Currently i've got a 4870 512MB. I'm playing games on a 24" panel at 1920x1200. The card is beginning to struggle somewhat with newer games such as BF3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I'm holding off getting Skyrim until i've had a chance to upgrade.
So I was comparing cards. I can get an MSI AMD 6950 2GB O/Ced (the Twin Frozr III) for around £230, then if i'm lucky i'll be able to unlock it to 6970 speeds (but i'm not counting on it).
Or for £250-£260ish I can get a 1280MB Nvidia GTX 570. While I do currently own an ATI card (at the time the price/performance vs Nvidia was just too good to pass up) i've always preferred Nvidia as their drivers seem more stable and games tend to Just Work on release day more often, where AMD sometimes need a driver update or game patch to fix framerate issues. Also, an Nvidia card means in games that support it I can utilise PhysX, as long as it doesn't drop my framerate below usable levels. I'm happy to pay a bit more for Nvidia at a similar performance level.
But the AMD card has almost twice the graphics RAM, and i'm comparing a stock GTX 570 with an overclocked 6950 that I might be able to push even further. My questions are 1) How would people say the two cards compare? I can find plenty of 6950/6970 vs 560Ti/570 reviews, but none that specifically compare the O/Ced 6950 vs a stock 570. And 2) Will I really benefit from that extra graphics RAM? I don't want to make the same mistake I did with the 4870 ("Double the graphics RAM is really expensive. Noone will ever use that much! It's half what is in there for the CPU!") but at the same time it seems like the only systems that make use of anything like that much graphics RAM are people running on 27" monitors at 2560 x whatever huge res or doing muti-monitor gaming setups. I certainly don't intend to upgrade past a 24" monitor within the next 5 years, by which time this card will be obsolete anyway, and while I have a second monitor (only a 19" 4:3 at 1280x1024) it basically displays all my IM clients and such on the Windows desktop while I game on the primary monitor. If I want a bigger screen i'll drag the PC downstairs and plug it into my TV, which is actually a lower res (1920x1080).


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