Gtx 670 vs 7970 with latest drivers.

Chad11491

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Dec 20, 2012
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I know this question has been asked alot, but it seems that all the benchmarks with AMD's latest drivers and few with Nvidia's latest (310.6 / 310.7) .

My question is this. I have a 560 ti, and I'm looking at upgrading after Christmas. I was wondering what the performance difference is now that Nvidia has rolled out a new driver to combat AMD's 12.11 betas.

Anyone with a 670 on latest drivers compare their performance to the 7970 (non ghz) after the 310.7 drivers?

I only game at 1920*1080p , but I want to futureproof for at least a year, maybe two.

I'm pretty hesitant going with AMD as i've always been team green, and physx and all that (although it's pretty much only in batman and borderlands at this point, and hawken?) . Are AMD's drivers generally bad? and what is you guys recommendations?

I'm sorry to ask ANOTHER thread on this, but I haven't noticed any up to date comparisons or benches in my searches.

Thanks all!
 
The 7970 costs more, but it performs better too. As for drivers, it's a case of YMMV. I've heard horror stories from both sides. Personally I switched from team green to team red a few years ago and have experienced less grief with drivers since then. By chance as much as anything. Nvidia seems to get better support for stuff involving third parties - 3D, CUDA etc.
 
The 670 and 7970 perform basically the same at stock up to 1080p resolution, trading blows depending on the game. The 7970 most likely will OC better and it will murder the 670 at high resolution (and has way more compute power), the 670 gives you CUDA , PhysX, TXAA, FXAA, ADap. Vsync etc and lower power draw. Both are solid buys.If you still can't decide which card to take try looking at the games that you play or specific features that you want.If cost really matter to you then you might want to go with whatever is cheaper to you.
 



What nvidia driver horror stories ? :O
Nvidia had better drivers before and still has better drivers today, saying that switching nvidia to amd cause of the drivers, made me laugh...
As for the question, see bigcyco1 post.
 

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/372657-15-nvidia-driver-issue

Heck it's only a quick google away. Driver problems happen with all graphics cards. And I did not say anything about switching because of the drivers, so I don't know what you're laughing about. I just, for whatever reason, haven't had to roll back drivers to get a game running on my 6850. I did with my 7800 GT. Like I said, YMMV.
 
If i had to put links to amd graphic cards with driver problems, it will take a year to read from...and a huge wall of text.

I had several nvidia gfx cards even before the one you mention, never had any problems.
I never seen anyone complain about the nvidia drivers from switching from amd to nvidia, now i've seen a LOT of people complaining of the drivers from switching from nvidia to amd.
There're exceptions of course.
 

kracker

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Jun 22, 2012
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Frankly, I know AMD had lots of drivers problems a few years back, but now not as much I think.
http://www.techspot.com/review/603-best-graphics-cards/
That has latest drivers I think?, amd catalyst 12.11 and nvidia 310.61 beta
 

The latest Nvidia drivers are 310.70 WHQL.
 

aramisathei

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Aug 25, 2012
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There are issues on both sides, which are largely dependent on individual hardware configurations.
Both companies have driver problems from time to time, but as was said above, the best option is to look at which games you like and which card/drivers support it better.
If that doesn't answer the question for OP, go with the cheapest and save a bit of cash.

At the end of the day, they're both fine cards.
 
In fact i recommended several amd cards here, what i was talking about was the drivers, and in that particular thing, nvidia has the advantage and by far they have better drivers, and of that nonsense of the nvidia drivers being a nightmare,bad,etc.
AMD cards have good things about like the raw performance and price point/value,some cards have the best price/performance value, and now they have good offer with the amd never settle thing.
 

kracker

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Indeed, Nvidia's Kepler was beating the crap out of AMD's GCN on most of the cards(mostly high end), But drivers 12.7 and especially 12.11 have REALLY improved.... strange on amd though heh, they usually don't focus on drivers too much sometimes... :)
 

A Bad Day

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Aren't the 600s series more restricted on voltage? MSI got in hot waters when they bypassed the voltage control through a circuit design so their GPUs could OC better.
 
Yeah of course they'll overclock :) How could manufacturers be selling factory-overclocked models otherwise? And we all know factory overclocks are very rarely anywhere near the limits of the card. But that brings up an important point anyway. It's a point that's often made in response to the 'but Radeons overclock and Geforce is left in the dust!' arguments (other than the fact GeForces also overclock) and that is that the overclock is never guaranteed. People get very different results, since not every GPU comes off the production line exactly the same. You can easily squeeze a little extra out of anything, but it might not be a lot, or as much as other people achieved.

+1 to DarkSable about waiting (and I'd agree), though the counter to that is that there will always be something better around the corner and you'll be waiting forever. And that's a valid argument too. So the important questions: firstly how close are the new models (they're pretty close) and secondly, how desperately do you need an upgrade? That one depends on the settings you want, but there's certainly no game that can't be played on your card.

Finally, with regards to drivers, I had a lot of problems on my Radeon 5970 - many blue screens at boot after an update, forcing me to use system restore. I don't recall too many problems with my other Radeons though. The GeForces I owned never had driver issues. Just one more person's experiences :)

EDIT: With regards to performance gains from drivers, the gains with Catalyst 12.11 were good, but not the huge deal people make out. It varies by game (some see no benefit at all) but one article calculated an average gain. These varied again by the GPU (I think the sub-7850 models saw very little gain) but you were looking at ~7% on average for 7850 upwards. The reason people made such a big deal is that we're not used to seeing these kind of gains from new versions of Catalyst. Really not a game-changer though - 7% represents the difference between 30fps and 32fps.
 

AMD fAnTIc's will always overlook that rather inconvenient fact as it gets in the way of their tirade. :lol:
 

omnimodis78

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All I can say is that a few months ago I went with a 7870 and had nothing but issues with it, Firefox crashing, "grey screen of death", games stuttered (and I mean basic games like Walking Dead), could barely over clock it, over-all I hated it wholeheartedly and felt like I made a massive error in switching teams - I was replacing a 560 (non-Ti). I contacted AMD support and they told me that all these issues "may" be fixed in future driver releases. That was the official support I received. I returned the card and went with a 670 and haven't looked back. I am sure it was more of an isolated incident with me but what I could not forgive is AMD's "support". Why do you think they are on beta 11 of a driver? If you really are on the fence with this, I suggest you stick with nvidia or wait until there is clear indication that all is well with driver support for HD7000 series.
 

That sounds about right for AMD/ATi.
 


Haha +1 to that :) And nice use of camel case there! omnimodis78, what's the grey screen of death? I also had absolutely terrible experiences with AMD's tech support (with regards to my £500/$750 dual-GPU monster card running Dead Space 2 at below 1fps) and ended up giving up with them. After 4 months of Catalyst updates, I could finally play my game. Could be something to do with the fact that a month earlier, Radeon 6990 was released. So why bother making games play at all on some ancient one-year-old flagship model when there's 2% gain optimising to be done on their new models! </rant> anyway. At least I got to play it eventually (pretty cool game too).