The AMD Radeon HD 7970

I don't know- even though it outclasses a 6970 it seems to come very close to a 580 in performance in a lot of cases and costs more. Probably not worth it to jump ship and upgrade at this point.

An unlocked 2GB 6950 for $239 is still a better deal.(too bad there ain't no more cards with switches)

I'll wait a bit to upgrade my 6770 (I'll ahve to upgrade my PSU also). With my monitor only displaying 1650 x 1050... I'm not in a hurry

I'm probably a glutton for punishment for asking this but: How do they scale in CF configs? I didn't notice any of the sites testing them that way (at least none of the ones I looked at).

I'll skip upgrading this gen. Unless anything really outclasses unlocked 6950s there's little point in upgrading now. I have performance to burn anyways.

Very good numbers all-around. AMD really did well with tessellation performance this time.

Price is a bit high, but still a good buy. If I were in the market for a 7970, I would wait for another vendor's version of the card that features a quieter and more effective cooling solution.

Nice but probably not worth the extra $$. I'll wait.

I'm sure MSI will offer their Twin Frozr, but it will be $600+, as will most of the others with custom coolers I would guess. I'd rather have a 6990 for that money.

I've been really pleased with my 6970 and imagine the 7970 will end up being marketed similarly - Once NVidia come out with their next gen card, I'll bet the ATI will drop from $550 to under $400 just like the 6970.

-Trouble

Honestly, I generally prefer AMD cards, but right now I don't see an point in an AMD card that focuses quite a bit on general compute speed.

Nobody actually takes advantage of OpenCL the same way that people are using CUDA. Besides that, Nvidia are the only cards that use PhysX, so you're missing out on the two big uses for general compute power.

I know it could very well be fake, but I wonder if there is any truth to that "leaked" slide for a supposed Nvidia GTX 780, which shows more than twice the performance of the GTX 580 in games where GPU power really matters.

i wouldn't put to much faith in the rumors yet, Nvidia seems to get a bit to over ambitious when it comes to performance. Either way, I'll have 2 of the 780's when they hit

Its onsale at newegg now.
I just ordered.. 5 :P
2 for my htpc/tv gaming PC and 3 for my main gaming box.

Your money. As I stated earlier, after my experience with my 6950s I'd never buy another Crossfire product again.

True. Although, I cannot help but remain hopeful that a single GTX 780 will indeed offer similar or better performance than a GTX 580 SLI configuration.

That would make it the first single-GPU card to spit out a constant 60fps in Crysis at maximum settings in 1920x1080/1200. That should mean something.

noooo. don't say that
in the past i've always keep the mutli video card setup to nvidia as they scaled better. The benchmarks of that these do better than the xfire of the past.


i hope

keep you eye out for bitching incoming if they do not.

Seeing as how the 7970 outclasses a 580 pretty handily and only lists for 50 bucks more in a lot of cases the 580 is a really bad deal. The 580 needs to come down in price otherwise it offers no value at all relative to a 7970 unless you're just dead set on Nvidia. AMD played it smart this time. The card performs very well at stock, is the fastest single gpu out there (and probably will be for 6 months) and has great tweaking ability. Heck with some decent voltage adjustments people are getting around 6990 level numbers. For that kind of performance 550 bucks is a steal. I now know what I'm going to use some of my tax return on. Yay for filing early!

edit lol helps if I get the model number right. Corrected my errors to read 7970.

It's been over a week, do you have any of them installed yet, up and running? I'm just wondering how stable they are and how they perform.

It appears that Nvidia's Kepler GPUs will be worthwhile, as insiders are apparently very impressed with what they've seen thus far.

With this kind of hype, these cards better deliver for those who are waiting.

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/01/19/n...-clear-winner/

OMG.... Get the spaceship ARK prepped and ready, the world is about to come to a end...year 2012 must be the doomsday as predicted. Charlie has something actually positive to say about Nvidia. OMG....

Energy efficiency is the only thing that i wish AMD did better. Thats one of the reasons i bought my GTX570. The 3D's good enough i think, so i might jump over to the AMD side pretty soon.

OT:Not trying to bash the 7970. Just hope you are not planning on running Crossfire...some times AMD/ATi has great hardware but so many times they have bad driver support. I can't wait for the new Nvidia cards so I can dump my triple 5870 setup and go back to SLI.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/...portunity_lost

I know, it's very hard to believe.

I think Nvidia will truly have a winner on its hands if they can offer a mid-range card that appreciably bests the GTX 580 for $300 or under.

What reason is there for getting such high-end cards?

I have a lowly Gigabyte 560 Ti SOC as my video card, and I can seem to run just about any game fine at 1080p. There are some games I haven't tried, and some graphical mods that I haven't tried, but most games from "this" generation run perfectly fine. When I say, "this generation", I mean this current console generation, because with the exception of maybe a handful of developers, everybody seems to be focused on the Xbox 360/PS3, so we are basically just getting enhanced ports that don't really push the hardware all that much. Of course, I'm not running eyefinity or anything like that, so maybe you need the extra power for that.


My plans are to use the current video card that I have, and basically just stick with using this card, and if I start playing games that have issues, I guess I'll just have to lower my settings and deal with it.

The idea of paying big bank to get another card just isn't something I'm considering with next-gen gaming systems coming in the near term. You know Microsoft will probably have a new Xbox for November 2013, and I'd rather save my pennies for that. Sony will likely have something for November 2014. Either way, both of those machines will likely be quite pricey, and for a short period of time, the games running on them will likely exceed anything anybody will be playing on PC. At least, it seemed like that back in late 2005 and late 2006. I don't remember anything on PC that was bringing the noise as much as stuff like the first Gears of War, or the first Motorstorm or Uncharted.


I will admit that I'm a console gamer at heart, and I only have a PC right now, because of the unique situation that we are in right now with new consoles being delayed for such a lengthy period of time. I built a gaming PC to try to get that new console "fix", that I was expecting at the 6 year anniversary of the 360. I've never seen a situation quite like this, where followup consoles have been delayed this long.

A few reasons...
Metro 2033/Last light
2560*1600
5760*1080

Carry on....

Unless you're running multiple monitors or just love Metro 2033 there's really a very sharp drop off in terms of value once you go that high end. You have to just be a fan of tech at some point to really enjoy the high end. Same with high end audio. The drop off in value is steep but then again it's never about that.

I think that's what it usually comes down to. I see many comments on other sites about how people want to upgrade from an 8800GTX or a 9800GT, and those cards cannot do very well with the latest games.

These 28nm GPUs make for a very good time to upgrade, especially if AMD and Nvidia can provide something really impressive in the area of $300.