[yannakout]

I am planning to be gaming on my new 1440p monitor

I am tossing up between these two cards:
Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 OC 3GB
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 770 WindForce 3X 2GB

I am leaning slightly more towards the GTX, however I am not experienced with 1440p and which card will perform better

I am planning to overclock the card I buy so keep that into consideration.

I am open to all sugestions just please provide some reasoning

 

[MrSharkington]

7970 since it has 3gb opposed to 2gb which will help somewhat at 1440p, along with it having a wider memory bus. Though if i was you i'd wait till october for the new radeon cards.

 

[Keromyaou]

I don't know your budget. But 1440p do really need strong gpu power. I think that it would be better off in the end to get the best gpu. I would recommend for you either to go with gtx780 or to wait until October and get HD9970. If gpu power becomes not strong enough in the future, you can add one more gtx780/HD9970 later on. If I were you, I would wait until October and compare between gtx780 and HD9970 to decide which one I will get.

 

[Junkboy]

I would say if you're buying today for single cards @1440 I would rank the top two as the GTX 780 at one and the 7950 as two. The performance cards in between the 7950/780 really aren't a good value, the 770/7970 are just not worth their price over a 7950 after OC and anything under the 7950 has 2GB of ram or less.

If you have to buy something now get the 7950 or step up to a GTX 780, if you wait a bit though we should be getting more info and leaks in the coming weeks for the new AMD cards which hopefully might lower prices on some of the old cards.

 

[villain]

Wait for the announcement of the 9970 in September.

 

[Outcasst]

Quote:

Originally Posted by villain

Wait for the announcement of the 9970 in September.

Why? If he's looking at these two cards then the 9970 / 780 is going to be out of his price range.

 

[Mr gardoki]

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/770?vs=829

If you view the link you will see a few benchmarks for the 770 vs 7970. I always recommend viewing a lot more benchmarks from different websites to get a general consensus. However, this benchmark shows what I found on a lot of reviews. They seem to trade off which card is better at 1440p for different games and on some are about even.

Things to consider knowing this are price and do you favor certain games more than others? There are some other theories out there such as the fact that the 7970 is at the end of it's life and won't improve much more while the 770 is still new and will continue to get better driver supports as time goes on. Also the 7970 has 3gb vs 2gb. While that isn't a big deal now as the benchmarks show it may be a concern going forward with the the new consoles offering a lot more memory, pc games may start requiring a lot more memory. You could possibly get the 4gb version of the 770 which I haven't seen any reviews for but that of course would up your price considerably.

That is also a benchmark for the 7970 stock not an overclocked edition. My personal opinion is that it doesn't matter since you are going to overclock you gpu anyway but some may feel different. Those are just my opinions, I am sure many other more knowledgeable people can help.

 

[raghu78]

OP at 1440p the HD 7970 has a slight edge. the extra 1 GB VRAM should prove its worth with next gen games. the bandwidth also benefits at high levels of AA and with demanding AA models like SSAA. the sapphire HD 7970 OC has a very good price perf.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202008

the alternative is to wait for HD 9970 / HD 9950 launch in Oct and see if there are price cuts on GTX 780. But you would need to have closer to USD 450 - 500 budgeted in that case.

 

[Mr gardoki]

Quote:

Originally Posted by raghu78

the bandwidth also benefits at high levels of AA and with demanding AA models like SSAA.

I have not played at 1440p but have been told by people who have that AA is not noticeable or really needed at that high of resolution. Do you find that to be true?

 

[NBrock]

I have a 7970 under water clocked at 1250 on the core and 1600 on the mem. Before it was under water I was at about 1100 core and 1600 mem. I just got an Auria 27 inch 1440p monitor. LOVE IT... That being said I have been putting it through it's paces with games. I love to play Skyrim and have it pretty heavily modded. With Vsync on it gets 60FPS I have seen it touch 57fps for a second. I play BF3 FPS did drop from about [email protected] 1080p to about [email protected] I saw a big drop in War Thunder I went from 130 to about 60-70fps. These are all on max settings Those are the only games I have played on it. I have another 7970 that I use for [email protected] 24/7...if games ever start to show my one cards age I'll just crossfire the other card and be fine...especially with AMD fixing the frame pacing. I can't speak from experience on the NVida cards because the last one I used was a 7900GT and it killed itself...burnt up...non over clocked. Haven't tried NVidia since.

 

[szeged]

The 7970 has a slight edge vs that particular 770. However there are 4gb versions of the 770 that would make them on more even ground. I would go with the 7970 though, can be had for cheaper and overclock like champs.

 

[raghu78]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr gardoki

I have not played at 1440p but have been told by people who have that AA is not noticeable or really needed at that high of resolution. Do you find that to be true?

aliasing problems are present at any resolution . the fact is most 1440p monitors (being 27 or 30 inch) are larger than 1080p monitors which are mostly 24 inch, . so the extra pixels are only making up for the larger screen size. if its at same screen size the extra pixels will improve image sharpness and maybe reduce aliasing errors but not eliminate aliasing problems. so Anti Aliasing is required even at high resolutions.

 

[DaFaRsHeR]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr gardoki

I have not played at 1440p but have been told by people who have that AA is not noticeable or really needed at that high of resolution. Do you find that to be true?

Yes, I do!

 

[villain]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Outcasst

Why? If he's looking at these two cards then the 9970 / 780 is going to be out of his price range.

Prices of current gen cards will drop and there's the possibility that they will launch a 9950 along with the 9970.

 

[yannakout]

Thanks for all the great insight I think i will be looking at going for the hd7970 I am buying this all on the weekend as my gaming laptop is on eBay so I can't really wait :/

When over clocking, how do I know what is stable when I push it to a certain setting?

 

[Mr gardoki]

Everyone has different methods. Me and a bunch of others I know will run 3dmark11, heaven, , etc... And if it makes it through all these benchmarks then I consider it stable. I make sure to use a game benchmark too like metro2033 because I can loop it however many times I want. I have never gamed with my oc's though so my purpose was served of just being able to benchmark.

 

[SGT. Peppers]

I go which ever has more horsepower. The 7970 will help with its 3gbs of ram, but tbh 2gb seems enough at the moment. I have 35+ mods on skyrim (many of those graphic/texture mods) and the highest amount of ram I've seen it use was 1400-1500. I even think its same with BF3 if not less on a mix of high/ultra (textures, mesh, and terrain quality on ultra, with 2x msaa. Just from my experience I find myself wanting more fps than vram at the moment.

 

[shadowland31]

Well, I seen benchmarks on both and their very close at 1440p. However, the GTX card does have the extra PhysiX card and on top of that it has more memory units vs. the AMD (memory units are REALLY important when it comes to higher res.) It all comes down to what you want, but I prefer the Nvidia.

 

[ataken]

Quote:

Originally Posted by shadowland31

Well, I seen benchmarks on both and their very close at 1440p. However, the GTX card does have the extra PhysiX card and on top of that it has more memory units vs. the AMD (memory units are REALLY important when it comes to higher res.) It all comes down to what you want, but I prefer the Nvidia.

Dude, you know this Thread is 4 months old?

 

[shadowland31]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ataken

Dude, you know this Thread is 4 months old?

Oops!