AMD HD7XXX Series - Latest leaked details - Chiphell

[Mungri]

I'd have to disagree about that. If you're playing cutting edge games, you certainly have a use for the horsepower of the high-end offerings. Battlefield 3 is a good example of a good PC game that needs GPU power. One 6970 isn't enough to play multiplayer on maximum settings at 1920x1200 in my experience. Two 6970s together break over the point where it's doable, but just barely. There are also any number of games which are poor console ports that need a lot of extra horsepower just due to how badly they've been put together for their PC version, not necessarily due to cutting edge graphics. It sucks that such games exist, but they're a part of what we have to deal with if we want to play them.

I'd rather say that BF3 is a game that is ahead of its time. I'd rather reduce my settings a bit to play it now, and then upgrade to the next mid range to max it out, rather than wasting money on an SLI GTX 580 setup right now.

Also I've seen several people capable of running BF3 on a pair of GTX 560s at ultra settings and 60+ FPS ... if they simply reduce their AA to 2x. I'd much rather do that as opposed to buying something more expensive just for the sake of 4x AA in a single game.

The 6970 is also a bad example of BF3 performance, this game is heavily Nvidia optmised and actually runs about the same, if not worse on a 6970 than it does on a single GTX 560 ti.

Some people on a few forums have recently been upgrading their rigs to SLI 3 Gb GTX 580s just for BF3. I cant help but think 'more money than sense' when we all know that HD 7000s and Keplers are due to be released soon, and I doubt that the mid range cards from the next gen will be incapable of maxing out BF3 at 1920x1200.

he's right somwhere look metro 2033,bf3, civ5 etc ... But only if we speak about use of MSAA in BF3, who is mostly a driver problem ( 4xMSAA will not kill your fps so much otherwise ). i have 85-115fps without problem with my 2x 5870 at 1920x1080. just FSAA on max and no MSAA.

Exactly, the only issue I see in BF3 is massive slowdown with 4x MSAA enabled, NOT with the other settings like textures, shadows and whatever else set to Ultra. If you set every setting in BF3 to Ultra, and drop the AA to 2x MSAA, it plays wonderfully on current mid range setups at 1920x1200.

Civ V, Metro (without DOF), and Witcher 2 (without Ubersampling) all at 4x MSAA and all other settings on highest have zero issues with remaining consistently playable, smooth and lag free on a pair of GTX 560 tis, as does BF3 with 2x MSAA.

People who think they currently need 2-3 GTX 580s to play these games comfortably at 1920x1200 resolution simply suffer from the 'more money than sense' illness.