SAPPHIRE Vapor-X Radeon 7950 vs. ASUS GTX 660 Ti

[martinuv]

Here's my spin on the age-old question. For my new build (with an Intel 3770K) I have narrowed down my graphics search to these two cards:

Nvidia:
1. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121656

AMD:
2. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202003

On paper, the Radeon looks like an obvious choice because it has double the bandwidth of the Nvidia plus an extra gb of memory. 3gb may be over kill now, but two years down the road who knows. My personal preference is towards the Nvidia, but if anyone can point me towards benchmarks showing that the Radeon has a distinct lead I'm persuadable. My fears with AMD are stable FPS and obviously drivers. Of course if you'd like to suggest another option in that price range feel free (MAX $340). Thanks in advance!

 

[lt_dan_zsu]

From what I have heard, amd has worse latency problems, then I saw these benchmarks for the titan. If you look at a few of the benchmarks, you notice that the 7970 usually has the smallest latency of all 4 cards that they compared. The 7970 is very similar to the 7950 is how it works. While I ran my 7950 in the Crysis 3 beta, it was using almost 2gb ram, so that will be a problem later this year possibly. It is very hard to show you specific benchmarks that are up to date at this point. I can tell you that according to this article, the 7950 is a mere 2% behind a 670
http://www.techspot.com/review/603-best-graphics-cards/page12.html
I am sure you have seen the gpu hierarchy before.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html
The 7950 is one tier higher than the 660ti. There is also the fact that amd tends to overclock way better this year. Nvidia has put a ton of restrictions, so they can't overclock very well. 7000 series also overclocks better in general. Drivers this year are great, they have been massively increasing performance, there are plenty of settings to use, and I like them more than nvidia. I had one small issue where I needed to reinstall my drivers because the sound would disable when my pc went into screen saver mode.

 

[drinkingcola86]

I have the 7950 that your looking at running on the 12.11 beta drivers. Looking at going to the 13.2 beta drivers to handle some of the latency issues that they are showing but i don't really notice any of the frame latency that others are talking about.

Cards verse each other though...
The 660Ti is a good match vs the non-boosted 7950's
The 7950 boost(which is what your looking at) vs 670. +/- 2 to 5% on certain benchmarks.

This is with out overclocking. the cards once when overclocked are pretty close to each other which is why I won't talk about that anymore.

 

[martinuv]

Best answer selected by martinuv.