inglewood78
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Multi 7970s vs Multi 680s Battle Royale
- Thread starter inglewood78
- Start date
Uhhh... what?
"In a nut shell, nVidia GeForce GTX 680 SLI scales really, really well. Overall perhaps a little bit less than AMD Radeon HD 7970 Crossfire, but in 5760x1080 it outperforms AMD's card. That's also the resolution where SLI truly comes into its own..."
stevelopez91
Weaksauce
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So basically, if playing with 3+ monitors, go AMD? otherwise Nvidia wins?
fattypants
2[H]4U
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Wow, nice! I wish I had the money for a setup like this.
sirmonkey1985
[H]ard|DCer of the Month - July 2010
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if you are going above 5760x1080 go AMD, otherwise the 680 will do fine below that.
From the look of it, it's more if you're going 5760x1080 and above AND using multi GPU, go AMD, otherwise nVidia. For a single card, the 680 is doing well even at those high resolutions, it just doesn't scale well to multiple GPUs. Honestly though, if I were in that situation I'd be tempted to wait and see what nVidia does with its drivers or if 4gb versions of the 680 come around.
This review was what made me finally decide to cancel my four 680s at Newegg yesterday. The 680 seems severely crippled in BF3 due to a paucity of VRAM. That combined with NVidia releasing a midrange card as a their high end card pissed me off as well. They expected more from AMD? I expected more from NVidia.... It pisses me off because I wanted to have some of the features on the NVidia cards, but they really shot themselves in the foot when it comes to multimonitor and mutlicard setups.
I'm buying the 7990s when they release instead now. I guess I'm going with AMD for another two years...
I'm buying the 7990s when they release instead now. I guess I'm going with AMD for another two years...
I don't really see the point in waiting for the 4gb versions. On my 6870, I barely go over the 1gb of VRAM in certain games, so I doubt you would reach the 2gb ceiling even at 4x MSAA. Kyle repeated quite often in the review and topic that they didn't have any issues with the ram amount, and that there's no reason *currently* to wait for the extra ram. If you're running three 1440p monitors, then I could definitely see waiting on 4gb cards. But not for 1080p in surround.
I'm running 7680x1600. I seem to hit the ceiling with two 7970s in crossfire and that is 3GB VRAM.
the thing is for single card with a single monitor at 1920 x 1080 which is what most of us run it beats AMDE easily, single card multimonitor 680 still wins. Not a lot of ppl. true in t5he review cited the AMD won but thats not a realistic setup for 99 percent of ppl, so who cares ???
Eh, just realized that I'll only get 3GB due to mirroring on the 7990s... So, I might as well stick with the 7970s or wait for the 4GB 680s. I guess I will get the 4GB 680s instead... Man, this is such a pain in the ass. I know that even 4GB isn't going to be enough to max out settings for 7680x1600....
Considering some of their benches show a tri-crossfire outperforming a quad sli 680 setup at highest settings, not sure how they got that conclusion.
BF3 Ultra 4X 5760x1080
a tri-xfire is 7fps faster than a quad sli.
AVP High 4X 5760x1080
tri XFire is as fast as a quad sli
Metro 2033 very high 5760x1080
a tri crossfire is 11fps faster than a quad sli.
The Quad SLI is faster in some games, sometimes slower than the Tri XFire, let alone a quad XFire.
Seems to be the 2GB Ram, or scaling issues with current drivers.
Yakk
Supreme [H]ardness
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VERY Badly done graphs.
Without minimum frame rates you can't tell if they run out of VRAM.
Single digit minimum would tell you right away...
If I'd venture to guess, I would say both broken SLI drivers & running out of VRAM are to blame.
Without minimum frame rates you can't tell if they run out of VRAM.
Single digit minimum would tell you right away...
If I'd venture to guess, I would say both broken SLI drivers & running out of VRAM are to blame.
I think it is more drivers issues than VRAM. Look at the following graphs:
Both of those games above at that resolution and settings are using some serious VRAM yet the Quad 7970 falls on it's face just as much as the Quad-680 in some games.
At the end of the article: "If we compare with AMD Radeon HD 7970 CrossfireX, then we see that the standard SLI-scaling is slightly inferior. With AMD we measured a 69 percent increase in performance on average, and 84 percent in 5760x1080. However, on the highest settings nVidia scored a little better, 88 percent compared to 84 percent."
So the 680's in SLI actually scale better than the 7970's in this test by 4% when using highest settings.
I think it is more drivers issues than VRAM. Look at the following graphs:
Both of those games above at that resolution and settings are using some serious VRAM yet the Quad 7970 falls on it's face just as much as the Quad-680 in some games.
At the end of the article: "If we compare with AMD Radeon HD 7970 CrossfireX, then we see that the standard SLI-scaling is slightly inferior. With AMD we measured a 69 percent increase in performance on average, and 84 percent in 5760x1080. However, on the highest settings nVidia scored a little better, 88 percent compared to 84 percent."
So the 680's in SLI actually scale better than the 7970's in this test by 4% when using highest settings.
Honestly, Skyrim runs like shit on a crossfire setup, because while you might hit 80-90fps, you get really jerky frames rates that go all over the place. Plus Tri-Fire is completely broken and useless (in Skyrim) - it's disabled in the cfx profile, and if you force it on you get negative scaling.
Crysis shows the same scaling problems - negligible performance difference between 3 and 4 card setup. I think the huge fps differences here in nVidia's favor, is because they are not suffering the same driver/scaling issues as AMD.
I honestly think that 7970 could really be the better hardware, if AMD knew how to actually write drivers. Instead they spit out garbage after garbage.
I don't know how you could come to that conclusion. Slower, more expensive, uses more power and generates more heat = better? AMD has also had 3 more months than nVidia to work on drivers.
Not quite. I would agree with you on single card setups. Muti-Gpu setups are completely different animals.
Yes skyrim runs like crap in crossfire, its a driver problem, same with crysis 2. Hardocp did a driver article on the 7XXX series already.
5760x1080 and above the Amd 7970 still wins in muti-gpu setups. That is when crossfire actually works anyways.
Amd does also have an advantage with mutigpu setups and idle wattage.
MavericK
Zero Cool
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most of us run 1080P???
Uhh, yeah. Most of us do run 1080p or less.
Multi-monitor, and even 1440p still is a pretty small minority.
MavericK
Zero Cool
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Lol. All this article shows is:
1) SLI scaling for the 680 is not fully optimized yet, especially beyond 2 cards where you get negative scaling sometimes.
2) 2 GB of VRAM is not holding back the 680 at all, even at 5760x1080. People generally consider Skyrim to be VRAM intensive, and:
Granted that is probably not with a ton of HD mods, but clearly it hasn't become an issue. Same with BF3, which for some reason people think needs 2+ GB VRAM for 1080p.
gerardfraser
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Good review.
Its too bad people spend and have been spending good cash on trifire/sli quadfire/sli and it really has never worked great.
Both cards are good and way cheaper then cards I bought years ago.So I do not know why people are saying 7970/680 are expensive.
EG:Nvidia 6800ultra =855 bucks
ATI 9800XT= 765 or so I forget now.
I prefer ATI picture quality over Nvidia but I still bought me SLI 680 gtx and will probably do Trisli even after seeing this review on a singal 1080P monitor.
Its too bad people spend and have been spending good cash on trifire/sli quadfire/sli and it really has never worked great.
Both cards are good and way cheaper then cards I bought years ago.So I do not know why people are saying 7970/680 are expensive.
EG:Nvidia 6800ultra =855 bucks
ATI 9800XT= 765 or so I forget now.
I prefer ATI picture quality over Nvidia but I still bought me SLI 680 gtx and will probably do Trisli even after seeing this review on a singal 1080P monitor.
What I said was that I believe AMD had the better hardware; it's slower because of the shitty/buggy drivers, and yes it uses more power/heat. It however has more memory and higher bandwidth bus and does have a better idle draw, but even that is easily broken between different driver releases (just look it up on guru3d forums). Honestly I would say it's on par, performance wise with nVidia in some instances, when it's not held back due to driver issues (like displayed Skyrim and Crysis 2). It also has better multi-gpu scaling when not hindered by lack of cfx profiles or a buggy driver.
I'm not trying to be a fanboy of either brand, I just wanted something that WORKS. Based on my experiences with a tri-fire setup, AMD dropped the ball on this release. They had 3+ months to come out with a proper driver, yet nVidia has a working driver on day 1. I just don't see the same scaling issues on the sli setups shown in the few nVdia reviews, that AMD currently has on their flagship product. I however don't consider the GTX 680 to be better in every way compared to a 7970. Might be slightly faster and a bit more efficient, but their drivers are night and day better than AMD's in their current state which is honestly the biggest advantage they have so far.
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I believe the 7970 has more headroom for overclocking.
yeah they are beastly overclockers. I can max out the sliders at stock voltage.
Lord_Exodia
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I wonder how much of this is driver related, I'm sure nvidia can squeeze a hell of a lot of more performance from their drivers. They always do on new architecture a month or 2 out of the gate.
We'll all just have to wait and see. I definitely see some memory limitations but only at extreme resolutions and extreme AA settings. 2GB running at 6Ghz should be able to hold it's own even at 5760x1080 or 3240x1920.
We'll all just have to wait and see. I definitely see some memory limitations but only at extreme resolutions and extreme AA settings. 2GB running at 6Ghz should be able to hold it's own even at 5760x1080 or 3240x1920.