're cpu limited just play the game and watch your gpu usage, frame drops /w gpu usage drops as pretty much tell tale signs of cpu limited situations.

If your 460 isn't bottlenecked but your fps aren't very high either, a few graphical settings settings (take off vsync) can often be cpu intensive.

To test the cpu I would probably max everything, then turn off some of the more gpu intensive settings that don't also require clock cycles (like shadows do), try to lower settings like foliage/flora/postprocessing and such until you see a clear indication that you are not using your gpu fully.

At that point find out what your fps are, and then decide which gpu matches that best (if you aren't upgrading your platform) and go from there.


Just another thought, are you overclocking your cpuNB? That helps a lot of the times with Phenom II, and the 1090T has a really good one typically they can do 2.8-3.2GHz.

Ill give that a try this evening... If I am playing and my FPS are <60 and my GPU usage is not 100% is that an automatic sign of CPU bottlenecking?

BTW its a 1055 not 1090T so its all FSB overclock (260Mhz). I have my NB running at 2.2Ghz currently but am not against bumping it up a few as I keep hearing that that boost in cache speed really helps.

 

[Midwayman]

@Midwayman: what site were you getting this info from?

http://www.overclockers.ru/lab/4994...ovlenie_0.8.0_-_novyj_rendering_i_fizika.html

Posted it up earlier.

 

[superccs]

http://www.overclockers.ru/lab/4994...ovlenie_0.8.0_-_novyj_rendering_i_fizika.html

Posted it up earlier.

Gah, wow that game rapes AMD CPU's no wonder I chunk along at 40fps...