Reviews - MSI R7950 Twin Frozr 3GD5/OC

[HEXUS]

We test it against GTX 670 on three screens.

Read more.

[Tunnah]

Why use MSAA at these resolutions ? With it turned off the framerates would surely be much higher, and gives the end user a much more useful benchmark.

[Tarinder]

Remember just how wide the viewing area on three screens is. The pixel density is no smaller than running on one 1,920x1,080 screen, and we'd always have high AA/AF for that. Of course you can reduce the AA/AF to an extent where the cards produce much higher framerates and you could keep reducing them for, say, a Radeon HD 7850 or Radeon HD 7770.

The point here is to see how these super-powerful, expensive video cards react when the same quality settings are applied to a single screen (24in, 1,920x1,080), a super-high-resolution screen (30in, 2,560x1,600) and super-wide screens (72in, 5,760x1,080). Putting the same IQ load on cards provides clear continuity between resolution results and indicates that a very high-quality three-screen gaming experience is just outside the remit of a single HD 7950 or GTX 670 card. But the settings also provide an adequate test for two-card HD 7950 or GTX 670, as you will see in an upcoming article.

[Noxvayl]

Another good review Tarinder, I'm especially liking the FPS/Time graphs, very useful for the more detailed differences between how the cards handle different games.

[Tunnah]

Oh yeah I understand the need for it but in a way it's kind of an unfair test, as the extra VRAM puts the AMD at an unfair advantage, considering how much extra MSAA uses, when FXAA does as good of a job with less of a penalty.

Or am I wrong ? From what I remember MSAA uses a lot of VRAM because it generates higher res textures to overlay, so with the 3 screens the VRAM needed is massive, and would equal more of a performance hit than the calculation itself.

That's kind of what I remember anyway, wouldn't be the first time I'm wrong

[Tarinder]

Oh yeah I understand the need for it but in a way it's kind of an unfair test, as the extra VRAM puts the AMD at an unfair advantage...D

AMD is giving you a 3GB buffer for the same price as NVIDIA provides a 2GB buffer on the GTX 600-series. I personally consider this a good thing from AMD - let's forget about the the design choices, bus width, etc. - and, taking it to an extreme, would prefer NVIDIA provide 4GB of GDDR5 memory at the same price as 2GB.

[Tunnah]

That's why I'm interested in seeing the FXAA-only numbers, as I reckon 2GB would be more than enough even at 3 screen gaming, would rather have a more powerful card (as I suspect).

Also to use that extra VRAM you have to put up resolution and settings to a level that the card can't handle comfortably.

I'll know soon enough myself, looks like I'm getting a 670 instead of a 680 like I was originally planning.