Quote:
Originally Posted by
Benchmarksli 
That's not accurate...It depends on whic games you play. The 7970GHz and GTX 680 are neck and neck @ 2560x1600.
This review was done Aug 4th. Pay no mind to the lightning and DCii numbers. I pulled these for the reference GTX 680 vs 7970GHz benchmarks.
^ It all depends on which games you play.
You are correct in that currently what games you play makes a difference between which card is better. The 7970 still pulls ahead for myself as I don't replace my video card every year, sometimes I might go as much as 3 years. Why this matters for myself is longevity, I already have seen situations of the GTX 680 stalling out on heavily modified games, because its lack of VRAM and memory bus at higher resolutions. Now if I were to wait for the GK110 cards to hit next year I am comfortable saying it wouldn't be an issue, Nvidia would be insane (they were with their current gen) to keep a 256-bit bus and 2GB. I am not going to wait another year, my GTX 470 has served me well but it is time for a new card.
The way I look at it is this; The 7970 and 680 are on par with each other, they are fantastic cards, and in unmodified gaming situations they trade blows, as they should. As soon as you start running modifications, ultra high resolution texture packs, etc, the 680 starts to fall behind. I am also concerned with future gaming and what having a 256-bit bus and only 2GB of memory is going to do in terms of limitations down the road. I honestly believe Nvidia chose the 256/2GB configuration to almost force high end users to upgrade in the next year or so when the newer generation games running the likes of Unreal Engine 4 come out. I see those people hitting a wall, I really do. Now it very well could be possible that we have a technology breakthrough that allows engines to render marvelous graphics with little strain, but I don't see that happening just yet.
So out of concern for longevity and what the future of gaming holds AMD's 384/3GB configuration wins. If the GTX 680 had the same configuration I might have gone that way, but the only other 680 option is the 4GB version and it just isn't worth the premium! Especially considering they kept the 256-bit bus.
EDIT: To highlight this we can look at the memory bandwidth of the two cards.
GTX 680: 192.2 GB/sec
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-680/specifications/
AMD 7970 Ghz Edition: 288 GB/sec
http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/7000/7970ghz/Pages/radeon-7970GHz.aspx#3
A difference of 33.27%, in favor of AMD. I see this difference being a nice advantage in the next year or so.
Edited by PostalTwinkie - 8/12/12 at 1:42pm
