HD6970 VS HD7850 - Page 3

Originally Posted by Atham 

I am thinking about getting the HD 7950 as well. You might want to wait a bit for nVidia to realease the GTX 660/660ti so that the prices go down (hopefully).

Originally Posted by raghu78 

Get a HD 7950 OC card. You can push it to 1050 Mhz in AMD CCC. With MSI Afterburner or Sapphire Trixx you should be able to hit 1150+ Mhz speeds.

Gigabyte HD 7950 Windforce (900 Mhz) - USD 399
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125414
Sapphire HD 7950 OC Dual X (950 Mhz) - USD 409
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102991
This is the best high end card when you look at perf/$. You don't run into bandwidth bottlenecks in demanding games like crysis warhead, metro 2033.GTX 670 is power efficient but at the cost of running into bandwidth bottlenecks and running much slower in these games.

Originally Posted by ShodanMarcus 

Have you read any of the reviews? The 670 crushes the 7950 but you're still recommending it?

Originally Posted by Farih 

Once overclocked the 7850 is faster then an very heavy overclocked 6970.
Here is my 6950 flashed to 6970 @ 1020/1300mhz [a very high OC]

Here an 7850 of mine @ 1165/1500.... My other 7850 can clock even higher [1230/1500mhz]

Also note the 6970 bench was done on a 2600K and the 7850 with a 2550K, even then the 7850 still outperformed that 6970 with ease.

Originally Posted by raghu78 

Some of the crucial points I look at are
1. Most demanding games at the most demanding settings - This gives an idea of how the cards perform when all the resources of the GPU are stressed to the limits - shading power, ROP, bandwidth.
2. Games like call of duty MW2, portal 2, mass effect 3 doing 200 fps at 1080p and 100+ fps at 1600p are useless. Anybody playing at those speeds is not going to feel the difference even if its a 20 fps difference.
3. I look at the following AAA games released in the last 12 months. - BF3, Crysis 2, Skyrim, Alan Wake, Deus Ex, Batman AC, Witcher 2, Shogun 2 Total War, Anno 2070. Skyrim and Deus Ex are not really demanding but very popular games. Rest are really demanding.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1255515/7950-or-gtx-670/50#post_17233881
I will give you a couple of examples of what happens when GTX 600 cards are bandwidth constrained

Metro 2033
1080p very high with DOF (AAA)
http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-7950-overclock-guide/10
http://www.guru3d.com/article/asus-geforce-gtx-680-asus-directcu-ii-top-review/18
HD 7950 (1150 ) - 50 fps
GTX 680 (1137 core / 1267 boost) - 41 fps
Crysis Warhead
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5476/amd-radeon-7950-review/6
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/nvidia-geforce-gtx-680-review/7
2560 x 1600 Enthusiast 4x AA
HD 7950 (800 Mhz) - 31.1
HD 7950 (900 Mhz) - 34.4
GTX 680 (1058 boost) - 30.8
From the GTX 680 review
"While Crysis was a strong game for the GTX 580, the same cannot be said of the GTX 680. NVIDIA is off to a very poor start here, with the Radeon HD 7970 easily outperforming the GTX 680, and even the 7950 is tied or nearly tied with the GTX 680 depending on the resolution. On the bright side the GTX 680 does manage to outperform the GTX 580, but only by a relatively meager 17%.

Given the large gap in theoretical performance between the GTX 680 and GTX 580, as it turns out we’ve run into one of the few scenarios where the GTX 680 doesn’t improve on the GTX 580: memory bandwidth. In our overclocking results we discovered that a core overclock had almost no impact on Crysis, whereas a memory overclock improved performance by 8%, almost exactly as much as the memory overclock itself. "
a HD 7950 OC (1150+) will be much faster than a GTX 680 OC (1250+) given HD 7950 scales better because its not bandwidth constrained.
These 2 games clearly illustrate that the GTX 600 cards are bandwidth constrained. I wouldn't want to spend USD 400 on a high end card which is bandwidth constrained in games today. In future you will come across more such scenarios. GTX 670 will be more power efficient. But that is at the cost being bandwidth constrained in the most demanding games. Mostly it depends on how you look at things.
Maybe you prefer power efficiency. But I don't want to be constrained

Originally Posted by MacLeod 

I guess Im gonna have to admit that I was wro.....wron.......mistaken. I didnt realize the 7850 could overclock quite so well and that it came to life as much as it did with the overclock. So Ill have to suck it up and say that the 7850 does look to be the better card if youre willing to do some overclocking.
Now that being said, do you have to have a non-reference card in order to overclock it this much? My Sapphire 5870 is reference and so the voltage is locked and I cant change it which means I cant overclock it much at all. My old 4850 I could overclock it like mad with stock voltage but my 5870, not hardly at all. How does this work with the 7850's?

Originally Posted by GunMetal 

This might be a silly question but is there any chance that a 7850 can run on a 2GB RAM system (I know 4GB is the minimum).
I'mma buy it next week but I got a bit short in cash and I'm just too excited to wait another more payroll.

Originally Posted by MacLeod 

I guess Im gonna have to admit that I was wro.....wron.......mistaken. I didnt realize the 7850 could overclock quite so well and that it came to life as much as it did with the overclock. So Ill have to suck it up and say that the 7850 does look to be the better card if youre willing to do some overclocking.
Now that being said, do you have to have a non-reference card in order to overclock it this much? My Sapphire 5870 is reference and so the voltage is locked and I cant change it which means I cant overclock it much at all. My old 4850 I could overclock it like mad with stock voltage but my 5870, not hardly at all. How does this work with the 7850's?