Best Graphics Cards For The Money: January 2012 (Archive)

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It has become very difficult for me to become excited about buying new video boards. The value just isn't there, like it used to be. We're seeing cards become cheaper to manufacture, thanks to new process technology and refinements to the distribution channels, but card prices still march upward.

The price/performance chart in this article is absolute garbage. It should be charting indexes, instead of expecting one to suss out data by trying to eyeball where a yellow dot lines up within a bar chart. It should also include cards from previous generations, because it completely fails to paint an accurate picture of video card values over time - if all of the current boards are priced on the same broken scale, then comparing them alone doesn't tell us what we need to know when deciding whether to buy now or wait.
 

They mention that at the bottom of page 6:

The Radeon HD 7970 delivers such impressive performance at $385 that we find it hard to recommend higher-performing (but sometimes-inconsistent) multi-card configurations for more money.

We'll call out some of the most promising options, though, mostly for folks with one of these cards already installed: two Radeon HD 7850 2 GB cards in CrossFire for $390, two Radeon HD 7870s in CrossFire for $480, two GeForce GTX 670s in SLI for $740, and finally, two Radeon HD 7970s in CrossFire for $770.
Click to expand...
 
@ Toms Hardware

You are using decimals in OpenGL and Shader version. You should also use in DirectX now that we know that Nvidia is not supporting 11.1 100% while AMD does. All 7000 AMD GPUs should have a 11.1 in the DirectX version. It is a mistake writing simply an 11.
 

Yes...? Did you miss the fact that they actually DO recommend it? They just call it the "7870 LE", which is somewhat inaccurate and confusing.
 
[citation][nom]lgweaver[/nom]where is the titan?[/citation]

They almost never have a brand new video card in this chart. If you read their review for it, then you'll know where it stands anyway. If you want an exact answer right now, I'd say that it should get a tier of its own right above the 7970 GHz Edition and it won't be recommended at any price except maybe as an absolute top of the line setup with two to four of them in SLI for the absolute best in graphics performance.
 
blaz, just curious... Have you heard if Titans could be put in quad-SLI? I'm wondering since in the TH article(s), only the mention of tri-SLI is what I remember seeing (not that they said quad-SLI isn't possible).

 


I read of a performance overclocking record with four heavily overclocked Titans in Quad-SLI yesterday, so it is possible AFAIK. IDK if it's difficult to set up in any way, but it seems possible if we can read about it being done.
 


Yeah, putting Titan in a price-performance article would be sorta silly. The explicit point of Titan, vis-a-vis gamers/consumers and as per nVidia's own statements, is to subvert price-performance comparisons. It's a luxury product. You use Titan when your chassis can't handle the extra heat from a 690, or when you want to set up the best possible 3+ card SLI rig. Neither of those use cases has anything to do with cost efficiency. Quite the opposite.

(Of course, the Titan may well be cost effective for people who need to run certain compute tasks, but in that case you're looking at what amounts to a business expense. And that's outside the scope of the article.)
 
[citation][nom]ufo_warviper[/nom]The Radeon 7990 doesn't seem to show up on the Hierarchy chart nor mentioned in the $375 and up section. I can only find 2 Powercolor variants, but they are both in stock. For some reason, i can only find a modest amount of press coverage on Radeon 7990 overall.[/citation]

The reason why I think that the 7990 shouldn't be labeled is due to the fact that Newegg and some other sites don't carry it. If Powercolor is the only person making it, stay far away. There is a custom 7970 that's essentially the same thing but it takes up 3 slots due to the large video card. You're better off buying two 7970s, although that would still be overkill for anything that you'd need nowadays. One 7970 or GTX 670 is all that anyone needs(two in SLI or Crossfire if you want multiple displays).

AMD cards have a lot of issues still, one example being micro-stuttering*, which don't usually occur in Nvidia cards. They may have raw power but their designs are typically flawed and their driver updates don't really improve much when compared to Nvidia. They're good for under $100 video cards. The Sapphire 6670 that I put in my Mom's PC does really good at what it's supposed to do, play Sims 3 on the highest settings while using as little wattage as possible (max watts is 72, I don't plan on over-clocking it due to power issues). However, it doesn't add the textures instantly when you speed up time. That might be a RAM issue though, I'll be able to find out after I get her 8 GB of RAM for Christmas. If you have a PSU with only 300 Watts then I would suggest no other card.

*In tests performed in Battlefield 3, a configuration with two GeForce GTX 680 in SLi-mode showed a 7% variation in frame delays, compared to 5% for a single GTX 680, indicating virtually no micro stuttering at all. A configuration with two Radeon HD 7970 in CrossFireX-mode, on the other hand, showed an 85% variation in frame delays, compared to 7% for a single card, indicating large amounts of micro stuttering. Having more than two Nvidia cores or one AMD core leaves you open for a large amount of micro-stuttering. "With Alternate frame rendering (AFR), the first GPU calculates the first frame while the other calculates the second one and so on. Upcoming graphics driver could provide the necessary balancing." This means that the problem will be fixed eventually but right now, it's not a good idea to Crossfire anything or SLI with 3 cards.
 

The Crysis 3 benchmarks seem to show Nvidia cards suffering more from microstuttering than AMD cards.
 
[citation][nom]Junoh315[/nom]The reason why I think that the 7990 shouldn't be labeled is due to the fact that Newegg and some other sites don't carry it. If Powercolor is the only person making it, stay far away. There is a custom 7970 that's essentially the same thing but it takes up 3 slots due to the large video card. You're better off buying two 7970s, although that would still be overkill for anything that you'd need nowadays. One 7970 or GTX 670 is all that anyone needs(two in SLI or Crossfire if you want multiple displays). AMD cards have a lot of issues still, one example being micro-stuttering*, which don't usually occur in Nvidia cards. They may have raw power but their designs are typically flawed and their driver updates don't really improve much when compared to Nvidia. They're good for under $100 video cards. The Sapphire 6670 that I put in my Mom's PC does really good at what it's supposed to do, play Sims 3 on the highest settings while using as little wattage as possible (max watts is 72, I don't plan on over-clocking it due to power issues). However, it doesn't add the textures instantly when you speed up time. That might be a RAM issue though, I'll be able to find out after I get her 8 GB of RAM for Christmas. If you have a PSU with only 300 Watts then I would suggest no other card.*In tests performed in Battlefield 3, a configuration with two GeForce GTX 680 in SLi-mode showed a 7% variation in frame delays, compared to 5% for a single GTX 680, indicating virtually no micro stuttering at all. A configuration with two Radeon HD 7970 in CrossFireX-mode, on the other hand, showed an 85% variation in frame delays, compared to 7% for a single card, indicating large amounts of micro stuttering. Having more than two Nvidia cores or one AMD core leaves you open for a large amount of micro-stuttering. "With Alternate frame rendering (AFR), the first GPU calculates the first frame while the other calculates the second one and so on. Upcoming graphics driver could provide the necessary balancing." This means that the problem will be fixed eventually but right now, it's not a good idea to Crossfire anything or SLI with 3 cards.[/citation]

Nvidia has almost as many stuttering issues as AMD and Tom's recent Cryis 3 tests are a good example of that.

Micro-stuttering is an issue that is only present with multi-GPU setups and with RadeonPro, AMD beats Nvidia in it. Even without it, micro-stutter is not a common issue anymore anyway it you use high-end modern GPUs.

AMD's driver updates improve much more than Nvidia's. That's how AMD started off this generation well below Nvidia, yet managed to get to the top. Nvidia generally starts off better, so that AMD needs to improve more is obvious and looking at driver releases makes it obvious that AMD has improved more.

The Radeon 6670 is an extremely low end card. To expect much from it seems ridiculous. The Radeon 7750 has a huge performance advantage and uses considerably less power. The same is true for Nvidia's GT 640 GDDR5 and IIRC, the GTX 650 too. That gives good reason to not recommend the 6670 unless budget is extremely tight to the point where $90-100 cards are not viable options.

Furthermore, it is a well-known and proven fact that triple GPU solutions have far less stutter issues than dual-GPU solutions in most situations, especially with modern hardware. I can even thoroughly explain and demonstrate the theories about why this happens without looking them up.

Also, at least when I look, Newegg and many sites do have one or more 7990/7970X2 cards. I do not recommend buying them, but I see them around. Powercolor is not the only company making them; there are several others such as Asus.
 
Clearly nobody is agree with this rank, but keep in mind the tittle: "Best Graphics card for the money" in that range, we take all the things that you can do with a GPU and see what price/performance give you the best experience at this moment.
 
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