Hello, everyone!
APPROXIMATE PURCHASE DATE: Within a month or so.
USAGE FROM MOST TO LEAST IMPORTANT: Gaming, game development, video watching
CURRENT GPU AND POWER SUPPLY: A GTX 295 and a Corsair 750W power supply.
OTHER RELEVANT SYSTEM SPECS: i7 860 CPU (no unlocked multipler), 8GB RAM, motherboard does NOT support SLI/XFire.
PREFERRED WEBSITE(S) FOR PARTS: Wherever it's cheap including shipping to Sweden.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: Sweden
PARTS PREFERENCES: See below.
OVERCLOCKING: Whatever it takes, but low noise is preferred.
SLI OR CROSSFIRE: NO.
MONITOR RESOLUTION: 1920x1080 and no sign of an upgrade anytime soon.
Update triggered by the lack of DX11 support and VRAM of my GTX 295, which I want for my homemade games. I've been suffering a lot from micro-stuttering in a few games, so I'd like to avoid a multi-GPU card this time (also mobo does not support multiple cards).
Games (worth noting) I will be playing are BF3, Crysis 2, Metro 2033/2034 and Stalker: CoP.
MOST IMPORTANTLY, I am an anti-aliasing freak. I can easily see the difference between 8xMSAA, 8xSSAA and even higher combined modes. I spend hours configuring graphics settings and forcing anti-aliasing with Nvidia Inspector trying to get the best image quality while maintaining 60 FPS minimum (at least for online games). Therefore, performance WITH antialiasing far outweighs performance without. Basically, I want to max the above 4 games with 4xMSAA at around 70-80 average FPS.
VRAM is also somewhat important, since the 896MBs I have on my GTX 295 just isn't enough. Got horrible stuttering/freezes in Starcraft 2 with 4xMSAA due to running out of it even though performance was well above 70 FPS, and I've also killed it by running a Playstation 2 emulator at 3840x2160 with 4xMSAA, again before the GPU actually bottlenecked.
Considering my pretty large budget, it all comes down to either a GTX 680 or a HD 7970. The following are the pros and cons I see in these cards in no particular order.
Pro Nvidia:
- Nvidia Inspector: profiles, combined AA modes, SGSSAA, OGSSAA which works with any game
- Perfect BF3 Ultra performance at my resolution
- Wins but barely in Crysis 2 ultra
- Has extra features I want to check out with my own programming (bindless textures, )
- Very good acoustics
- Dynamic V-sync
- TXAA (= somewhat future-proof)
- Pretty quiet, so overclocking is more acceptable
Con Nvidia:
- "Only" 2GB VRAM
- Lower memory bandwidth might limit MSAA/SSAA performance
- Loses hard in Metro 2033 (and most likely 2034) with 4xMSAA (10 FPS loss)
- Where the hell IS TXAA?! Update your stupid developer site, Nvidia!
Pro AMD:
- Awesome Metro 2033 performance
- Overclocks well
- Better compute performance
- 3GB memory
- Much better bandwidth
- SGSSAA
- GPU compute advantage
Con AMD:
- Having no tweakable game profiles makes it a hell setting up everything before starting a game
- Sometimes buggy OpenGL drivers (that's what I use for my own games, but it might be fixed by now)
- Generally somewhat unreliable drivers (a boost from drivers 6 months after launch? Not too reassuring...)
- Performs a little worse in BF3
- Pretty loud, even worse when overclocking
In short: Nvidia wins feature-wise, while AMD wins in raw stats (memory, bandwidth, overclocking).
What complicates it all even further is that I will probably get a factory overclocked card, and I might also do some overclocking myself. Currently I'm leaning towards Nvidia and I plan on going with this card:
ASUS GTX680-DC2T-2GD5
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121634&Tpk=asus gtx680-dc2t
I believe the overclock might just push all the GTX 680's weak games into acceptable frame rates, but it's so difficult to judge. Is there anything I've overlooked? I honestly don't know much about AMD cards nowadays...
APPROXIMATE PURCHASE DATE: Within a month or so.
USAGE FROM MOST TO LEAST IMPORTANT: Gaming, game development, video watching
CURRENT GPU AND POWER SUPPLY: A GTX 295 and a Corsair 750W power supply.
OTHER RELEVANT SYSTEM SPECS: i7 860 CPU (no unlocked multipler), 8GB RAM, motherboard does NOT support SLI/XFire.
PREFERRED WEBSITE(S) FOR PARTS: Wherever it's cheap including shipping to Sweden.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: Sweden
PARTS PREFERENCES: See below.
OVERCLOCKING: Whatever it takes, but low noise is preferred.
SLI OR CROSSFIRE: NO.
MONITOR RESOLUTION: 1920x1080 and no sign of an upgrade anytime soon.
Update triggered by the lack of DX11 support and VRAM of my GTX 295, which I want for my homemade games. I've been suffering a lot from micro-stuttering in a few games, so I'd like to avoid a multi-GPU card this time (also mobo does not support multiple cards).
Games (worth noting) I will be playing are BF3, Crysis 2, Metro 2033/2034 and Stalker: CoP.
MOST IMPORTANTLY, I am an anti-aliasing freak. I can easily see the difference between 8xMSAA, 8xSSAA and even higher combined modes. I spend hours configuring graphics settings and forcing anti-aliasing with Nvidia Inspector trying to get the best image quality while maintaining 60 FPS minimum (at least for online games). Therefore, performance WITH antialiasing far outweighs performance without. Basically, I want to max the above 4 games with 4xMSAA at around 70-80 average FPS.
VRAM is also somewhat important, since the 896MBs I have on my GTX 295 just isn't enough. Got horrible stuttering/freezes in Starcraft 2 with 4xMSAA due to running out of it even though performance was well above 70 FPS, and I've also killed it by running a Playstation 2 emulator at 3840x2160 with 4xMSAA, again before the GPU actually bottlenecked.
Considering my pretty large budget, it all comes down to either a GTX 680 or a HD 7970. The following are the pros and cons I see in these cards in no particular order.
Pro Nvidia:
- Nvidia Inspector: profiles, combined AA modes, SGSSAA, OGSSAA which works with any game
- Perfect BF3 Ultra performance at my resolution
- Wins but barely in Crysis 2 ultra
- Has extra features I want to check out with my own programming (bindless textures, )
- Very good acoustics
- Dynamic V-sync
- TXAA (= somewhat future-proof)
- Pretty quiet, so overclocking is more acceptable
Con Nvidia:
- "Only" 2GB VRAM
- Lower memory bandwidth might limit MSAA/SSAA performance
- Loses hard in Metro 2033 (and most likely 2034) with 4xMSAA (10 FPS loss)
- Where the hell IS TXAA?! Update your stupid developer site, Nvidia!
Pro AMD:
- Awesome Metro 2033 performance
- Overclocks well
- Better compute performance
- 3GB memory
- Much better bandwidth
- SGSSAA
- GPU compute advantage
Con AMD:
- Having no tweakable game profiles makes it a hell setting up everything before starting a game
- Sometimes buggy OpenGL drivers (that's what I use for my own games, but it might be fixed by now)
- Generally somewhat unreliable drivers (a boost from drivers 6 months after launch? Not too reassuring...)
- Performs a little worse in BF3
- Pretty loud, even worse when overclocking
In short: Nvidia wins feature-wise, while AMD wins in raw stats (memory, bandwidth, overclocking).
What complicates it all even further is that I will probably get a factory overclocked card, and I might also do some overclocking myself. Currently I'm leaning towards Nvidia and I plan on going with this card:
ASUS GTX680-DC2T-2GD5
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121634&Tpk=asus gtx680-dc2t
I believe the overclock might just push all the GTX 680's weak games into acceptable frame rates, but it's so difficult to judge. Is there anything I've overlooked? I honestly don't know much about AMD cards nowadays...
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