Does the 6970 have the potential of the 580?

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Carc369

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I've read plenty of reviews and came to the conclusion that it wasn't the graphics card that was the problem but the ATI/AMD drivers. Everyone knows that AMD/ATI comes out with bad driver updates every other month.

I would've thought

560 = 6870
570 = 6950
580 = 6970

but it seems as if the GTX 580 is in its own class given that the 6990 is coming out soon to compete against its own kind the 5970 and the future GTX 595.



My question is, does the AMD Radeon HD 6970 actually have potential to be as good as the Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 if the ATI/AMD drivers had decent updates or is it doomed to be the 570 equal or in a lot of cases the lesser?
 
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4745454b

4745454b

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I would argue that the days of bad ATI drivers are long gone. We are talking years ago here. AMD users now get monthly driver updates and the cards are quite good. Yes there was a driver issue with the 58xx cards, but that was fixed with a driver update. There is the matter of the bad 2D performance, but that's a hardware issue not software.

I doubt its the drivers holding back AMD cards. AMD and Nvidia simply took different paths to do the same tasks. Also remember that AMD isn't trying to take the single card crown with a single chip. They start with the midrange and cut down to make the weaker cards, and use the internal CF to tackle the high end. Its wrong to attack their cards or drivers if they aren't even trying.
 
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Carc369

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Was playing Dragon Age Origins and got a driver crash error message with the 10.12 drivers. I would be getting 80+ fps the whole game but in certain points I would lag spike down to 5-10 fps game and it wasn't a 1-2 second lag spike either.

Back when I had my 5850 I bought Borderlands. I thought I would be able to beast the game. Turns out when I started it up I was only getting 15fps avg on max settings. It wasn't until 2 updates later that I was receiving normal 60fps in that game.

Also when I bought Resident Evil, ATI drivers would not allow for the cutscenes to work. The cutscenes would turn black and you'd get audio with no video. I bet you can imagine how frustrating it could be.

I'd expect drivers to work from the get-go and improve from there. I've had bad experience with the ATI drivers and heard good things about Nvidia which is why I'm contemplating to sell my 5870 for a 580.
 
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4745454b

4745454b

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The launch drivers for the 58xx cards were bad. Easily the worst that AMD has put out in some time. I doubt your 5870 is giving you grief, or that 5850. If you could use that card with current drivers, I'd bet it would be a lot better. I almost wonder if AMD rushed the release for some reason. Did they think Nvidia was closer then they were?
 
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Carc369

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So if you had a choice would you get the 6970 or the 580? The 6970 has now dropped down to the price of 570 but I truly believe it can come close to the 580 if the drivers were given good updates.
 
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Helltech

Helltech

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Even at 1000 core a 6970 cannot compete against an Overclocked 580. Right now the 580 is the king on it's throne till the 6990 comes out but the 595 is rumored to be quite nasty.

Rumored 595 - 2 Downclocked GF110 512 shader cores at 600 core.
Click to expand...

I have a feeling a 595 will finally be my replacement for these GTX 260s. =] I can't wait.

Anyway, as others have said 580 >> 6970 all day.
 
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notty22

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GtX 580 - Fermi 100/110 is a huge /complex chip. It has a lot of extra hardware to get that extra 15% out 40nm. 48 ROP"s and a 384mb memory interface, an area of the gpu thats probably not a major bottleneck in other gpu's but its part of the edge

table.png
 
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xx12amanxx

xx12amanxx

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6970 doesn't compete with the 580 head to head it has to be cheaper to compete. The 580 falls right in between the 6970 and the 5970. So to answer your question no the 6970 cannot go toe to toe with the 580.
 
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17seconds

17seconds

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Let me just ask you: If you had a choice of a HD6970 or GTX580 given to you for free, which would you choose?
 
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Carc369

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The 580 without a doubt. But I assumed the bad drivers is what drove down the 6970 not the card itself. I'd rather pay for a 6970 if there was potential for it to be a 580 or even come close to a 580 rather than buy a 580.

580 seems to be a safe bet but a really expensive safe bet. I'm a college boy addicted to being able to play every good game at max settings (AA off, I don't find it very useful at 1920x1080+ resolutions) so I have to spend my money carefully. I don't want to buy an Nvidia GTX 580 and then see AMD come out with an amazing ass driver update that'll have the 6970 close behind a 580.
 
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Helltech

Helltech

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They already have good drivers, a driver update isn't going to increase the cards power THAT much.
 
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4745454b

4745454b

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I'd rather pay for a 6970 if there was potential for it to be a 580 or even come close to a 580 rather than buy a 580.
Click to expand...

What do you mean by close?

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/HIS/Radeon_HD_6970/12.html

Its close the entire time, and even takes the lead at 2560x1600 with 4xAA. It's also close in AvP, Dawn of War 2, DIRT2 (in the higher res's), and F1 2010. Even in the other games where its behind it still does pretty well. If it saves you enough $$$ to afford something else like a faster CPU to drive everything or a new SSD, then it might be worth it.
 
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17seconds

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Drivers are not magical. At best they tweak a little and fix glitches. They cannot overcome fundamental differences in hardware architecture. Sometimes, they can even reduce performance. In general AMD has fewer updates to their drivers than Nvidia, so AMD users have fewer alternate driver options and longer waits between updates.
 
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bystander

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Are you joking? AMD puts out drivers about 2 times more often. AMD puts out a new set of drivers every month (this has it's good and bad points), while Nvidia puts them out every month at times, and sometimes it can take 3-4 months before another set. It's kind of random with Nvidia.

I'm not saying if it's better or not, sometimes the monthly AMD/ATI drivers seem to be pushed out for the sake of pushing out new drivers.
 
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Haserath

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AMD did just come out with their VLIW4 architecture. Are games optimized for this new setup yet? If not, they could potentially update the drivers to optimize the performance for the new arch.

I look at benchmarks of the 6970 and the 6950, and the 6970 only seems to scale better than the 6950 due to clocks. 6970 is ~10% faster while the clocks are ~10% faster than the 6950. What's up with that? If they could get a 10% boost from the added stream processors(6970 compared to the 6950), then they would boost performance closer to the 580.
 
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g00fysmiley

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really i'd say if you're already going for 500+ on a gpu with a 580 going 250 on a 560 now and getting a really good 1000+ watt psu and 560 then a second 560 would be my route.. but then again i always want my psu running at a maximum of 75% load... hence my current 850 watt psu (corsair tx850w) for a sli 450 rig

but given the two choices 6970 vs 580 if oen or the other definatly 580
 
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bystander

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You are including essentially what is would be called Beta drivers and patches, their WHQL drivers are their official ones. AMD has beta and patched drivers too.

If you look on Nvidia's site, most of those drivers are listed as BETA, even if your 3rd party site doesn't:
http://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-us
 
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