On the overclock front and in benchmarks at that time, they were competing well vs Titans in multi-gpu. I had a quad setup that benched over 1340/1850 give or take.
1340 on a 7970? That must have been on water and over 1.3V?
I bought an 8800 GTX in December of 2006. I didn't retire it until October of 2010. While its performance fell from top to lower-mid during that period of time I still think I did well with it.
4 years from 8800GTX's launch is when NV released the GTX580.
Geforce 8800GTX 768MB (DX10) -- 53 VP
Geforce GTX 580 1.5GB (DX11) -- 180 VP (
3.4X faster!)
In comparison, 980Ti
max overclocked is about 2.25-2.3X (2.5X in some games I guess) faster than a max overclocked 7970. In a similar time frame, the 8800GTX aged worse than a 7970 did from a performance point of view. This is why I think 8800GTX can no longer be viewed as legendary as it was prior to 7970's history. In 4 years, the 8800GTX didn't become lower-mid-tier but I would say it was actually
low end by our forum's standards. Take a look:
Geforce GTS 450 1GB (DX11) -- 63 VP
Geforce GT 545 1GB (GDDR5) (DX11) -- 56 VP
Geforce GTS 240 1GB (G92) (DX10) -- 50 VP
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2298406
In comparison today, I think of 290/390/970 as upper mid-range so I'd consider 960/7970 as lower mid-range.
I bought a used HD 7950 (original non-boost) as a placeholder card about a year and a half ago. I OC'd it to 1100/1400. Its still pretty decent, but doesn't perform any better than the GTX 960 I have in one of my PCs. Considering when it was released and the fact it was the second from the top AMD card at the time that's not bad at all.
The most foolish thing I ever did in my near constant buying and selling was to purchase an ASUS GTX 670 DirectCU II in summer of 2012 and getting rid of it just two years later. It would be pretty much as good as the GTX 960 I ended up buying for that second PC.
Wow, I don't get your upgrade history but I guess for the types of games you play it might make sense to move from 7950 to 670 but moving from 670 to 960 is odd. I think going to 970 would have made way more sense but that's just me. Your post just goes to show how amazing the 7970 aged because by late 2015, a GTX960 OC
still cannot outperform an overclocked 7970
overall.
This is even more crazy. 8800GTX cost at least $600 US on launch, and by November 2010,
it was easy to find GTX460 for $160 and HD6850 for $180, about what the 960 costs today without a sale. 960 OC is slower than an HD7970 OC and has 50% less VRAM in the base model. In contrast, GTX460 and HD6850 OC were easily 2X faster than the 8800GTX 4 years from its launch.
But it also proves just how horrible the sub-$200 desktop discrete GPU space has become. The new $200 sweet-spot is now $280-350 occupied by cards like 970/390/290X. I think moving forward, the sweet spot for GPUs will be $300-350 as $200 bracket is too much of a compromise in performance. Then again, if we keep getting more console ports, it might be possible to max most games out at 1080P @ 60 fps on a $200 soon. :awe:
my 660 ti and 760 have not aged well to say the least, despite pulling a 7k 3dmark firestrike graphics score with a stable OC on my 760...
Good lesson to not pay attention to inter-brand comparisons of 3DMark scores because there is no game in the world that's made on a 3DMark game engine. Until that happens, 3DMark is best to use as a GPU overclocking stability test.
660Ti/760 were slower against their competing AMD cards to begin with, had less VRAM and worse overclocking scaling/headroom. A 7950 easily dusted them at release and ever since that point. Don't fall for the brand name marketing hype next time. I really can't recall any time when 660Ti/760 even made sense as 7950 was always a better card overall, unless you specifically played games that run way better on NV like WoW or needed NV specific features like PhysX.
I hope the 660Ti / 760 were for separate systems because 760 is barely faster than the 660Ti, about 7-8%.