TahoeDust
Limp Gawd
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That is good to hear. I would certainly hope a 2700k @ 4.9ghz and 2x6950>70 would be enough to max out anything.
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7970 - Overkill for 1600x900 resolution?
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That is good to hear. I would certainly hope a 2700k @ 4.9ghz and 2x6950>70 would be enough to max out anything.
Pkirk618
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it most certainly would.
I just moved to from my SLI 480s to an MSI 7970. Though I was happy with the performance of my trusty nvidia cards, they produced some heat. I made this purchase based on efficiency.
As for differences in performance. Ever so slight, if any. I do think, as I always have that ATI has better 2d quality.
I just moved to from my SLI 480s to an MSI 7970. Though I was happy with the performance of my trusty nvidia cards, they produced some heat. I made this purchase based on efficiency.
As for differences in performance. Ever so slight, if any. I do think, as I always have that ATI has better 2d quality.
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I upgraded because I need to in order to maintain 60fps minimum with BF3 maxed out. In my mind.. that was necessary because turning down quality settings or simply living with slowdowns were not an option. When the sh*t gets heavy in BF3 is when you need the fps the most. That's my personal experience.
TahoeDust.. you won't be disappointed. It's still a massive upgrade in performance. But you will still probably see frame rates under 60 with heavy loads as I did. I had the same thought you did when I bought mine thinking I was more than ready for BF3 or whatever. BF3 proved me wrong.
Pkirk618.. my 6950's were not adequate for my needs as FPS under 60 is not acceptable. The 7970's are as they keep the 60fps minimum I like. I say they get a good workout because as powerful as they are I still have to OC them to never see fps under 60 under the heaviest loads.
MavericK96.. I'd tell the OP to watch out for people like yourself who think their personal experience is a blanket benchmark for everyone's tastes. Based on your response what's "completely playable" to you would probably be "completely intolerable" to me. How about you keep your opinion to what you know.. your personal experience.. and try not to use yourself as a baseline of what everyone else should like?
Pkirk618
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you must be too sensitive to the occasional drops in frame-rates that below 60 was troublesome for ya. It's unfortunate and expensive but if you can afford to make changes, more power to you. If the 7900 series cards hadn't come out, what actions with your current setup were you willing to take to maintain that frame-rate? I suspect if you hadn't maxed your setting with your 69xx cards, you increased them with your 79xx card. If this was the case, did you notice that much of difference in quality going from one to the other.
Just curious how things progressed for you.
Just curious how things progressed for you.
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Too sensitive? It's relative like listening to music IMHO... to each their own. If the 7970's had not come out I was seriously considering getting a 6990 to pair up with one of my unlocked 6950's or getting a new MOBO and ading a third unlocked 6950. Made a post about it on 12/25 here well before the 7970's hit the retail market: Running into a dilemma. lol 6950/6970 CFX vs...
I did have everything maxed out.. ultra with 4xMSAA and high post + HBAO... no blur. IQ is identical going from a pair of 6950's to 7970's IMHO.
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60+ FPS at all times would be considered "intolerable" to you? Okay...
If you're referring to the single card, it dropped to like 35-40 FPS at times but not much lower.
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60+ FPS at all times would be considered "intolerable" to you? Okay...
Rolleyes all you like. I actually owned a pair of unlocked 6950's until just last week and am not trying to apply my standards to others. I'm simply telling what I experienced on my rig. Give it a try.
You must have some magic 570, every review I have read puts a single 570 in the 40fps average at 1920x1200 with MSAA4x... not "at times". IMHO 35~40 fps is not acceptable.
Pkirk618
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hey, I'm not knocking you and I hate to bring up micro-stuttering but could this be the problem more so than a lower frame-rate. I've experienced it before more so with ATI cards and moving over to nvidia, at the time, solved the issue...with less FPS to boot.
I'm not bashing your perspective so take it easy.
I'm not bashing your perspective so take it easy.
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Did not take any offense to your post at all. Mav's "Yeah, you have to be careful of people who say shit like..." on the other hand... not... so.. much.
I eliminated the BF3 micro studdering completely by limiting my frames to 59.95 with vsync enabled in game. I still use that limit on my 7970's as w/o it the studdering is still there. But the frame rate drop was noticeable and significant to me.
Honestly, with my 1920x1080 120hz monitor, 100+fps is my new standard. Having slowdowns that go from 100+ to down in the
low 50's is just WAYYY too noticable with my CFX 6970's, even overclocked at 990/1500. I plan on picking up
2x Asus Direct CUII 7970's(maybe hit 1250/1600? I'm not shy with voltage) when they are released to fix that issue.
When I have the slowdowns in the 50's, my CPU is still able to produce frames in the 80-90s (via render.perfoverlayvisible 1).
That is after I remove my GPU bottleneck, shit, maybe I could bump the AA to 4x, instead of 2x.
Anybody who says 6970 / 7970 CFX on one screen must have low standards for eye candy / frame-rate.
low 50's is just WAYYY too noticable with my CFX 6970's, even overclocked at 990/1500. I plan on picking up
2x Asus Direct CUII 7970's(maybe hit 1250/1600? I'm not shy with voltage
) when they are released to fix that issue. When I have the slowdowns in the 50's, my CPU is still able to produce frames in the 80-90s (via render.perfoverlayvisible 1).
That is after I remove my GPU bottleneck, shit, maybe I could bump the AA to 4x, instead of 2x.
Anybody who says 6970 / 7970 CFX on one screen must have low standards for eye candy / frame-rate.
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Rolleyes all you like. I actually owned a pair of unlocked 6950's until just last week and am not trying to apply my standards to others. I'm simply telling what I experienced on my rig. Give it a try.
You must have some magic 570, every review I have read puts a single 570 in the 40fps average at 1920x1200 with MSAA4x... not "at times". IMHO 35~40 fps is not acceptable.
Dunno what to tell you. I guess the 570 is just better than the 6950, then. I guess we already knew that, though. Disregard.
TahoeDust
Limp Gawd
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I would hope so when you are paying 40% more.
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Except I was not comparing your 570 to a 6950. I was comparing it to 570 reviews which clearly show the 570 average fps to be about 40fps with 4xMSAA. Not the "occasional slowdown to 35~40fps".. but the average.
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I paid $250 each. U mad bro?
TahoeDust
Limp Gawd
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Nah bro. I paid a lot less for my 6950>70s.
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Cool. Even with current full market price your "40% more" number holds no ground.
TahoeDust
Limp Gawd
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OK man, lets not turn this into a 6970cf vs 570 SLI thread. There are already plenty of those. We both know what the benchmarks say and we both know what we paid for the cards.
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Fair enough.
People told me (and keep telling me) 7970 is overkill for 1920x1200 resolution that I game with. I laugh in their face now. Tweaked Skyrim makes this card sweat big time averaging 30-40 fps with drops to low 20s (yes, it looks like a dream come true though, so I don't mind).
Having said that, 1600x900 is not something I'd pair 7970 myself. Upgrade monitor first or wait for 7950 1.5 GB.
Having said that, 1600x900 is not something I'd pair 7970 myself. Upgrade monitor first or wait for 7950 1.5 GB.
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2[H]4U
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I use to be one of those people, because a single 5830 let me run my games on high *not ultra* settings 1920x1080 just fine. Now I have a 7970 (granted held back some by my CPU) but loading up 3dmark2011 / heaven DX11 benchmark and you can really see its no walk in the park. If you truly want to max modern games at high resolution you will probably need crossfire/sli setup.
heaven DX11 settings maxed i averaged 55.7fps with a minimum fps of 22. 3dmark2011 scored P6579 with a mild overclock 1100/1500
Your scores seem low, I'm not sure how CPU dependent 3DMark11 is, but I get
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/839299/7970/other/3dmark_11/stock.png (7.9k stock)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/839299/7970/other/3dmark_11/1125_1575_oc.png (8.8k OC), that's with 2500K @ 4.7GHz.
Dure ur indeed very low as the guy above says too.
My score is P8380 with 1000/1425 and P9150 with 1100/1575. Your score looks like an underclocked GTX580... Also in heaven I have rly much more that 56fps (but I dont remember how much). My CPU is i7 @4 GHz, but even without the overclock (2.8Ghz) I have around P7900
metallicaband
Limp Gawd
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Not overkill at all, games are optimized like shit these days since most of the major titles are console ports, you'll need more raw power to run things smoothly at max settings and stable 60FPS because you can't depend on the developers to fully optimize their games to take advantage of your hardware.
7970 isn't overkill for 1600x900
Turn on EQAA/8xSSAA+Edge Detect/x3 Temporal AA/-10 LOD/16xTrilinear AF/Alpha sharpening/AFO/TFO/Flip que 1.
DO NOT USE FXAA OR MORPHOLOGICAL. IT KILLS FPS AND BLURS EVERYTHING. THERE IS NO REASON TO USE IT FOR ANYTHING UNLESS YOU SIMPLY LIKE THE BLURRING EFFECT.
Use ATI Tray Tools, install with disabled driver level overclocking since it isn't enabled for 7x series yet. Use CCC or another tool for OC.
go into tools&option>on screen display. Turn off OSD
Don't worry the card isn't overkill. thoes settings will give you insane single monitor quality. Swich back and forth between MSAA/AMSAA/SSAA modes depending on framerates. Also go into advanced tweaks and set 4 minimum and 4 maximum threads, I noticed smoother BF3 gameplay from it.
Turn on EQAA/8xSSAA+Edge Detect/x3 Temporal AA/-10 LOD/16xTrilinear AF/Alpha sharpening/AFO/TFO/Flip que 1.
DO NOT USE FXAA OR MORPHOLOGICAL. IT KILLS FPS AND BLURS EVERYTHING. THERE IS NO REASON TO USE IT FOR ANYTHING UNLESS YOU SIMPLY LIKE THE BLURRING EFFECT.
Use ATI Tray Tools, install with disabled driver level overclocking since it isn't enabled for 7x series yet. Use CCC or another tool for OC.
go into tools&option>on screen display. Turn off OSD
Don't worry the card isn't overkill. thoes settings will give you insane single monitor quality. Swich back and forth between MSAA/AMSAA/SSAA modes depending on framerates. Also go into advanced tweaks and set 4 minimum and 4 maximum threads, I noticed smoother BF3 gameplay from it.
Not at all. The great thing about the 7970 it is PCI Express 3.0. You already have the benefits of next gen CPUs/Motherboard good to go. When you build you next system, you can easily transfer it to your next system. I don't like to upgrade unless I have to. Get the best hardware you can afford and sit on it for years for the software to catch up
Also one 7970 is still good at 1920x1200 when you decide to upgrade your monitor.
Not overkill IF you want to run higher settings/modern games. IE: If you like eye candy. However If you are happy with not needing to turn on AA/higher end details and can be happy playing at medium-high with eye candy off, than yes it's probably a waste of money.
Anyone who says a single 7970 / 680 is overkill for ANY resolution, doesn't care about AA/higher settings or Modern games.
Just because your 6950 can run BF3 at 1080p on medium with no AA @ 100fps (dropping to 30-40fps in many areas/explosions/etc no doubt) doesn't mean that is good enough for all of us.
So sick of people ranting about overkill and that you should be running Eyefinity/surround/120hz/30" monitor to need these cards, you are 100% WRONG. I run "only" 1080p and I have a 7970 and I still can't even COME CLOSE to maxing out BF3. If I turn on full AA (deferred and post) on Ultra I can easily get dips into the 20's!
For kicks I tried going to 720p @ 75hz on ultra with full AA and super sampling and it was STILL unplayable (my standards anyway, if you like dropping in to the 40's and 30's and lower than maybe)
/endthread
Anyone who says a single 7970 / 680 is overkill for ANY resolution, doesn't care about AA/higher settings or Modern games.
Just because your 6950 can run BF3 at 1080p on medium with no AA @ 100fps (dropping to 30-40fps in many areas/explosions/etc no doubt) doesn't mean that is good enough for all of us.
So sick of people ranting about overkill and that you should be running Eyefinity/surround/120hz/30" monitor to need these cards, you are 100% WRONG. I run "only" 1080p and I have a 7970 and I still can't even COME CLOSE to maxing out BF3. If I turn on full AA (deferred and post) on Ultra I can easily get dips into the 20's!
For kicks I tried going to 720p @ 75hz on ultra with full AA and super sampling and it was STILL unplayable (my standards anyway, if you like dropping in to the 40's and 30's and lower than maybe)
/endthread
I was just reading about this earlier today, and according to at least one [H]OCP article it's a vast improvement over MLAA if software supports it (not in visual quality, but in comparable results with less performance decrease). Stopped reading when I had to go out, though...
Doesn't seem like a 7970 is overkill for BF3 at around his resolution. It's about what you'd want for smooth gameplay with all the eye candy turned on.
Exactly! And that isn't with all (That is only at high not ultra, no super sampling, would dip to low at times for Vsync, etc.)
I don't know what the Nvidia equivalents are but if a game supports AMSAA you can get better quality than FXAA by using AMSAA-Edge detect/EQAA/Temporal AA. Probably higher framerates and definately better quality.
Even if a game dosen't support FXAA simply using 2xSSAA-edge detect+EQAA+mabye Temporal AA depending on framerates yields much better quality also.
Personaly I always prefer the cleanest crisp images I possibly can. FXAA/MLAA needs to die IMO. There is no point in benchmarking ATI vs NV with FXAA. ATI cards don't like it and it is garbage. it blurs everything.
We need someone to benchmark 7970 vs 680 with the highest possible quality settings @ 1920x1080 and 2560x1440 keeping close to 75fps. Reviewers should use any available tweaking programs to enhance quality and overclock.
This would definately be much more informative of a review as to the quality and performance of the 2 gfx cards.
Reviewers should also play with in game settings to find any unnecessarily high settings. some games have ultra settings that add very little actual value to gameplay and gfx. these should be lowered where applicable. A good example of ultra settings that are not necessary can be found in BF3.
Even if a game dosen't support FXAA simply using 2xSSAA-edge detect+EQAA+mabye Temporal AA depending on framerates yields much better quality also.
Personaly I always prefer the cleanest crisp images I possibly can. FXAA/MLAA needs to die IMO. There is no point in benchmarking ATI vs NV with FXAA. ATI cards don't like it and it is garbage. it blurs everything.
We need someone to benchmark 7970 vs 680 with the highest possible quality settings @ 1920x1080 and 2560x1440 keeping close to 75fps. Reviewers should use any available tweaking programs to enhance quality and overclock.
This would definately be much more informative of a review as to the quality and performance of the 2 gfx cards.
Reviewers should also play with in game settings to find any unnecessarily high settings. some games have ultra settings that add very little actual value to gameplay and gfx. these should be lowered where applicable. A good example of ultra settings that are not necessary can be found in BF3.
While you make many good points, grndzro, most "gamers" don't care about actually tweaking visual quality properly and will be satisfied only when their machine can run "ULTRA" or "THE HIGHEST" setting, even if that setting gives them extreme performance hits and very little visual gains over "SECOND HIGHEST". These same guys will build machines with 16GB+ RAM and do nothing more than browse the web and play BF3/MW3...
For example, I just purchased a Sapphire 7970 and play TF2 competitively. Since I play it a lot, it was the first game I loaded up on the 7970, and I cranked EVERY setting to max. My FPS? ~40-100FPS on 2Fort at 1920x1080. But the visual gains I got from doing so were hardly even noticeable when compared to the 2xMSAA I had already seen on my 5770. I'm not saying the difference isn't obvious, because everything IS smoother at max SSAA, but Supersampling is really much better when running crossfire because of the extreme performance hit. Seeing this, I decided to see what it looked like with Adaptive MSAA instead of the SSAA I had enabled...
My FPS after changing that ONE setting? 140-200FPS, and I'm sorry but I really can't tell the fucking difference between the two at this resolution. In fact, I can't tell the difference between anything except non-AA and moderate AA, and most of the people saying otherwise are full of BS. I would LOVE to see a blind test given to gamers, asking them to describe whether a game is running in "ULTRA" or "SECOND HIGHEST" quality settings. They will not know the difference unless running at extreme resolutions (bigger than 1600p).
In short, just because you can doesn't mean you should. There are a BUNCH of morons running Ultra on BF3 when it in fact doesn't look noticeably different than the second-highest settings and gives them extreme performance hits. If you're actually into playing the game and not in it for ePeen factor, then performance will be important to you, especially when you record your matches and need very high FPS for a professional-looking slow-mo scene.
Also, I purchased my 7970 because I'll be getting a 1440p monitor soon, but even if I continued to game at 1080p I'd say the 7970 is not overkill if you really want to run at MAX settings all the time. At 1600x900 it will be even better for doing this.
For example, I just purchased a Sapphire 7970 and play TF2 competitively. Since I play it a lot, it was the first game I loaded up on the 7970, and I cranked EVERY setting to max. My FPS? ~40-100FPS on 2Fort at 1920x1080. But the visual gains I got from doing so were hardly even noticeable when compared to the 2xMSAA I had already seen on my 5770. I'm not saying the difference isn't obvious, because everything IS smoother at max SSAA, but Supersampling is really much better when running crossfire because of the extreme performance hit. Seeing this, I decided to see what it looked like with Adaptive MSAA instead of the SSAA I had enabled...
My FPS after changing that ONE setting? 140-200FPS, and I'm sorry but I really can't tell the fucking difference between the two at this resolution. In fact, I can't tell the difference between anything except non-AA and moderate AA, and most of the people saying otherwise are full of BS. I would LOVE to see a blind test given to gamers, asking them to describe whether a game is running in "ULTRA" or "SECOND HIGHEST" quality settings. They will not know the difference unless running at extreme resolutions (bigger than 1600p).
In short, just because you can doesn't mean you should. There are a BUNCH of morons running Ultra on BF3 when it in fact doesn't look noticeably different than the second-highest settings and gives them extreme performance hits. If you're actually into playing the game and not in it for ePeen factor, then performance will be important to you, especially when you record your matches and need very high FPS for a professional-looking slow-mo scene.
Also, I purchased my 7970 because I'll be getting a 1440p monitor soon, but even if I continued to game at 1080p I'd say the 7970 is not overkill if you really want to run at MAX settings all the time. At 1600x900 it will be even better for doing this.
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First, I haven't heard of an MMO called BF3. Most MMOs can be maxed out by almost anything not built into the motherboard (I max out DDO with a 280 at 1920x1080). On the other hand, if you wanted that answer, you wouldn't have asked it here.
The real answer is to replace the monitor & desk (I'm assuming a 22" monitor with iPod3 dot pitch isn't going to be an option any time soon). It might be realistic to tide yourself over with a 5770 or something (which will likely max out you MMOs, show skyrim reasonably well (at 1600x900) and absolutely fall over for bf3 and such). It will be easily another year for another graphics card generation (although I'd expect a 660 sooner or later, but don't expect any miracles: I'd expect half the performance for half the price). So it really doesn't look like there are any easier answer than this:
Replace that silly desk already. Get a real monitor and then you can get the card you want.
The real answer is to replace the monitor & desk (I'm assuming a 22" monitor with iPod3 dot pitch isn't going to be an option any time soon). It might be realistic to tide yourself over with a 5770 or something (which will likely max out you MMOs, show skyrim reasonably well (at 1600x900) and absolutely fall over for bf3 and such). It will be easily another year for another graphics card generation (although I'd expect a 660 sooner or later, but don't expect any miracles: I'd expect half the performance for half the price). So it really doesn't look like there are any easier answer than this:
Replace that silly desk already. Get a real monitor and then you can get the card you want.
