EVGA 570 2 GB or 6970 2 GB

F

FalcX

Weaksauce
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Nov 15, 2005
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Im building a new system and am looking for a good videocard to get me through until the new high end cards are released and reviewed. System will be an Intel 2500 or 2600, 1 ssd , 1 hdd, etc, etc.

I only want a single card system now and down the road, but I want to possibly go multi monitor after the new gens are out.

I think Ive narrowed it down to the evga 570 2 gb or a 6970 2 gb card(looking at the non reference cooling ones: Gigabyte OC)

I will do some gaming : BF 3 and more. at 1900x1200 for now

Just curious as to personnal exp with these cards and opinions. I have been searching alot on the forums and www.

Thanks
 
I don't think it makes sense to pay for the extra memory on the 570, if you only have a single 1920x1200 monitor.

If you have plans for buying a second card for surround gaming later then maybe, but who knows whether the EVGA 570 2560MB will still be on sale then.
 
At 1920x1200, go with a 1280MB 570. The HD6970 isn't really worth the extra at that resolution.
 
Yeah, the 570 is actually 2.5 GB, and not worth it at that res as everyone else has said.
 
if you are going to run linux, i would go with the nvidia, better supported card in linux ...there are a couple of linux distros that do have ati as a configurations, which is good , but many do not..
 
For the price premium on that 2.5 GB 570, you might as well get a 6950 or 6950 2 GB.
 
spaceman said:
Uh bf3 hits 1.4 on my 480 gtx at that resolution. Get a 2 gb card.
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I'd agree with this. Buying a new pseudo-high-end card with only 1gb seems somewhat shortsighted. If the question was whether it was worth it to upgrade from a 1gb card solely for more VRAM I could see the argument for just making do. But why make a new investment in a 1gb card when the OP explicitly references BF3 and we all know what kind of usage that's turning out to be.
 
According to HardOCP's preliminary testing, in the BF3 beta a 6970 is faster than a 570. (This may however change when the final version is out.)

Add to that the better upgrade path for your future multi-monitor setup, then probably a 6950 or 6970 is the best choice.
 
chithanh said:
According to HardOCP's preliminary testing, in the BF3 beta a 6970 is faster than a 570. (This may however change when the final version is out.)

Add to that the better upgrade path for your future multi-monitor setup, then probably a 6950 or 6970 is the best choice.
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I've read some reviews lately on all these cards and I've noticed over the last year the GTX 5xx line has pretty much stayed the same performance wise. However the HD 69xx line has improved because the drivers are getting better. Read a 6970 review with 10.10 drivers, then 11.1, 11.4, and 11.8 drivers and you'll see it keeps getting faster. The additional VRAM helps too. I think the 6950 is the best value right now but 6970 is worth the extra cash too. The GTX 580 just seems priced too high unless you can get a great deal like the Zotac 580 for $399. Here in Canada the price premium from 6970 to 580 is $150+ that is way too much.
 
That's primarily only true of the HD6900s though, the 6800s actually went the other way, they perform worse now than they did at launch due to the removal of a dubious image quality reduction present in the drivers.
 
In Hardocp testing the HD6950 and HD6970 preformed better than the GTX570 and I trust Hardocp more than other sites.
 
Just saying my results exactly contrast with [H], having AMD cads performing worse, but no matter which cards you go with you will be able to play the game with great IQ settings.
 
Agreed, but with the variable test environment at this stage, any moderate differences (say, <15%) should probably be written off.
 
Whatever you buy make sure it has no less than 2 GB. BF3 is a VRAM monsta!

I'm in the same boat and I will not buy any card with less than 2 GB.

I think I'm going to wait the new ATi 7000 or NV 600 series.
 
Tiporaro said:
I'd agree with this. Buying a new pseudo-high-end card with only 1gb seems somewhat shortsighted. If the question was whether it was worth it to upgrade from a 1gb card solely for more VRAM I could see the argument for just making do. But why make a new investment in a 1gb card when the OP explicitly references BF3 and we all know what kind of usage that's turning out to be.
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This. Rise of Flight and ArmA 2 use all of my 896MB of video RAM on my GTX 260. With RoF's settings turned all the way up it will use 170% or so of my video RAM. So, probably 1.5GB or so. Keep in mind I am not even running 1680x1050 in ArmA 2...

I am sure more games will follow in the next year. No reason to spend $200+ and be stuck with 1GB of RAM.
 
I will not pay extra for GTX 570 on 2.5GB, its pointless and worthless..

BF3 actually take quite a bit of VRAM, for 1680*1050 with Ultra/4xMSAA it eats up 1.5-1.6GB of VRAM already...

There are more and more games that uses up VRAM like mad when it offer some high resolution textures.
 
Yeah, the idea is that the price of the 2.5 GB 570 makes it not worth it. Like samuelmorris said, you might as well get a 6950/6970 with 2 GB.
 
Unfortunately, while I think nVid's offerings can be somewhat competitive at some points for price-performance, getting the high vram cards is not one of them. That being said, I'm enjoying the 6900 series and have no regrets with going amd this generation.
 
samuelmorris said:
Agreed, but with the variable test environment at this stage, any moderate differences (say, <15%) should probably be written off.
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15%? That's a huge variance. People will pay upwards of an extra $200 for a 15% improvement.
 
samuelmorris said:
Comes with the nature of the test unfortunately.
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With beta software/drivers I can understand, but if benchmarks vary that much with retail samples then you've got to take a look at motherboards used, settings, CPU clocks all of that stuff.
 
Well it's not directly to do with the fact it's beta software, the problem is because it's a multiplayer beta, there's no means to play the exact same scenario with every hardware configuration. You just have to play the game, and where you end up in the map, how many people there are in the server, and so on, will have a massive effect on the frame rates. Spending 10% more time inside the subway rather than outside the level is going to have more at least a 5-6% increase in the average frame rate shown, and that's obviously going to skew the test data, to the extent that levels of variance less than about 15% are unusable as scientific data :)
 
That's primarily only true of the HD6900s though, the 6800s actually went the other way, they perform worse now than they did at launch due to the removal of a dubious image quality reduction present in the drivers
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I havent noticed any performance drops on my 6870s.
 
This was a long time ago now, a few months after launch they changed this, so right at the beginning of the year.
 
Playing BF3 with a radeon 6950 shader unlocked to 6970, with everything maxed out Im gettin 1600mb Vram usage. I think either card will do fine as long as your getting 2gb version.
 
Im in the same boat. Im looking to do a upgrade for my gaming rig. I dont want to spend a lot but we all know how that goes when it comes to upgrades. Im sticking with my 24inch LCD so i wont be doing this hi rez gaming everyone is getting into.

I want to run BF3 really well and I am thinking between the 6950 or the 6970. I took a look at the 570, but seeing the beta results (ya i know its a beta) for BF3, i cant see spending $100 more for the 570 when its hitting the same results as a 6950.
 
Sedriss said:
Im in the same boat. Im looking to do a upgrade for my gaming rig. I dont want to spend a lot but we all know how that goes when it comes to upgrades. Im sticking with my 24inch LCD so i wont be doing this hi rez gaming everyone is getting into.

I want to run BF3 really well and I am thinking between the 6950 or the 6970. I took a look at the 570, but seeing the beta results (ya i know its a beta) for BF3, i cant see spending $100 more for the 570 when its hitting the same results as a 6950.
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Id get a 6950 and unlock it. There are still a few cards that can be unlocked. Or you can find some used for around $250-$275.
 
Gah, I'm wrestling with this. Physx support...yes it's important to me to have paper and other detritus flying about whilst gaming :)
 
I very rarely see PhysX used for anything impressive. Given that it can never be a non-proprietary technology, it can never change how games actually play because not all players of the game will have it. Thus, it can never succeed.
 
Perhaps AMD's 6xx cards are better in the aspects of drivers, but I sure had a hell of a time with my 5850.

felt like I was an early adopter the entire 2 years I had it. (my major plague with AMD's drivers were dual monitor support (cursor corruption), 99% gpu usage at desktop (worked with Andrew in a series of emails to get this fixed), and of course having to wait for fixed drivers every time a new game launched.

Went with a 570 this time in my new build and haven't had a single driver issue. Ultra is playable at 1080 and I'm sure that'll only get better in time.
 
samuelmorris said:
I very rarely see PhysX used for anything impressive. Given that it can never be a non-proprietary technology, it can never change how games actually play because not all players of the game will have it. Thus, it can never succeed.
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But in the case of Batman and Alice: Madness Returns, it does make the game look WAY more awesome.
 
MavericK96 said:
But in the case of Batman and Alice: Madness Returns, it does make the game look WAY more awesome.
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That's subjective, and in the case of Alice: Madness Returns, it makes it practically unplayable on current hardware.
 
prease said:
Perhaps AMD's 6xx cards are better in the aspects of drivers, but I sure had a hell of a time with my 5850.

felt like I was an early adopter the entire 2 years I had it. (my major plague with AMD's drivers were dual monitor support (cursor corruption), 99% gpu usage at desktop (worked with Andrew in a series of emails to get this fixed), and of course having to wait for fixed drivers every time a new game launched.

Went with a 570 this time in my new build and haven't had a single driver issue. Ultra is playable at 1080 and I'm sure that'll only get better in time.
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Similar experience here. Bought two HD 6950's and took them for a test drive for a month. I really tried to like them but I was always plauged with these little driver bugs and errors, most notably having to wait 5 mins for CCC to pop up....

Having switched over to 570 SLI I no longer have any driver issues and overall my gaming experience has put a smile on my face, especially being able to max out the BF3 beta with FPS to spare. This is with AA and AF at max as well as HBAO. Some people claim to max out IQ but never mess with those settings but you aren't playing maxed out if you simply play on Ultra, which is actually just High. AA and AF make your game look more refined.
 
Thanks for all the input.... I decided to go with the MSI Lightning 6970
Looks good at leaSt for the next 6 months to a year when the new gen gpu's will be out and ill be looking for a top end card if its feasible.
 
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glad you made a choice! I just picked up(well, waiting to ship) 2 2gb 6950s for bf3. One thing i want to point out, is for everyoen who says bf3 runs great on high/ultra on your current card, the beta did not actually include the ultra, or all the high settings, so you were never playing it on high/ultra (if i remember what i read correctly). So, if you had, say, 50fps steady now at 'high/ultra' youll probably see is decent drop when the retail hits in 2 weeks with the actual ultra settings, as opposed to settings that hardly change :p
 
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