Classic ATI vs Nvidia question

[BrightCandle]

I have owned 2 7970's and 2 680's. I have used both in single and dual card mode. In all cases I found the NVidia solution to provide signficantly smoother frame rates. So much so infact that the wife has requested to replace her 6950 with a 670. Its striking when you put them side by side how massively better the NVidia cards are. In my opinion AMD isn't even competing in the same game as NVidia with this generation, and with SLI the gap only widens. Ignoring the major problems I had with the 7970's in Windows (bad power saving in the drivers) I have found gaming on the 680's an enormous improvement to the 7970's.

I used those 7970's for 6 months and I had problems the whole time, I just can't recommend another person buy their product because comparatively its .

[DashTrash]

I have owned 2 7970's and 2 680's. I have used both in single and dual card mode. In all cases I found the NVidia solution to provide signficantly smoother frame rates. So much so infact that the wife has requested to replace her 6950 with a 670. Its striking when you put them side by side how massively better the NVidia cards are. In my opinion AMD isn't even competing in the same game as NVidia with this generation, and with SLI the gap only widens. Ignoring the major problems I had with the 7970's in Windows (bad power saving in the drivers) I have found gaming on the 680's an enormous improvement to the 7970's.

I used those 7970's for 6 months and I had problems the whole time, I just can't recommend another person buy their product because comparatively its .

Hey, thanks for the opinion. Exactly the kind of subjective feedback I was looking for. I've been pretty close to pulling the trigger on the 7970, but am really curious to try the 680. Which brand of 680's do you have? How is the overclocking?

[BrightCandle]

I have a pair of MSI cards. I haven't yet done much overclocking as I have had CPU overclocking stability problems, but since they are watercooled I expect they will go up quite nicely.

[DashTrash]

I have a pair of MSI cards. I haven't yet done much overclocking as I have had CPU overclocking stability problems, but since they are watercooled I expect they will go up quite nicely.

7970 or 680's? Post results when you get the cpu sorted out.

[Manicdan]

BrightCandle, was your smoothness test across 3 monitors or just one? there should be no significant difference between them in typical situations. but add on things like eyefinity and xfire i can start to see something standing out.

[DashTrash]

I'm on a single 30" monitor, but which one is "better" on 3 panels?

[BrightCandle]

I tested the 7970's in crossfire on single 1920x1200 and 5760x1200. I have done the same thing with the 680's, but I have only had them a few weeks and I have found myself playing a lot of games triple monitor where on the 7970's it wasn't possible.

NVidia in SLI >> ATI in xfire for 1920x1200
NVidia in SLI >>> ATI in xfire for 5760x1200
NVidia > ATI in 1920x1200

the NVidia's in SLI are not as smooth as on their own. It starts to show some stutter around 45 fps, where a single 680 looks quite smooth down to 30 fps if not a little lower. Which says if you get less than 50% extra from the second card you would be better turning it off! But on AMD anything less than or greater than 60 fps would stutter worse than anything I have seen on NVidia. Honestly I would call AMD in crossfire on 7970's unplayable. Its not just microstutter, its simply does not fool me there is motion properly. It gave me headaches .

So SLI is worse than a single card, but all NVidia options are better than the AMD ones, single or xfire. NVidia is just smoother at lower FPS than AMD. No amount of overclocking my 7970s solved the problem, they stutter even only when loaded to 30%. They just sucked donkey balls in games and in Windows they have such massive performance problems you need to turn transparency off and then you'll "only" have 300ms of input lag.

Get the NVidia card(s). Its not that AMD's cards don't benchmark well, its that the benchmarks aren't measuring what actually matters.

[Stijndp]

It's because nvidia does automatic fps limiting in their drivers which is how you solve microstutter. But even with Nvidia you can experience it because it's not an exact formula where you have to limit your fps and understandably nvidia doesn't want to do too much limiting to avoid bad looking benchmarks.
A start is taking your average fps and you limit your fps to x-1. If you are above 60fps the best solution seems to be enabling vsync and limiting to 59fps. People with lower fps will have to look at their minimum fps and put the limit from x-1 to x+5 for good results. As you can see it's not very exact and it will require some tuning.
AMD users can do this in afterburner. Bandicam is an alternative to do it. With Nvidia you can do it in inspector. In some games you can even do it directly like for instance in BF3 add to your user.cfg "GameTime.MaxVariableFps x".
Now ofc why would we buy 2 expensive cards and then start limiting them? Because 30fps without stutter on 2cards is still better than 20fps on 1card without stutter.


Alternative way is to increase your avaible gpu power.
- Overclocking: this is mostly not enough. when the microstutter is bad enough you can see it, those few extra fps won't save you
- Go trifire/trisli: this is expensive and not practical for many people
- Underclock your cpu so that you are hitting the cpu limit harder and gpu's get breathing room: this is a free and a practical solution but it's not very fun

[bobbth]

the NVidia's in SLI are not as smooth as on their own. It starts to show some stutter around 45 fps, where a single 680 looks quite smooth down to 30 fps if not a little lower. Which says if you get less than 50% extra from the second card you would be better turning it off! But on AMD anything less than or greater than 60 fps would stutter worse than anything I have seen on NVidia. Honestly I would call AMD in crossfire on 7970's unplayable. Its not just microstutter, its simply does not fool me there is motion properly. It gave me headaches .

So SLI is worse than a single card, but all NVidia options are better than the AMD ones, single or xfire. NVidia is just smoother at lower FPS than AMD. No amount of overclocking my 7970s solved the problem, they stutter even only when loaded to 30%. They just sucked donkey balls in games and in Windows they have such massive performance problems you need to turn transparency off and then you'll "only" have 300ms of input lag..

Having done the opposite to you and going from a pair of 680 to a pair of 7970's I can say I found none of this true.

The 7970 looks almost exactly the same as the 680, they both net about the same FPS (and if I had to pick I would say the 7970 felt a tiny bit smoother but only by a fraction at 5760x1080) and since the 12.7 AMD drivers I honestly haven't had a single driver issue. I think you must have had a bad OS/driver install.

OP, I think you are over analyzing the situation, I would just pick the easiest/cheapest/coolest looking.

[DashTrash]

OP, I think you are over analyzing the situation, I would just pick the easiest/cheapest/coolest looking.[/QUOTE]

I'm for sure over analyzing. I've been watching the 7970 prices, and will almost certainly go with one of those. They are running almost $100 less than a 680. Probably won't buy this month, unless I run across a steal of a deal. Also watching how the 7970 lightning does on the ek full blocks. Thanks for the input though!

[the_real_7]

i have both options also , i run my htpc with a evga 670 ftw and my mainf rig with a 7970 , i would say the amd card does better cuase at stock and overclocked it runs way cooler , but yes nvidia has way easier drivers to work with . . . but if you haven't tried both cards and you judging "gtfo" cause yes they both run great but a 7970 oc is ftw

[Ket]

I'm for sure over analyzing. I've been watching the 7970 prices, and will almost certainly go with one of those. They are running almost $100 less than a 680. Probably won't buy this month, unless I run across a steal of a deal. Also watching how the 7970 lightning does on the ek full blocks. Thanks for the input though!

This is exactly why I grabbed a TwinFrozr 7950, the damn thing was/is £80-£100 cheaper than a reference GTX670. For that kind of price premium I would expect the 670 to do something amazing... but it doesn't. My choice to go with the 7950 was based on knowing that the 670 and 7950 basically perform the same coupled with the huge saving of getting a 7950 compared to a 670. When I was weighing everything up this is the shortlist I come to;

AMD/ATI

+ Far cheaper prices
+ 7 Series OC like mad
+ Better in applications like BOINC
+ 3GB vRAM

-/- Dodgy drivers (this seems to be improving)
-/- Flaky OGL support (AMD is supposedly preparing to update OGL to 4.2 in their drivers... we shall see..)

- Worse multi card scaling
- Currently no vBIOS editor to customise fan speeds, voltages and clock speeds

nVidia

+ Better drivers
+ Better multi card scaling
+ Better OGL support
+ vBIOS editors available

-/- Hit and miss overclocking

- Poor in applications such as BOINC
- Only 2GB vRAM

Everything else will sort itself out really. CUDA/PhysX is not anything special to write home about, and thats coming from somebody whos just moved from a OC'd 1GB GTX460 that keeps pace with OC'd GTX560s. Honestly, I think OpenCL and OpenGL support is way more important than CUDA/PhysX.