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Tom's Hardware > Forum > Graphics & Displays > Graphics Cards > How much of a difference would there be between two crossfired 7970 and a 5990?

How much of a difference would there be between two crossfired 7970 and a 5990?

Forum Graphics & Displays : Graphics Cards How much of a difference would there be between two crossfired 7970 and a 5990?

I want to upgrade from the 5990 I have in my machine now - to two crossfired 7970's.

Will I see that much of a difference in gaming?
What are the rumors about the 7970?

I multi monitor - 3 24" Asus monitors in portrait mode.

Reply to domt5chord

2x 6970s would destroy a 5990 and 2x 7970 would destroy 2x 6970s

A 5990 is faster and slower then a GTX 580.

To finalize my ideas, ONE 7970 would beat up a 5990

Reply to zloginet

One 7970 is as fast as a 5970, so 2x 7970 would definitely beat your 5990.
But when playing only on one 24" monitor you would not even see the difference. You might on 3 eyefinity setup monitors, but it might not even be worth the extra money for the upgrade.

Reply to Skrendie

I disagree... a 5970 is much slower then a 7970

A 7970 is much faster then a 580 and a 580 often beats a 5970

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5314 [...] tom-7970/3

I believe the guy has a Saphire 5990 that is basically a overclocked 5970...

Message edited by zloginet on 01-23-2012 at 12:40:21 AM

Reply to zloginet

Yeah one 7970 will flatten a 5970 (5990) due to the fact its way faster and has way more memory which affects eyefinity greatly

Message quoted 1 times

------------------------------ My PC - Intel Core i7-3930K (4.4ghz, Stock voltage), Asus Rampage 4 Extreme, 7970 (1125/1575 EK-FC7970), 16gb G.Skill 2133mhz DDR3 Ram, 1x 128gb SSD, 1x 64gb SSD, 6x 1tb HDD, Antec TrueGamer 900w PSU, Corsair Obsidian 800D Fitted with Xigmatek XLF Fans,
Reply to kitsunestarwind

kitsunestarwind wrote :

Yeah one 7970 will flatten a 5970 (5990) due to the fact its way faster and has way more memory which affects eyefinity greatly

Plus if you add in the tessellation improvements.

Reply to jdwii

Here one can see the difference between the 7970 and a 5970: http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd- [...] 70-review/
The difference is negligible.

4GB Memory on the HD5990 should me more than enough to be no bottleneck on an eyefinity setup. There are some games that only use the 2GB memory (one side) of the internal crossfire setup on the HD5990, and then yes, it will be a bottleneck.
But with 2x 7970 you will ofcourse beat down the HD5990 (almost double, minus the crossfire scaling loss).

Reply to Skrendie

i mean: (The difference with the 5990 would be negligible.)

Reply to Skrendie

I have a black edition xfx 5990 - I just bought Skyrim - and I cannot play it unless it is on medium settings.

My system:

890fx ud7
8gb Ram
xfx 5990 - black edition
1000 watt PS
housed in a haf x
1 TB hard drive
128 SSD

Reply to domt5chord

Would you suggest purchasing one 7970, to see if there is an eyefinity bottleneck? I would really like to play some of the games at the higher graphics settings.

Message edited by domt5chord on 01-23-2012 at 05:22:59 PM

Reply to domt5chord

I'd love to know what the hell a 5990 is.

6990? You really don't need more than that even at eyefinity settings, but two 7970s would definitely crush a 6990.

It's pretty easy to just google "crossfire 7970"

For example:

Reply to wolfram23

the hd5990 was the card that was supposed to be released by sapphire. Although i never even read about it in real life. And also when i search for it on the internet, i cant find the fact it was even ever sold.

If you are playing skyrim on a hd5970 and have issues with stuttering, there might be other problems at hand, this card is more than capable of running that game on your 1920x1200 resolution monitor at high settings.
But indeed playing eyefinity setup on 3 monitors could give your card a hard time.

Why invest in one single new card which is only marginally better than your old card?

- are you playing skyrim with the newest patch?
- do you have the latest drivers installed (chipset drivers, graphics drivers, directx)
- what kind of cpu do you have?
- are you playing eyefinity?
- are you sure its a hd5990? (if no, go take a look)

Reply to Skrendie

Well there's the Asus Ares which is a 5870x2, but otherwise it's either a 5970 or 6990.

Googling 5990 does return a result for the Sapphire model, but as far as I know it never actually happened. The closest to what they were advertising is the Asus model.

Reply to wolfram23

This is a 5990 sold by XFX - It is a black edition. It actually exists...

As far as the processor is concerned - I am using a 1090 t
I am POSITIVE it is a dual graphics card - xfx black edition...5970 is right...
I am playing with three 23" monitors in portrait mode -

As far as the lastest drivers - yes on all - Might it be the 1090t?

Reply to domt5chord

Reply to domt5chord

1090 should be more than good enough.

If you are really playing eyefinity, an upgrade could be worth it. 2 7970's are more than twice as good. But beware that you won't be able to get these cards for a bargain in the coming 2 months.

Reply to Skrendie

Is it simply that I'm playing in eyefinity mode?

I know that the card would shred it on one monitor..

I am really playing eyefinity - three monitors - portrait mode - side by side by side

Asus...

Reply to domt5chord

Ok so it's the OCed 5970... well, that card should be able to do eyefinity. I was running 5760x1080 on my CF 5850s and BF3 played at around 45fps on medium settings...

Anyway, if you want to max out games you'll want either CF 6970, SLI 570, SLI 580, 6990, 590, or 1 or 2 7970s.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/201 [...] d_review/1
Good eyefinity review of the 7970

This is at Highest settings, so if you reduce from Ultra to High, or even just drop the AA to 2xMSAA, you'll probably be in a very good FPS range.

Message edited by wolfram23 on 01-23-2012 at 07:42:42 PM

Reply to wolfram23

Do you think there is a difference in manufactures? XFX HIS SAPHIRE and the like?

Reply to domt5chord

Technically, yes. One of the most important ones would be warranty.

If the cards are all reference models, then as far as performance and cooling go, they will be identical. However, if we're talking custom PCBs and custom cooling with factory overclocks, then there will be some difference. Best to read some reviews on the models you're looking at if it means that much to you.

Reply to wolfram23

[quotemsg=2545532,9,1100001]I have a black edition xfx 5990 - I just bought Skyrim - and I cannot play it unless it is on medium settings.

There's your problem. Skyrim had the most mindblowingly bad problems for Crossfire... I could not imagine a worse situation for a hardware vendor than the driver support for this game. It took me about a month to play through it and things weren't resolved by then. They claimed victory with a couple successive driver updates (first that it fixed issues on 6xxx Crossfire, then on 5xxx Crossfire in a subsequent driver update), but I never experienced resolution with my 5850's. For a while i would get better performance by simply using 1 GPU (go figure). It's a shame, too, because it marred an otherwise very good game. I was considering bumping up to a 7970 to avoid the multi card issues, but then I realized that a pair of 560 ti's provide pretty much identical performance for $150-$180 less (assuming you pay MSRP for a 7970). The 7970 will OC further, but that has its own tradeoffs.

Are you having issues in any other games besides Skyrim?

No issues in any other game...I've been considering bumping up to a 7970 crossfired...but really, it is just skyrim...and I'm kinda pissed - because I paid for it... I

Reply to domt5chord

Yes...and up until the 7970's - xfx warranty was the industry standard...

Reply to domt5chord

wdf r u guys talking about. The 7970 DESTROYS ALL!!! upgrade to that or wait for nvidia kepler/maxwell.

Message quoted 1 times

Reply to mahin1islam

mahin1islam wrote :

wdf r u guys talking about. The 7970 DESTROYS ALL!!! upgrade to that or wait for nvidia kepler/maxwell.

We're talking about not throwing money away. And no, it only destroys other single GPU cards. For the money you can get better performance out of a crossfire or SLI setup, like CF 6950s or 560 Tis.

OP: If it's just Skyrim, for one, make sure you're running the 12.1 drivers. Secondly, download the performance fix off skyrimnexus.com. There's a couple of them, I'm not sure which is better. Although apparently with the new Skyrim 1.4 patch, Bethesda is applying the optimization flags that the mods add, so it might not matter in a week or two.

Reply to wolfram23

I will look into that, wolfram23 - this is a question of not throwing money away - and except for skyrim and crysis - my card shreds every other game I play in eyefinity mode. if I was running one screen, there wouldn't even be a question.

Thanks for the advice, and I'll keep you informed.

Reply to domt5chord

FYI the Skyrim 1.4 patch is on Steam now, apparently it has performance fixes. Might want to give that a go and see if it helps.

Also with Crysis, if it's the first one, well, that game is a GPU killer lol. But if it's Crysis 2 I can tell you what's happening: It's an Nvidia "The way it's meant to be played" game, so Crytek went and added tesselation to all sorts of useless crap. For example, concrete barricades are the most tesselated things in the game. It also renders an entire ocean of water under the ground at all times if you are near a large body of water.

Read a detailed report on that... crap... here:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/21404

Reply to wolfram23

That's REALLY sneaky - and make sense, unfortunately. I'll give the patch a go, if it can get past ESET NOD 32, and see what happens...any help with how to get the game going despite ESET Nod?

Reply to domt5chord