http://techreport.com/review/23981/radeon-hd-7950-vs-geforce-gtx-660-ti-revisited
EDIT:
First news post, should this have gone in Graphics General?
Edited by jbmayes2000 - 12/5/12 at 7:36am
Quote:
Doesn't seem that long ago, back in August, when the GeForce GTX 660 Ti first hit the scene and squared off against the Radeon HD 7950. That match-up ushered in a new generation of competition among ridiculously powerful video cards at around 300 bucks. Nvidia had the advantage going in, since it was facing off against an already established competitor; it knew what the GTX 660 Ti had to do in order to win. AMD, however, has been unusually feisty lately, and it had other ideas. At the last minute, the Radeon team rolled out a new BIOS that added dynamic clock speeds to the 7950. The result was an incredibly slight win for the GTX 660 Ti on points, but in the end, we threw our hands up and said the differences mattered little.
We're vaguely astonished by how much things have changed since then.
Of course, we have a new crop of games for the holiday season, headlined by titles like Borderlands 2, Hitman: Absolution, Sleeping Dogs, and Assassin's Creed III. AMD's newfound aggressiveness means many of these games are part of its Gaming Evolved program, so they should run very well on Radeon graphics cards—and maybe, you know, not so well on those pesky GeForces.
In fact, accentuating its stronger ties to game developers, AMD has taken to bundling a trio of these games with its Radeon HD 7950 cards. Cramming that sort of gaming goodness into the box with a graphics card certainly changes the value equation.
As if that weren't enough, AMD has also released Catalyst 12.11 beta drivers that promise a roughly 15% across-the-board performance increase for its 7000-series Radeons. New drivers often bring performance gains for individual games, but general improvements of that magnitude are uncommon. AMD tells us it has employed new insights in tuning its relatively young GCN architecture.
What's more, Windows 8 is out, and we've transitioned our test rigs to the new operating system.
Add up all of these changes, and you have a recipe for realignment in ongoing battle for GPU supremacy. Are we still at rough parity, or have AMD's bold moves allowed it to push into the lead? We've deployed our infamous "inside the second" testing methods with a host of the latest games in order to find out.
We're vaguely astonished by how much things have changed since then.
Of course, we have a new crop of games for the holiday season, headlined by titles like Borderlands 2, Hitman: Absolution, Sleeping Dogs, and Assassin's Creed III. AMD's newfound aggressiveness means many of these games are part of its Gaming Evolved program, so they should run very well on Radeon graphics cards—and maybe, you know, not so well on those pesky GeForces.
In fact, accentuating its stronger ties to game developers, AMD has taken to bundling a trio of these games with its Radeon HD 7950 cards. Cramming that sort of gaming goodness into the box with a graphics card certainly changes the value equation.
As if that weren't enough, AMD has also released Catalyst 12.11 beta drivers that promise a roughly 15% across-the-board performance increase for its 7000-series Radeons. New drivers often bring performance gains for individual games, but general improvements of that magnitude are uncommon. AMD tells us it has employed new insights in tuning its relatively young GCN architecture.
What's more, Windows 8 is out, and we've transitioned our test rigs to the new operating system.
Add up all of these changes, and you have a recipe for realignment in ongoing battle for GPU supremacy. Are we still at rough parity, or have AMD's bold moves allowed it to push into the lead? We've deployed our infamous "inside the second" testing methods with a host of the latest games in order to find out.
Quote:
In the end, we're left to confront the fact that the biggest change from our prior graphics reviews was the influx of new games and new test scenarios that stress the GPUs differently than before. (The transition to Windows 8 could play some role here, but we doubt it.) For whatever reason, AMD's combination of GPU hardware and driver software doesn't perform as well as Nvidia's does in this latest round of games, at least as we tested them. That's particularly true when you focus on gameplay smoothness, as our latency-focused metrics tend to do.
EDIT:
First news post, should this have gone in Graphics General?
Edited by jbmayes2000 - 12/5/12 at 7:36am
1155 Rig
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1155 Rig
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I wasn't having a go at you, I'm pleased you posted it, I enjoyed reading it. However, through no fault of your own, it's a terrible comparison for the two cards because every game there is known to be terrible on the 7000 series GPU.
