I agree with this. Actually, it's my entire stance on nVidia vs AMD in general.
AMD gives you a lot of performance, and for a great price. They overclock well, but consume a lot of energy. They "scale well" in crossfire, but the microstutter offsets that worse.
nVidia works really great in multi-card setups, and well in single-card as well (of course). But. Price for money, they are except at the GTX 660 at pretty poor spots, really compared to the opposition.
I wouldn't recommend a GTX 680 over an HD7970 for a single card config unless you're after something specific that nVidia offers.
And the strength of the HD7970 is not the memory amount but the bandwidth. While it's wrong to say it "gets better" the more textures and resolutions you throw at it, it suffers less.
thats the first time ive heard ppl say single go amd, multi go nvidia.
why?
Milk was a bad choice.
2013 MMO-Champion User of the Year (2nd runner up)
I really ought to do something stupid one of these days. Like building a 2011 testbench and comparing the two families now, more than 6 months after the initial release. (This is quite important because the reviews may be outright outdated, even if they were correct at the time.)
Oh, sorry. If you can find me a website that has direct number comparisons between the MSI Lightning GTX 680 and MSI Lightning HD 7970, be my guest. I used a site that I know, love, and trust, however, that happens to have a plethora of tests that have been run, as well, comparing many things.
---------- Post added 2013-01-10 at 11:43 PM ----------
I would share the crap out of your reviews, honestly. That is what bugs me about a lot of the reviewers, they get engineering samples (90%+- of the time) and only really ever test them right as they launch... not later on with new drivers or anything.
SLI works much better than crossfire, this is a proven fact, not taking a fanboy stance on this, but crossfire has loads of issues, and often new games dont see fixes for months, crossfire does really well on benchmarks though, 4 7970s will produce higher results than 4 680s or 2 690s, but almost every reviewer will tell you that its not something you want to use every day, while quad SLI has almost no issues running games
going back to a single card, the higher vram and memory bandwitdh on a 7970 give it some great attributes, but the lower overall price means you can improve your computer elsewhere, such as a larger SSD, faster ram, or even a good soundcard
So here's a lil' thing I did. I looked at the techpowerup reviews. The relative performance ones. For these values I looked at the 2560x1600. I took the % of the benchmarked item (100%) and divided by the unidentified GTX 680 in the list. This should produce a number describing the relative performance increase over the GTX 680 on the benchmark.
TL;DR - 100% / GTX 680 * 100 = x%
@ 2560x1600
HD 7970: 105.26%
GTX 680: 106.38%
I'll be the first to admit that I'm not fully sure if I'm correct in my method, so any corrections would be just dandy.
Last edited by Drunkenvalley; 2013-01-11 at 12:06 AM.
and at 1920x1080 ?
Milk was a bad choice.
2013 MMO-Champion User of the Year (2nd runner up)
@ 1680x1050
HD 7970: 98.04%
GTX 680: 105.25%
@ 1920x1200
HD 7970: 100%
GTX 680: 105.25%
@ 2560x1600
HD 7970: 105.26%
GTX 680: 106.38%
Conclusion: We have learnt that at the time of the review, the HD 7970 did not perform as well as the GTX 680. And I'm sorry, but that's really all we've learnt. It's a completely meaningless basis imo for actually comparing the cards. Especially since this doesn't describe where and how the card was better, only that the rounded together number indicated the GTX 680 performed better.