The 570 wins on ultra with MSAA turned on, as stated in an earlier post. Also note though, that graph is from a single player test run. No one runs ultra with MSAA at 1920 resolutions on 64 player maps without an sli or xfire solution. Besides MSAA gives a huge performance hit for little visual quality increase, so I dont see the value in it. I think both are great cards, that will run ultra with MSAA off no problem. I went with a 6970 for the 2gb vram, since the numbers were so similar, and the price was better.
Exactly. I said before the GTX 570 is better with MSAA. For whatever reason. Hardware? Drivers? I don't know...
However, what you said is 100% true. You won't be running MSAA in MP and if you turn off MSAA the gap is significantly narrower if not equal. You can still have Ultra without MSAA. Too many people are marrying Ultra to MSAA as if you cannot turn of MSAA if you use Ultra terraign, shaders, objects etc. It's a bit misleading because the preset is not the only way to go.
I have seen over 1.5GB usage in Battlefield 3 as well. I don't know what it's doing with the memory, but even the DICE devs have stated the game will use extra memory so they recommend 1.5-2GB if you are running ultra and AA. Whether or not it's faster or slower is not the whole story as some people have suggested it's loading more textures and objects in the distance when more VRAM is available.
My point is, the performance is close...very close if not equal. There's more to PC gaming than BF3 too, best to look at other benchmarks too.
the 570 is the better option specifically for BF3, however the 6970 is probably the better investment as it obviously won't be as vram limited for the future.
personally I don't care for any single GPU's performance in BF3 with Ultra settings @ 1080p (I hate having my minimum framerate dip below 60), so I would lower the settings regardless of it being a 6970 or a 570 and thats where performance begins to equalize between the two, so it makes choosing the 6970 even easier for me in this instance. But that's just me, everyone has their own preferences.
I agree with this too. For MP I can play on Ultra, but I dropped down to High and the difference in visuals was there but it was a better experience overall. Felt a lot better during tense firefights and things. Definitely gonna do Xfire for my system around christmas, unless I can pickup a 28nm part by then which I doubt highly.