Help me choose a card!

[ATOJAR]

Ok heres my dilemma ... Just after Christmas im gonna be upgrading my GFX card. Not sure what to get.

Asus ATI Radeon HD 6970 2048MB GDDR5 £329.99 inc VAT

Or

EVGA GeForce GTX 570 SuperClocked 1280MB GDDR5 £329.99 inc VAT

Both the same price but the 6970 has more on-board memory, Faster memory clock speeds, Faster clock core & over three times the Stream Processors.

Now i aint a fan boy so its all about pure bang for buck here.

In opinion what of the two has more raw power?

[MUYA]

didnt you read the reviews?

[ATOJAR]

No.

[MUYA]

*slap*

Go and read em!

I dunno man very competitive pricing for 6970! .....very tempting

[ATOJAR]

Originally Posted by MUYA

*slap*

Go and read em!

I dunno man very competitive pricing for 6970! .....very tempting

*ouch*

Thanks man i will read em.

Ive never owned a ATI card, The only thing that kind of puts me off is ive heard alot of things about there drivers support.

2 6950's could be nice....

[MUYA]

Very nice indeed....as I can only do crossfire on my x38 mobo and no SLI (but an illegal patch is available..and I dun want that)

PS- dont ask where you can get it as I wont tell you either...its easily searchable in far east websites

[Redeemed]

Originally Posted by ATOJAR

*ouch*

Thanks man i will read em.

Ive never owned a ATI card, The only thing that kind of puts me off is ive heard alot of things about there drivers support.

My vote goes to the 6970.

Regarding the drivers, if you've got a long history of nVidia graphics cards then you'll be very used to the Forceware drivers. Catalyst is definitely different- it'll take some getting used to.

First tip: When install drivers *always* do a fresh install. Meaning make certain you fully remove the prior drivers before installing the ATi drivers. Even if you are going to upgrade from a set of Catalyst drivers on your computer to a newer version- FRESH INSTALL... remove the old Catalyst drivers first, then install the new ones. This will spare you many headaches.

Outside of that... you'll likely not experience many issues. I did have a hard time getting older titles, like CoD (the very first one) and MoH:AA to run... had to revert back to Catalyst 10.4 as the games wouldn't run on anything newer. Those are the only two games I've had issues with. Every other game seems to work wonderfully with the latest official Catalyst drivers (10.11).

Mind you, at this moment there aren't any official drivers for the 6970s... any headaches that you *may* encounter will likely be resolved with the next driver release.

Anyhow- for the price you just can't go wrong. The 6970 will be soundly faster than the GTX570 in most games, likely receiving a performance boost with official drivers once those are available. Since they're the same price the 6970 is the only logical choice... it is faster than the 570.

[jcrox]

Originally Posted by Redeemed

Anyhow- for the price you just can't go wrong. The 6970 will be soundly faster than the GTX570 in most games, likely receiving a performance boost with official drivers once those are available. Since they're the same price the 6970 is the only logical choice... it is faster than the 570.

The reviews that I've seen so far have the 570 ahead in some games and 6970 ahead in others with most cases showing only a couple of frames per second difference between the 2.

[Redeemed]

Originally Posted by jcrox

The reviews that I've seen so far have the 570 ahead in some games and 6970 ahead in others with most cases showing only a couple of frames per second difference between the 2.

I've only read the HardOCP review. The 6970 trades blows with the 580 but leaves the 570 trailing.

I guess ultimately it depends on resolution he'll be playing at. The higher the resolution the better the 6970 will perform compared to the 570.

[Rollo]

Originally Posted by Redeemed

I've only read the HardOCP review. The 6970 trades blows with the 580 but leaves the 570 trailing.

I guess ultimately it depends on resolution he'll be playing at. The higher the resolution the better the 6970 will perform compared to the 570.

You need to read a review where the reviewer doesn't arbitrarily decide what settings are "playable" and they actually bench at the same settings. A 6970 does not "trade blows" with a 580, it's trades blows with a 570/480.

The 6970 is another testament to the failure that is VLIW arch. (e.g. Itanium, FX5800)

Yes, a 6970 does have 3X the SPs as a GTX570, strike anyone else as "odd" it's the same level of performance? Compiler efficiency and the inherent limitations with instructions depending on the results of other instructions. AMDs GPUs may be smaller, but in terms of SPs sitting idle, they're VERY inefficient.

In any case, I can't think of a reason why anyone would pay $20 more for a 6970 and lock themselves out of PhysX, CUDA, and 3D Vision.

[Blacklash]

GTX 570 and OC it if you like.