AMD Updates Radeon HD 7950 to Counter GeForce GTX 660 Ti

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]Formata[/nom]I appreciate and agree with all your comments bar the above quote. It just seems underhanded to me to sell a product deliberately scaled down from what it is capable of performing at, with the motive of granting that performance down the track when it makes them more financially competitive. It's almost like miss-information.I may have spoken out of place with the Overclocking comments. I too have returned Overclocked GPU's without issue. I just imagined it may have been a problem for some people[/citation]

Look at it this way: If the 7950 was much more powerful than the 580 3GB back in January and the few months after launch, then it would have been priced even higher at launch and not brought down until after the GTX 680 launch. Anyone who has a reference 7950 can freely update their card themselves to get a boost instead of pay more money for it and anyone with a non-reference 7950 who would have updated their 7950 is probably willing to overclock anyway.

Besides, this boost looks like it is to make the 7950 better compete with the 670, not the 660 TI which it is obviously already the superior card whereas with the 670, it is not so clear. If that is considered, then it is entirely possible that AMD didn't plan this BIOS update before March, if even that early. Heck, they might have not even thought about a GPU Turbo Boost feature back then. AMD might have simply waited for a few days or weeks after they finished the BIOS revision to launch it to coincide with the 660 TI. This could let them make the 660 TI and the 670 less relevant buys for stock performance at once instead of just the 670.

Sure, it's not the friendliest thing to do to their customers, but I think that some people are overreacting at least a little, especially since we don't really know the circumstances around the BIOS update's planning and when it was completed. Many people who posted comments here simply seemed like they wanted to flame regardless of the actual situation and took this opportunity to do so.

 

[trevoradrianfcb]

asus 7950 beats the evga gtx 660 ti sc+ 3GB ?? :/ help! new gamer here
both card price are same in my country !!

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]trevoradrianfcb[/nom]asus 7950 beats the evga gtx 660 ti sc+ 3GB ?? help! new gamer here both card price are same in my country !![/citation]

On average, the 7950 has a small advantage, but the 660 Ti may have a few wins in some situations and has somewhat different feature support. Either card should offer a good experience and which way you go is mostly personal preference. For example, I like to overclock and I like MSAA much better than FXAA, so I'd go for the 7950 pretty much without a second thought. Some people can argue over thigns such as PysX, but for me, that's not an issue for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that I have spare Nvidia cards to act as PhysX processing units if I really wanted GPU accelerated PhysX.

You, however, may have different preferences and/or a simply different situation and might prefer the 660 Ti for some reason or another. For example, EVGA's customer service is second to none in the graphics card industry AFAIK, granted their card quality and cooler quality tends to be sub-par among the other brands with their non-reference cooling and overclocking enhancements.