New AMD cards for Q4?

[ritchiek]

I was considering buying another Sapphire 6970 to run in Crossfire with my current one but after reading this(http://wccftech.com/amds-generation-28nm-hd7000-series-southern-islands-graphic-cards-specs-leaked) I'm debating holding off until the 7xxx series comes out. I don't keep up with this stuff so I'm not sure if this is accurate. If it is would it be worth it selling my current 6970 and buying a 7970? How much of a performance increase would I see? I heard the performance increase from the 5xxx series cards to the 6xxx series cards was twice the performance. What do you guys reccomend I do?

 

[spentshells]

The 78xx series will be coming out, they will likely be a little short of your current card. The 6000 series was nowhere near 2 times as powerfull as the 5000 series.
6950 is not a much better than the 5870 although crossfire scaling was much improved.

 

[ritchiek]

I see. So I guess I'll be waiting a little longer for the 7970s. I'm reading rumours of a Q2 2012 release. Does that seem accurate?

 

[Homeboy2]

I see. So I guess I'll be waiting a little longer for the 7970s. I'm reading rumours of a Q2 2012 release. Does that seem accurate?

I read somewhere that the flagship 7000 series cards will be out in December. I'm sure that they will be out in Q2 2012. We won't know how good they are until they're released but they will be using much faster memory and will be 28nm, so they should overclock better and be a good bit faster. I'm waiting.

 

[purple stain]

If you look in the past both Nvidia and AMD are only able to come out with a 1 bump in threshold.For example the GTX480 is on par with the GTX570 while the GTX580 stands out being the most powerful.Same thing goes for AMD with the 5870 being on par with the 6950 and the 6970 being the leap forward.But that's just in threshold performance.Just like the 6xxx series brought improved tesselation and corssfire scaling you can probably expect the same from the 7xxxx series but it should be the same as it was going from the 58xx series to the 69xx series.

As always upon release of new GPU's prices are sky high so I would suggest getting another 6970 when they release that way the 6970 will be somewhat cheaper.A 6970 crossfire is still a good combo and will last at least 2 years.

 

[ritchiek]

Best answer selected by ritchiek.

 

[rcrodgers]

In all honesty, my 4870 is still performing well beyond what I expected, and it's roughly a 3 year old card. As for what to get, I guess it depends on your system and philosophy on power and heat. I experimented with a CrossFire configuration with a second 4870 a few weeks ago, and I was pleased with the performance, but the noise and heat levels were unacceptable, not to mention the increased power draw. If that's not a major concern for you then (as others have suggested) you might want to wait until the 7000 series is released and pick up another 6970 cheaper than current prices. Otherwise there's nothing wrong with waiting for the top of the line whenever it's released. I've heard the top of the line 7000 series card will be out in December with the lesser cards becoming available Q1 2012; I don't have a lot of faith in that since AMD usually [from what I've seen] releases the low and midrange cards first, and then waits until NVidia's next release before releasing their top of the line.

Unfortunately for me, I'm headed to NVidia for the simple fact that Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 does CUDA acceleration but not OpenCL/Stream.