7970 or 680?

Ness · 03-23-2012, 08:04 AM #1

Well, now that the 680 is out I've decided to ask here, which should I get? There are no videos of either running Dolphin on YouTube and its by far the most intensive thing I run next to maybe Battlefield 3. I mostly play on 3 monitors with Eyefinity at 5760x1080 and was wondering which would be better for that? My other specs are in my signature, and I'm also planning on upgrading to 32GB 1600MHz. Anyways, yeah, the 680 beats the 7970 in almost all benchmarks and is $50 less however its also way hotter and requires more power, which may cancel out the possibility of SLI in the future (I run a Kingwin Black Box 750w)

**ExtremeDude2** · (This post was last modified: 03-23-2012, 08:20 AM by ExtremeDude2.)

680 can only use 2 monitors I believe (unless they changed it).

**AnyOldName3** · 03-23-2012, 08:40 AM #3

I doubt that: you can use 3 with a much more basic (yet still pretty high end (by my book anyway)) GTX560 Ti.

dEnigma · 03-23-2012, 08:49 AM #4

The 680 might beat the 7970 in most benchmarks, except "Heaven", but it still can't reach it in games that aren't nvidia-supported, i.e. "The way it's meant to be played"-titles. Also the 7979 consumes less power in 2D-mode, but I guess that only matters on non-gaming PCs. If I were you I would wait for 1-2 weeks because the price of the 7979 is sure to drop.

**NaturalViolence** · 03-23-2012, 09:10 AM #5

680. The drivers for the 7970 are currently terrible.

**admin89** · 03-23-2012, 09:23 AM #6

680 can use 3 + 1 monitors , new feature "graphic turbo" same as "intel turbo boost"
It beat 7970 in most benchmark and it's 50$ cheaper

**NaturalViolence** · (This post was last modified: 03-23-2012, 09:42 AM by NaturalViolence.)

The only problem with the 680 is the surprisingly poor compute performance. It's better than the 7970 in every other way.

This entire situation is so weird.
-AMD comes out with HD5000, vliw5 based, very efficient (power/performance/size efficiency) and excellent gaming performance but poor compute performance
-Nvidia comes out with fermi, superscalar, innefficient but good compute performance (vliw is bad for compute applications, superscalar trades efficiency for better performance reliability)
-AMD comes out with HD6000, moves to vliw4, boost efficiency further
-AMD comes out with graphics core next (HD7000), superscalar, trades some efficiency for compute performance
-Nvidia comes out with kepler, vliw based, trades compute performance to get more efficiency

They've traded places now. Now nvidia is using vliw and AMD is using superscalar, last gen AMD was using vliw and nvidia was using a superscalar design.

Ness · 03-23-2012, 06:05 PM #8

So, I assume the consensus is 680 then, unless there's a significant price drop on the 7970? Also, is anyone aware if the 680's come with a DisplayPort adapter, as I currently run my third monitor with a miniDisplayPort on my 6970.

**AnyOldName3** · 03-24-2012, 05:52 AM #9

As far as I'm aware any decent card comes with display port these days.

After a quick check I can confirm that there is one display port socket on a GTX680.

Gir · 03-24-2012, 06:40 AM **#10**

GTX680 supports 3840 x 2160, imagine that resolution in Dolphin

2160p TVs are already out
http://www.johnlewis.com/231549250/Product.aspx