460 SLI vs. 7870/7850

[DarkSaturn]

Watching all the 7970 charts roll out has got me inflicted with upgraditis. Single screen gamer on a moderate budget, so the 7970 or even the 7950 don't really interest me at this point. Was thinking I would probably wait it out for the release of the 7870 or 7850 for an upgrade, but then started thinking about pick-up a second 460 now since they are at a pretty reasonable price.

Hard to know with any accuracy where the 78** performance will be, but given what we've seen from the 7970, it looks like 460 SLI will be in the ballpark, and approx. half the price given I've got one already and they are selling on the cheap now.

So, make sense to bite now and deal with a little extra wattage (system in sig, more than ready for 460 SLI), and having to deal with SLI headaches and be set to run Skyrim with a moderate load of mods nice and smooth at 1920x1080?

Haven't run SLI recently other than in a Quadro setup. Is 1GB going to be a bottleneck at 1920x1080?

 

[MavericK]

1 GB isn't going to be too bad but you'll probably want to upgrade in the next year or so.

With Skyrim, however, if you want to run a TON of visual mods, you might want at least 1.5 GB. I have 1.25 GB on my cards and even with the high-texture mods Skyrim was fine. However, I can't run 8x FSAA (like you really need to anyway), otherwise I run out of VRAM. 8x FSAA was fine on stock Skyrim, and 4x FSAA is fine with heavily-modded.

Personally I would wait a few months and see what Kepler and mid-range Radeon cards bring. If you really need to upgrade now, it really depends on your budget. If it were me, I would not get another 460 at this point. I don't think you'll be satisfied with the performance over new mid-range cards, plus only 1 GB of VRAM is not going to work in your favor in the future.

 

[xoleras]

Well on the one hand,

<AMDrocks> 7970 is 176.438920 times faster than the 580 quad sli, you should go out IMMEDIATELY AND BUY A 7970 NOW! Its YOUR TURN to be another SATISFIED AMD CUSTOMER!

and on the other,

<Full Assault> nVidia has discovered a cure for cancer with Kepler, AND ITS 17 billion times faster than the 8970!!11one

Looks like a toss up. This has been another issue of Fanboy Gamer, hope this clears things up

 

[buttons]

I think the performance will scale with $$$. 7870 will probably be very close to 6970 performance maybe a tad faster.