New i5 ivy bridge build...What Graphics Card Should I get?

[Willzzz]

I'm sure you are right about AMD drivers improving, but I'm not sure I follow your logic here!

[flamstead]

Stable drivers?? Considering the stuttering issues Nvidia has had this year,I think that is more an old wives tale!!

Not sure what you mean quality,as I have had both AMD and Nvidia cards which have lasted years.

Also,the 192 bit memory controller and lower number of ROPS will be an issue over time with the GTX660TI against the GTX670.

I remember having similar conversations about the 8800GT 256MB vs the 512MB version,the GTX460 768MB vs the 1GB version and the massively factory overclocked GTX560TI cards vs the GTX570,with people recommending the first cards over the second ones.

The GTX660TI will show its age much quicker than a GTX670 or HD7950 IMHO.

Marketing and pricing strategies. I know I should be solely focusing on performance at the end of the day.

I have read a lot of your previous posts in other threads and respect many of them so let me ask you this. In your honest opinion for the games that I'm looking to play on my PC should I get a 7950 or 660 Ti?

Whats a reasonable frame rate to play most PC games at without stutter or is that dependent on the game?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Marketing and pricing strategies. I know I should be solely focusing on performance at the end of the day.

I have read a lot of your previous posts in other threads and respect many of them so let me ask you this. In your honest opinion for the games that I'm looking to play on my PC should I get a 7950 or 660 Ti?

Whats a reasonable frame rate to play most PC games at without stutter or is that dependent on the game?

These are my views:
1.)For pure overall performance I would get an HD7950.It suffers much less with intensive forms of AA and even with mods too. The GTX660TI has a reduced number of ROPs and less memory bandwidth than a GTX670 despite using the same number of shaders and the same clockspeeds. The cards I mentioned before had enough RAM and ROPs at the time they were released,but these became the main limitations as time progressed. A lot of people will try to only look at the short term and not the long term with these cards. If you are spending well over £200,do not get something which will hit limitations sooner rather than later.
2.)If you overclock,as long as you get a better HD7950,you can 30% to 45% additional overclocks on average(however XFX and Sapphire models are voltage locked but you can still hit 1GHZ on stock voltage!). Hence for overclocking on average I would get an HD7950.
3.)If you need a shorter PCB,are cooling limited or have a more marginal PSU the GTX660TI makes more sense.
4.)If you really need PhysX(sadly it is more about gimping games first it seems),then get a GTX660TI.

Now,if the GTX660TI was around £200 up front I might recommend it more often,but it isn't and I just think the HD7950 has more legs.

Also,it appears the GTX660TI is not selling that well:

http://www.kitguru.net/components/gr...very-sluggish/

Even the purchasing manager over on OcUK,mentioned that the HD7950 and HD7870 had much higher sales:

http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-news/2...ml#post2591269

There seems to be some noise,that there will be a price cut on the GTX660TI as a result in the next few weeks. It might be worth waiting as you might be able to get a £200 GTX660TI.

[Willzzz]

The 660 Ti and 7950 are pretty close, it depends upon the games you play now and the games you anticipate playing in the future.
But most of all it depends upon the price.

I mean when you can pick up a quality 7950 for £240 that is hard to argue with, but then again Nvidia are preparing to announce price cuts for the 660 Ti.

The key thing is usually the minimum frame rate, you never want this to drop below 30fps. For most games having an average of 50-60 fps should give you confidence that the minimum will not drop below 30fps. This should be achievable on almost any graphics card, the issue is how high you can push the resolution and effects while doing so.

Having excess memory capacity is great, but AMD cards will usually hit another bottleneck before their memory advantage is fully used. But hey, at least it's there

[dacads]

Features such as physx will be useless if you plan to play fifa 13

[Fjo]

The 7950 for £240-£270 is the choice. I agree entirely with Cat's thoughts on the matter.
Though if you've got the funds, a 670 can be had for £290 and i'd make the jump. For a new build that you'd like to last, get the best you can - it's that simple. A 670 will keep you going for a good while and that's before any overclocking. The 660Ti i wouldn't bother with unless you really can't spend more than £220, and only if you're willing to wait and see / have faith that rumoured cuts will come good.
If OP's happy to spend ~£300, a 670. May be more than you need right now but that's no bad thing.
If OP wants to spare some funds, a 7950 with a decent cooler. You won't regret it and no game right now strains it too hard at High/Ultra settings.

If you're angling at a 7950, try and get one on sale and before the model you want is replaced with boost bios stock. I was going to get the MSI Twin-Frozr 3, but it's end of line at Scan and the new bios version is £300. I personally decided to switch up to a 670 for my new 3XS build because i could.

[flamstead]

Thanks Cat, I think I'm gonna holdout for a bit maybe til November as ill be heavily playing Fifa 13 on the Xbox come end of the month...hopefully within that time the price of a non reference 670 drops sub £290 or the GTX 660 Ti drops to around the £210-£200 mark but honestly i cant see it dropping especially if Nvidia are releasing the non ti version and also the GTX650.

Wish I had snapped up the EVGA GTX 670 from PC World when they had a 10% code going!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Thanks Cat, I think I'm gonna holdout for a bit maybe til November as ill be heavily playing Fifa 13 on the Xbox come end of the month...hopefully within that time the price of a non reference 670 drops sub £290 or the GTX 660 Ti drops to around the £210-£200 mark but honestly i cant see it dropping especially if Nvidia are releasing the non ti version and also the GTX650.

Wish I had snapped up the EVGA GTX 670 from PC World when they had a 10% code going!

Here is an article which looks at the memory bandwidth limitations of the GTX660TI with a bandwidth heavy game:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/geforc...-32522-10.html

This is why at around £200 it would be better value. However,it also seems AMD is dropping prices too:

http://www.techpowerup.com/172097/AM...rice-Cuts.html

That means an HD7870 will be well under £200 hopefully and the HD7950 3GB will start at around £220 to £230.

[Willzzz]

Wow, more price cuts, awesome

Have to say though that article in Toms is just pointless, just telling us stuff we already knew.

"We really can’t recommend Nvidia's GeForce GTX 660 Ti if you plan to use 4x or 8x MSAA;"

Yeah the 660 Ti only gets 93fps (53fps min) that's just unplayable.

Turning off all the other effects that the card handles well is pointless, it's just not realistic. I mean who in their right mind would turn on 8x MSAA but turn off tesselation, HBAO and MVSS?
How many people can even tell the difference between 4x MSAA and 8x MSAA anyway?

Maybe they should run another article on AMD cards called "testing for shader/tessellation limitations". That would be equally pointless, people get the information they need from actual game tests, all this fake theoretical stuff is rubbish. I much prefer the way HardOCP tests cards by showing what features/resolutions can be enabled while performing to a level that is playable:

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

It's far more interesting to know that a card will let you play with say 4x MSAA rather than that card gives you 70fps instead of 60fps.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Wow, more price cuts, awesome

Have to say though that article in Toms is just pointless, just telling us stuff we already knew.

"We really can’t recommend Nvidia's GeForce GTX 660 Ti if you plan to use 4x or 8x MSAA;"

Yeah the 660 Ti only gets 93fps (53fps min) that's just unplayable.

Turning off all the other effects that the card handles well is pointless, it's just not realistic. I mean who in their right mind would turn on 8x MSAA but turn off tesselation, HBAO and MVSS?
How many people can even tell the difference between 4x MSAA and 8x MSAA anyway?

No,because it highlights what most of us have been saying and you forget the game tested is a Nvidia sponsered title. The GTX660 is bandwidth and ROP limited and is a poor choice at its current price. In fact for a long time the game ran poorly on AMD cards.

Maybe they should run another article on AMD cards called "testing for shader/tessellation limitations". That would be equally pointless, people get the information they need from actual game tests, all this fake theoretical stuff is rubbish. I much prefer the way HardOCP tests cards by showing what features/resolutions can be enabled while performing to a level that is playable:

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

It's far more interesting to know that a card will let you play with say 4x MSAA rather than that card gives you 70fps instead of 60fps.

You mean the same website which only recommends Galaxy cards after being sponsored by them?? You do realise even people on other forums who own Nvidia cards find HardOCP a joke. Even when people question some of their own findings they end up being banned from their forums and the editors are morons too.

That Galaxy card is also a pre-overclocked card with 3GB memory which means it costs more than most 2GB cards,and is also compared to stock GTX670 and HD7950 cards.

[Willzzz]

Yeah and the galaxy card is worse, so let's not even discuss it

I said I liked the way they test, not the website or the way it's run.

The fact that they test by features rather than just frames per second. FPS is actually quite a meaningless stat in many ways, especially when you are comparing figures like 132fps vs 123 fps and then concluding that 123fps @ 4xMSAA means that the card is rubbish.

Having a better graphics card is only worthwhile if it means you can enable higher resolutions or more features. Slight fps differences are imperceptible and not the basis for a comprehensive review.

[Willzzz]

No,because it highlights what most of us have been saying and you forget the game tested is a Nvidia sponsered title. The GTX660 is bandwidth and ROP limited and is a poor choice at its current price. In fact for a long time the game ran poorly on AMD cards.

Yes it highlights what everyone already knew, that is why it is pointless. We all know the memory is the weak point on the 660 Ti, we also know how it performs in actual games rather than what is essentially a theoretical test that Toms have done (even if they used a real game as tool for constructing the test).

And yes I agree that for general purpose gaming the 7950 is currently preferable to the 660 Ti.

Also I didn't link to the Galaxy review, in fact I only linked to a 660 Ti review by chance because it was at the top. I could have linked to a 7970 review, the only purpose of the link was to show the FORMAT they used, not any of the results.

[Fjo]

The point of Cat's link was to provide a specific example in review that shows quite nicely where the 660 Ti's problems are.
I get what you're saying, Willzzz, about a more realistic test but that wasn't the point of the example.
In real life, the 660 Ti does other GPU intensive operations well, but what about when you have those features enabled, and then you put on MSAA? Regardless of comparison against AMD's cards with the same settings, as soon as MSAA is enabled the 660 Ti dives, and in real life that'll be alongside any performance hits incurred by higher settings elsewhere. I'd expect a card i've paid more than £230 on to handle some reasonable MSAA, regardless of what my other gameplay settings are. That's the point here - it's not terrible, and FXAA helps a lot...but it's still a bit naff for over £200.

And it's also interesting to see the 3GB struggling so much, when many wondered if it might be a bit better. It just reinforces the bandwidth issue, even if we did know about it beforehand. I particularly agree with a point touched upon in that review too: that a 1.5GB 660 Ti at £200 would make far more sense.

[Willzzz]

and in real life that'll be alongside any performance hits incurred by higher settings elsewhere.

Actually I don't think that is true at all, when we are talking about a bottleneck (such as memory) it's called that because it doesn't let the other components work to their fullest.

Adding extra features such as tessellation is going to stress a totally different part of the GPU so it shouldn't impact performance significantly.

[dcwt2010]

The point of Cat's link was to provide a specific example in review that shows quite nicely where the 660 Ti's problems are.
I get what you're saying, Willzzz, about a more realistic test but that wasn't the point of the example.
In real life, the 660 Ti does other GPU intensive operations well, but what about when you have those features enabled, and then you put on MSAA? Regardless of comparison against AMD's cards with the same settings, as soon as MSAA is enabled the 660 Ti dives, and in real life that'll be alongside any performance hits incurred by higher settings elsewhere. I'd expect a card i've paid more than £230 on to handle some reasonable MSAA, regardless of what my other gameplay settings are. That's the point here - it's not terrible, and FXAA helps a lot...but it's still a bit naff for over £200.

And it's also interesting to see the 3GB struggling so much, when many wondered if it might be a bit better. It just reinforces the bandwidth issue, even if we did know about it beforehand. I particularly agree with a point touched upon in that review too: that a 1.5GB 660 Ti at £200 would make far more sense.

Again, this http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/...ettings_review article compares a 2GB 660ti to a 2GB 670ti and then a 3GB 660ti to a 7950. They overclocked the 660ti to match clocks with the 670ti and it shows clearly that the smaller bandwidth bus isn't as bad as how others have reported. Unlike Tomshardware they tested it over 4 games.

Now I entirely agree that overall a 7950 is better value but having had two gens of 5850 I wanted to go Nvidia again for their superior control panel. AMD are catching up but it's taken them years...

Oh, I sold my Borderlands 2 code for 20 quid so my 660ti only cost me £220 (it was the Palit Jetstream version).

[Willzzz]

But you can sell the 3 game bundle that comes with the 7800 series for around £30 too.