Fall 2012 GPU and Driver Comparison Roundup @ [H]

Fantastic! While other sites have done similar I have more faith in your methods.

Thanks for taking the time to do this guys.
 
I cant believe you all actually did it :)

I also cant even imagine how much work went into this. Well done. Some pretty good numbers out of the red team.

Like you all said the most impoartant thing is the price drops and competition.
 
great article, like always!

Should put a rest to all the ridiculous threads saying nvidia won this round, the consumer won this round.
 
What's interesting is that the nVidia cards have gone from clear leaders during the summer to now mostly second best ...both in terms of performance (AMD have made the greater strides in terms of driver improvements) and of course price... where AMD is much the better value.

Didn't see that coming!
 
I hadn't realized the GTX 680 dropped in price. That's a fantastic price for the Galaxy OC model.

It always bugged me that the 660 Ti was priced at $300. I'm still resistent to the increased $300 price for the mid-range. I guess I just liked the $200-$250 price point for the past decade.
 
fingerbob69 said:
What's interesting is that the nVidia cards have gone from clear leaders during the summer to now mostly second best ...both in terms of performance (AMD have made the greater strides in terms of driver improvements) and of course price... where AMD is much the better value.

Didn't see that coming!
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Really good comprehensive review.

I was also surprised at how the AMD side has improved.
But that said, when you transition to three screen Surround or EyeFinity and go to multicard setups, I think (at least from my personal experience) nvidia has the advantage.
 
Great review, thanks for your time and effort.

Any chance for some X-fire vs SLI results? I've never had an issue with the single card performance of the HD 7970 or GTX 680 however, the multi-gpu performance of the 7970 was never a "smooth" experience. While the frame rates would normally dictate a great experience, X-fire on the 79XX series always seemed choppy, skipping, or stuttering. The method of testing video cards here at the [H] is perfect for this test as it takes into consideration the playable experience of the game and not just frame rates.
 
Good but even better considering reference 7970 as of today sell for as little as $389.99 :D
 
$399.99 (before rebate) is the lowest price right now on Newegg for a 7970 -- and you have a choice of 3 custom models as well :) Oddly, the $389.99 price on Google Search becomes $665.99 when you click the Newegg link ... :confused:

Alpert said:
Good but even better considering reference 7970 as of today sell for as little as $389.99 :D
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this is a great article IMHO.

Just hoping there is a good boxing day sale for a 7950 /ok
 
I was wondering why the GTX660 was left out. But after watching the results it makes sense. It would be dead last.

It's interesting to see how tables turn. Once the 660Ti was trading blows with the 7950. But now it can barely take on the 7870 which is cheaper.

AMD has done a great job with current pricing and drivers. Its time for nvidia to do the same.

I always thought the 600 series was about $100 more than it was worth. While prices have gone down, they are still not where they need to be.
 
Stoly said:
AMD has done a great job with current pricing and drivers. Its time for nvidia to do the same.
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Agreed. I have always found nVidia drivers to be stable, but I have barely seen any performance increases for the 600 series since it was released. AMD really stepped up performance-wise on drivers...can't speak as to how stable they are, though.
 
So many man hours had to go into getting this article from the testing phase to the print stage. Thanks once again for taking the time, money, and effort to test these cards with their new drivers. Hats off to the [H]ardocp team!

It took AMD so long to figure out it's driver problems, but when they did they certainly delivered the goods! Hopefully these driver tweaks find a home in the next generation of cards. Would be nice to have less bickering about drivers in the AMD section and more about the hardware settings for particular games. Thx again!
 
MavericK96 said:
Agreed. I have always found nVidia drivers to be stable, but I have barely seen any performance increases for the 600 series since it was released. AMD really stepped up performance-wise on drivers...can't speak as to how stable they are, though.
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The new drivers are very stable. No crashes for me since I've installed them. The only minor quibble was that when I initially installed them they set the downclocked "desktop" speed as the fastest speed. After I figured out what was wrong and corrected it (took all of 30 seconds to figure out) everything has run perfectly.
 
raghu78 said:
thats a nice win for the red team. nvidia though have dropped their latest 310.54 beta with significant improvements in BF3. so this is good for consumers :D

http://www./whats-new/articles/nvidia-geforce-310-54-beta-drivers-released
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Keep in mind, those performances NVIDIA has compared to are the 306.97 WHQL drivers, a much much older driver version. This new driver is mainly for Black Ops II and AC3, the intro paragraph says it all. "This is the recommended driver for the best experience in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and Assassin's Creed III, providing up to 26% faster performance in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and up to 18% faster performance in Assassin’s Creed III"

Of course, we will use this driver in our testing of both games this month. AMD is also going to have a driver out tonight for Black Ops II.
 
baldrik said:
Nice work Brent, it is much appreciated.
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Thank David, he did all the work ;)

We knew you all wanted to see this, and it is quite telling how the cards stack up today, the new drivers and the price drops together really have changed things.
 
magoo said:
Really good comprehensive review.

I was also surprised at how the AMD side has improved.
But that said, when you transition to three screen Surround or EyeFinity and go to multicard setups, I think (at least from my personal experience) nvidia has the advantage.
Click to expand...

The research I have done says otherwise - the extra memory available on the HD7970/HD7950 and bigger memory interfaces tend to help a lot at the larger Surround/Eyefinity resolutions.

A typical Eyefinity today is 5760x1080 or 5760x1200, and the closest comparison to those resolutions in the tests presented in this article would be the 2560x1600. As you can see in the graphs, 2560x1600 is where AMD had it's largest leads.

Just as a simple example - Max Payne 3 shows HD7970 52fps avg and GTX 680 47fps avg. Now look at 1920x1080 and you'll see that Nvidia takes the lead back, HD7970 at 30fps and GTX 680 at 33fps (note: fps dropped overall because MSAA was changed significantly higher). I wish there was more data to present from this specific test, but only a few games were tested so its hard to say my "theory" is 100% true.

Anyone else have info on this? Also I am referring to only 1 card for eyefinity/surround - the original post also mentions multicard, can anyone else tell us from personal experience?
 
Thanks. Would've been nice to see how 7870 cf would do (660 ti too). My cf 6870s beat a 580 sometime
 
Good to see AMD and Nvidia are duking it out. There may only be 2 competitors, but at least they are reasonably evenly matched.
Let's hope this trend will happen in sales as well, we need the competition.
 
AMD has retaken the lead. There are almost continuous street prices and rebates considerably lower then those listed. The 7950 has been available for a long time for around $270-280, and aftermarket 7970's for under $400. Yeah they may not all be GHZ editions, but it's pretty sure all of them can do 1 GHz if not up to 1200MHz.

Searching the egg provides 7 7970's at $400 or less, with 2 at 1000Mhz.
http://www.newegg.com/Index.aspx?nm...-_-na-_-na&AID=10521304&PID=3891137&SID=HComm
 
in page 7 the apples to apples comparison is confusing. are all the cards using the same settings. if so then the fraps graph is showing ubersampling for the hd 7970 ghz, gtx 680, gtx 670 and 4x MSAA for hd 7950 boost, GTX 660 Ti, HD 7870.

This has been fixed, Thanks - Brent
 
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Great review, is there any chance we could get the same thing but for multi-GPU & surround gaming?
 
After selling off my rigs to move 4300 miles, I havn't paid attention to the GPU scene in a while. This is impressive as I had no idea ATI had become so competitive again. If only AMD had something that would make us enthusiasts happy once again.
 
sleeping dogs comparison is just baffling. GTX 680 is shown to run at 2560 x 1600 High AA at 30.3 fps in the sleeping dogs game performance review done earlier. in this review GTX 680 runs at 2560 x 1600 High AA at 51.5 fps. the changes between the 2 reviews are the game version and drivers. but how can that amount to 70% performance increase.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/11/12/fall_2012_gpu_driver_comparison_roundup/5

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/10/02/sleeping_dogs_gameplay_performance_iq_review/5
 
And just to clarify, these new AMD drivers do not give any gains for the 6000 series, correct?
 
Very well done review, it's nice to see how the current cards stack up with the latest drivers. AMD seems to have done a nice job getting more performance out of the 7900 series, going toe to toe with the GeForce 600's.

The only, and I mean ONLY other thing I would have liked to see is some numbers for the 7900's using MLAA 2.0, since I've yet to really see any real of its performance or quality, the only numbers I've seen are with the original MLAA. Granted, more and more games are building in FXAA support, which is a great step forward. It'd still be nice to see if the significant performance boost from the original MLAA to MLAA 2.0 makes it a viable option.

Great job guys, looking forward to future analysis of these cards in upcoming games.
 
still crazy how the 670 is so close to 680 performance. my DCII top (1254mhz-1304mhz boost out of box) was 10-14% faster than my friend's 680 SC and my 7950 (950mhz edition) killed them both once oc to 1150mhz or better. sucks I sold the 7950 due to that vertical line bug. would love to see it's performance on 12.11.
 
Great article. Would have loved to see more games but I realize the effort required to do it the [H] way.

That said, 7970's can be had for cheap. I got a factory OC card that runs at 1000 MHz for $349 AR a couple weeks back. Not even a die-hard NV bigot like myself could turn that down.
 
Thanks for doing this. That being said, the following quote from the conclusion of the article is possibly the most grudging, evasive, heavily-qualified acknowledgement of the 7970's superiority:

"For those that must have the absolute highest frame rates (even if it makes no difference to the overall game play experience), the Radeon HD 7970 seems to pull ahead of the GTX 680."


The mid-range conclusion, however, tells it like it is. Bravo.
 
raghu78 said:
sleeping dogs comparison is just baffling. GTX 680 is shown to run at 2560 x 1600 High AA at 30.3 fps in the sleeping dogs game performance review done earlier. in this review GTX 680 runs at 2560 x 1600 High AA at 51.5 fps. the changes between the 2 reviews are the game version and drivers. but how can that amount to 70% performance increase.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/11/12/fall_2012_gpu_driver_comparison_roundup/5

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/10/02/sleeping_dogs_gameplay_performance_iq_review/5
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its a mixture of the game being updated plus driver performance increase. you'd have to test seperately between old drivers new version, new drivers old version to see what change has the biggest effect but yeah 70% is still possible.
 
Damn. All the results of how much better the 7950/7970 keeps getting is a knife being driven deeper into my gut. If I didn't have so many driver problems with the AMD cards, I would never have ditched them.

I hope nVidia gets decisively and conclusively destroyed very quickly in sales, and soon, so that nVidia finally drops prices on Kepler cards for the first time. Let me at least SLI my 660Ti ._.
 
Nice work!

Though I gotta throw in my .02 that I sure do wish we'd see something like DCS:A-10C, IL-2 Cliffs of Dover, or Rise of Flight make an appearance in an AMD vs nVidia benchmark someday.

We all see the reviews about how the latest FPS title does on both cards and the drivers are being optimized for these titles...but what about older titles that they aren't specifically optimizing for?
 
PureBlackFire said:
still crazy how the 670 is so close to 680 performance. my DCII top (1254mhz-1304mhz boost out of box) was 10-14% faster than my friend's 680 SC and my 7950 (950mhz edition) killed them both once oc to 1150mhz or better. sucks I sold the 7950 due to that vertical line bug. would love to see it's performance on 12.11.
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Yeah I always have and still fail to see the point in the 680. Just buy a 670 and overclock it.
 
Damn, this makes me officially a fanboi!

I tend to go green, but these numbers make sure point to team red as the best choice.

Sure, I can say that in my experience drivers, blah blah blah... but that is really subjective based on my limited experience with team red.

I had lot of trouble with my HD 5970, but that was based on my particular non standard use, which included a Display Port to DVI adaptor, which never did pan out and made me sell the 5970.

While I think and SLI vs XF article would be of great interest, I would love for [H] to do a review of driver quality between NVidia vs AMD.

Great article [H]ard team
 
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