GeForce GTX 680 3-Way SLI & Radeon 7970 Tri-Fire Review @ [H]

raghu78 said:
GTX 680 has enough shading power over GTX 580 (1536 shaders at 1100 Mhz vs 512 shaders at 1550 Mhz).
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That's an invalid comparison because the shader architecture between the two cards is different.

And yes I know that if you overclock the 7970 it overcomes a lot of the performance disparity. Your first link is 7970s with a 200MHz overclock, it shouldn't be surprising that they compare more favorably to the GTX 680 there.

Anyways, it really depends on the game / settings, but most of the benchmarks here at the [H] (which I trust more than canned benchmarks at other places) show the 680 winning in their tests. It can vary game-by-game, as usual, some games favor one architecture over the other and some games use different areas of the GPU more. I wasn't try to bash the 7970 - now that AMD has dropped the price I think it's a competitive single card solution.
 
Rizen said:
That's an invalid comparison because the shader architecture between the two cards is different.

And yes I know that if you overclock the 7970 it overcomes a lot of the performance disparity. Your first link is 7970s with a 200MHz overclock, it shouldn't be surprising that they compare more favorably to the GTX 680 there.

Anyways, it really depends on the game / settings, but most of the benchmarks here at the [H] (which I trust more than canned benchmarks at other places) show the 680 winning in their tests. It can vary game-by-game, as usual, some games favor one architecture over the other and some games use different areas of the GPU more. I wasn't try to bash the 7970 - now that AMD has dropped the price I think it's a competitive single card solution.
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yep. on paper the gtx680 has 100% more shading power than the gtx580 but its only 30-35% faster overall.
 
Rizen said:
That's an invalid comparison because the shader architecture between the two cards is different.

And yes I know that if you overclock the 7970 it overcomes a lot of the performance disparity. Your first link is 7970s with a 200MHz overclock, it shouldn't be surprising that they compare more favorably to the GTX 680 there.

Anyways, it really depends on the game / settings, but most of the benchmarks here at the [H] (which I trust more than canned benchmarks at other places) show the 680 winning in their tests. It can vary game-by-game, as usual, some games favor one architecture over the other and some games use different areas of the GPU more. I wasn't try to bash the 7970 - now that AMD has dropped the price I think it's a competitive single card solution.
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Everyone has their own preferences, but a 7970 oc'ed to 1150-1200 definitely smashes the 680 in many games at 2560x1440. All crysis games/metro 2033/alan wake/witcher 2 / a few others in particular. The most tested games (bf3, skyrim) generally favor nvidia reason though - although they're about the same speed at a heavy oc (for the 7970). Because of this i'm dismayed that eyefinity has issues, I'm a fan of the potential of the hardware and want AMD to do well -- but someone who shells out 1500$ for trifire shouldn't get fucked. Shrug. AMD fucking up in that area pisses me off. Anyway, I maintain the 680 is a better card out of the box, can we all just get along and such.
 
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xoleras said:
Everyone has their own preferences, but a 7970 oc'ed to 1150-1200 definitely smashes the 680 in many games at 2560x1440. All crysis games/metro 2033/alan wake/witcher 2 / a few others in particular. The most tested games (bf3, skyrim) generally favor nvidia reason though - although they're about the same speed at a heavy oc (for the 7970). Because of this i'm dismayed that eyefinity has issues, I'm a fan of the potential of the hardware and want AMD to do well -- but someone who shells out 1500$ for trifire shouldn't get fucked. Shrug. AMD fucking up in that area pisses me off. Anyway, I maintain the 680 is a better card out of the box, can we all just get along and such.
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Yep, I looked at both cards, and I have both a 5760x1200 Surround setup and a 2560x1440 monitor, so I wanted dual cards. AMD's CFX/Eyefinity issues with the 7970s steered me towards the 680s.
 
people act like you can just magically hire someone like it's manual labor, show me all the skilled people that can write a driver? even open source is a mess

open amd's job board, you'll see A LOT of job openings, so are there enough capable people to move into amd's offices?

what amd really lacks other than manpower is transparency/contact with the community ('we heard about issue x, we'll look at it now') & listing lots of the undocumented issues/fixes in release notes (vaguely related to QA, but it's also quite possible that they know, yet send out an WHQL anyway, just look what happened to the 8.96 branch that only appeared good early on, why bother putting fixes into that branch with limited manpower when 8.97 is the planned final pre-dx11 driver that should be the focus)
 
I bought 3 7970's at launch to run my eyefinity set up. All I can say is i am very disappointed, nothing but problems since the day i got em.
I came from 3 580's in surround that gave me only few problems, Had i know AMD was having trouble with Tri fire and eyefinity together I would have not bought them.
After seeing this article i am actively trying to return my 7970's or 2 of em anyway, i'd like to return all of em though.

I am tired of waiting on a fix! I hate Nvidia as a company but i just to tired of problems i had to this point and just wanna stop trying to fix my sh*t.

I paid 1650 for a broken product and many hours tring to find a fix, it will be awhile before i trust AMD again.
 
@Brent + Kyle,

Was wondering if you were monitoring gpu utilization while you were benching Skyrim? I think you would have found that with AMD Trifire with the latest drivers and Cap profiles only two gpus are working. Thats because AMD has hard locked and disabled the third gpu for some reason. Its notable that the xml profile under Skyrim says "Maxgpus=2" and that it may even be locked on the driver itself. This boggles my mind why they would cripple its performance intentionally?!

So its no wonder why Nvidia triple SLI out performed triple xfire. A more 'apples to apples' test would have to be limited to just two gpus as this isn't technically a scaling issue. Perhaps you could write to Andrew Dodd and bring it to their attention for what good it might do. I have already written to catalyst crew via their feedback form about this issue and how 12.4s seem to me to be broken for Trifire eyefinity users.

Anyhow mostly my cards behave pretty good in Trifire. I have three 6970s which have been out for a while and most of my favorite games play well though it seems like hotfixes always come out too late and some bugs never get fixed. Nvidia is looking good..

Thanks.
 
davidm71 said:
So its no wonder why Nvidia triple SLI out performed triple xfire. A more 'apples to apples' test would have to be limited to just two gpus as this isn't technically a scaling issue.
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Huh? So in an article comparing 3 GPUs to 3 GPUs they were supposed to drop back to two because of a driver issue to make it an 'apples to apples' comparison? [H] already did an 2x 680 SLI test, if indeed AMD's drivers don't work with 3x CF Eyefinity in Skyrim then that's what the test SHOULD point out. AMD's driver issues with 3x CF and Eyefinity are already known to AMD according to this article.
 
Yeh the way I see it, its AMD's poor drivers that let them down. If someone wanted to buy a Tri system for Eyefinity, these are the results they would get. you could also extrapolate that quad is in the same boat..
 
Just because AMD gets bitch slapped in a 3x CF/SLI comparison should not stop review sites from running three card reviews. Sure it isn't nice, but the reality of the situation is that people who bought $1500+ in AMD cards have had to put up with five months worth of bugs preventing them from using their shiny hardware with newer drivers. Kyle was right to call them out on it.
 
heatlesssun said:
Huh? So in an article comparing 3 GPUs to 3 GPUs they were supposed to drop back to two because of a driver issue to make it an 'apples to apples' comparison? [H] already did an 2x 680 SLI test, if indeed AMD's drivers don't work with 3x CF Eyefinity in Skyrim then that's what the test SHOULD point out. AMD's driver issues with 3x CF and Eyefinity are already known to AMD according to this article.
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I guess you have a point that this was a three gpu contest and not a 2X test. Thing is the article does not go into details about why the Skyrim test was so poor beyond saying its related to poor drivers. I just wanted to point out that its because they Amd locked the drivers to operate at 2X mode only for some reason and was wondering if Kyle could ask Amd whats up with that?

Thanks
 
Krog said:
I bought 3 7970's at launch to run my eyefinity set up. All I can say is i am very disappointed, nothing but problems since the day i got em.
I came from 3 580's in surround that gave me only few problems, Had i know AMD was having trouble with Tri fire and eyefinity together I would have not bought them.
After seeing this article i am actively trying to return my 7970's or 2 of em anyway, i'd like to return all of em though.

I am tired of waiting on a fix! I hate Nvidia as a company but i just to tired of problems i had to this point and just wanna stop trying to fix my sh*t.

I paid 1650 for a broken product and many hours tring to find a fix, it will be awhile before i trust AMD again.
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Where did you buy those cards at? It has'nt been over 30 days or something? If you get them returned let me know i got 4 i should be trying the same.
 
I looked at the HardOcp 2X review and the Skyrim scores are 99% identical to the 3X scores. At 2X crossfire at 5760x1200 (8X AA + FXAA -16X AF Ultra) they get Min. FPS 17 Max FPS 125 Avg. FPS 62, and at 3X crossfire at 5760x1200 (8X AA + FXAA -16X AF Ultra) they get Min. FPS 0 Max FPS 124 Avg. FPS 60.4. Its statistically the same. The reviewer though should make a correction where he says:

raw framerates HD 7970 Tri-Fire is severely hampered. We think it might simply be that this game is not scaling efficiently well between the three Radeon HD 7970 video cards.
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As its not a scaling issue. That is technically incorrect as its factory locked at 2X performance. Anyhow hope this catches someones attention at AMD because this is the last time I ever buy three cards from AMD!
 
davidm71 said:
I looked at the HardOcp 2X review and the Skyrim scores are 99% identical to the 3X scores. At 2X crossfire at 5760x1200 (8X AA + FXAA -16X AF Ultra) they get Min. FPS 17 Max FPS 125 Avg. FPS 62, and at 3X crossfire at 5760x1200 (8X AA + FXAA -16X AF Ultra) they get Min. FPS 0 Max FPS 124 Avg. FPS 60.4. Its statistically the same. The reviewer though should make a correction where he says:



As its not a scaling issue. That is technically incorrect as its factory locked at 2X performance. Anyhow hope this catches someones attention at AMD because this is the last time I ever buy three cards from AMD!
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I still would love to know if AMD pays attention to this shit, the bad reviews like this. You'd think they would immediately increase size of the software team, and I realize its hard to find talent to do that - coding drivers is extremely complicated, far more so than most software - but this kind of shit shouldn't be happening. How can people be up in arms about stuff like this so long with inaction on their part? Fucking bullshit.... If Triple crossfire is an option it should be supported in a game that has been out for 6 months.

I say that with a lot of disappointment because I have a box with 7970CF and I enjoy it very much, all of my games scale great, both cards oc like crazy and it is perfect on single screen 2560. However, It would be nice to know that I would be covered if I ever opt for eyefinity. It sounds like it would be more hassle than its worth and that is disappointing to say the least.
 
@ eclypse
Yes it has... I got them at newegg and i spend boat load of money there a year so they do stuff for me. However Sapphire has offered to me a deal i cant refuse so i gonna take that and be happy.
I dont wanna buy Nvidia cause I'm a hater and 2 GB sucks for that kind of money, so i will wait for AMD to Talk to some aliens over at area 51 to fix there stuff. That must be where they got the Tech because they dont know what to do with it.
 
Krog said:
@ eclypse
Yes it has... I got them at newegg and i spend boat load of money there a year so they do stuff for me. However Sapphire has offered to me a deal i cant refuse so i gonna take that and be happy.
I dont wanna buy Nvidia cause I'm a hater and 2 GB sucks for that kind of money, so i will wait for AMD to Talk to some aliens over at area 51 to fix there stuff. That must be where they got the Tech because they dont know what to do with it.
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Curious as to what that deal was hehe.. Not that i'd expect the same as i have 2 XFX and 2 Diamonds. My only hope would be to sell off 1-2 and sadly go back to a single monitor.
 
Krog said:
so i will wait for AMD to Talk to some aliens over at area 51 to fix there stuff. That must be where they got the Tech because they dont know what to do with it.
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Superb. I don't know why AMD is having so much trouble with their drivers and HD 7000 series.
 
eclypse said:
Curious as to what that deal was hehe.. Not that i'd expect the same as i have 2 XFX and 2 Diamonds. My only hope would be to sell off 1-2 and sadly go back to a single monitor.
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I could never go back to single monitor again......well maybe a 2660x1660.
Ahhhh they will fix it some day or maybe kidnap someone who could:D
 
Quagmire LXIX said:
Nice catch david!
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Hey Thanks!

This sucks though.. I want my Trifire working in Skyrim! What is wrong with AMD! This should have been introduced in a hotfix immediately and instead AMD is saying to everyone who ever bought multiple gpus to [edit] them selves!
 
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davidm71 said:
Hey Thanks!

This sucks though.. I want my Trifire working in Skyrim! What is wrong with AMD! This should have been introduced in a hotfix immediately and instead AMD is saying to everyone who ever bought multiple gpus to [edit] them selves!
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This is probably the consequence of the 10% 'across the board layoffs.' Just goes to show how stupid 'across the board' layoffs are. When you're trimming fat off a steak, you don't randomly cut off any old 10% of it, you look carefully for the fat. I get the feeling the cuts were much more random than that, and some of them were made to driver staff who were critical to the crossfire optimizations, especially for eyefinity. If I were AMD's CEO, I'd be making damn sure that every piece of CPU and GPU technology was supported with drivers that squeezed 110% out of it.

Nevertheless, like some others here, I also feel very reluctant to support nvidia (why don't they just merge with AMD already and fight the good fight against the REAL enemy - Intel?) I also feel that spending $500 on a GTX680 with 2Gb of video memory for my 3 monitor setup would be kinda dumb. If I were prepared to do that, I might as well buy a couple of 7870s and crossfire them once they fall closer to $300 and get a setup that crushes the single 680 for about $600.
 
Haven't we established that the 2GB buffer on the GTX 680 is sufficient right now? Kind of tired of hearing people play the 2GB card to say some 3GB cards (*cough*) are guaranteed to be better (not that you are anubis44, just saying). I haven't seen any evidence to suggest 2GB isn't enough for the GTX 680, nor that 3GB isn't enough (or too much) on the 7970.
 
I take it you dont use eyefinity/surround vision?

Night and day difference going from 1.5GB 580s to 3GB 580s/7970 3GB cards using surround vision/eyefinity with a large res.
 
But going from 2GB on the 680 to 3GB on the 7970 certainly isn't helping the 7970 overall at least up to 5760x1200 though the VRAM difference might make more of an impact beyond this resolution.
 
Was wondering if the Op wouldn't mind running the bench on Skyrim again for Trifire but this time turn on AFR Friendly mode and verify with Afterburner that all GPUs are being used? I was able to finally get Trifire working in Skyrim with 12.4 driver and 12.4 cap profile that just came out by using AFR mode but scaling on my machine was horrible. Got better performance with just two gpus than three in regular crossfire. I may be cpu limited for this game with my 920 at 3.8ghz so I wonder though on a pimped out overclocked intel Cpu if he would get better scores?

Thanks
 
Great review. Now I know which to go with if I ever had retarded amounts of money. haha.
 
Then pull your head out your arse and read the next Page where it clearly states that 2gb is not enough to run the game in 2 or 4 MSAA!
 
albertyouwrong said:
I guess thinking I could run 3 monitors with two midrange video cards was wishful thinking -__-
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A lot of caveats in this statement. It would depend of the resolution of the monitors, the games being played and the desired performance level.
 
sure you can, you just cant max every game but most you most likely could.
 
night_2004 said:
Haven't we established that the 2GB buffer on the GTX 680 is sufficient right now? Kind of tired of hearing people play the 2GB card to say some 3GB cards (*cough*) are guaranteed to be better (not that you are anubis44, just saying). I haven't seen any evidence to suggest 2GB isn't enough for the GTX 680, nor that 3GB isn't enough (or too much) on the 7970.
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IMO, no, it's not enough. I think I wouldn't be able to pull off my heavily tweaked Skyrim w/ ENB config on a 2GB 680. VRAM usage can be variable, so I can't say for sure, but it wouldn't run properly on the 2GB 6970 (frequent dips to 1fps). I'm "only" at 2560x1600 too. Another game that hit the 2GB VRAM wall was Crysis Warhead at 8xMSAA. This is partially why I moved to the 7970... if the 4GB 680 was out when I bought my card I would have gotten that instead though.
 
The conclusion of the hardocp article states that the 2gb VRAM buffer was just fine ...
 
Krog said:
Then pull your head out your arse and read the next Page where it clearly states that 2gb is not enough to run the game in 2 or 4 MSAA!
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Maybe check the Multiplayer page, it says the HD 7970, with its amazing 3gb, cannot play it either because it is too choppy. Shows that 3gb is useless since it can't even be utilized due to the cards being too weak.
 
So I just switched over from 7970s in trifire running eyefinity to two gtx 670s in surround (3rd card on the way) and I was thrilled that nvidia could make all this all run buttery smooth. BF3 in surround is just as smooth as a single card powering a single monitor. Heck even the single card powering surround was acceptable if you can be happy running at low settings. I came over from triple 580s and didnt realize how good I had it with Team Green.
 
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