6870 or 7770

[GotNoRice]

Assume for a moment that you are in a situation where these two video cards are your ONLY options. Which would you choose?

According to benchmarks (most of which are several years old at this point and may not take driver optimzations into account), the 6870 is a fair bit faster than the 7770, with the 7770 even coming in behind the 6850 in many cases. EXAMPLE.

Now here's the catch:
The 6870 is an older design using VLIW5, same as the 5870 and even older cards. The 7770 uses GCN, similar to current AMD cards.
The 6870 has been pushed to the legacy driver (although they JUST released a beta crimson driver that supports the 6870, so this isn't that big of a deal yet), whereas the 7770 uses the current main driver.
The 6870, although it is a DX11 card, does NOT support DX12. The 7770 is a DX11 card also, but supports DX12 using Feature Level 11_1)

Do those disadvantages make the 7770 worth it despite it being "slower"? Also, VLIW5 is no longer being optimized in the drivers while GCN is almost certainly receiving constant optimizations. Is it possible that this might be enough to close the performance gap?

 

[primetime]

neither of those cards will really be capable of playing modern demanding games anyway...But if all you play is brand new games pick the gcn card...if its for playing diablo or older games pick the pre-gcn card. lol i dont think that 7770 is powerful enough for dx12 to help much even if that day ever comes. Shit they both have a 1gb frame buffer that rules out newer games anyway

 

[CombatChrisNC]

If you buy anything AMD, don't by anything non-CNG. Period. I wouldn't.

 

[defaultluser]

This would have been an easier decision 2 years ago.

If you're gaming, you'll get better performance from the 6870, but you'll get much longer official support from the 7770. I'd go 7770 if I had to choose.