GPU question

Nope. That'll take two 570s. The other hardware's good enough, though.

^+1
And the 570's should have 1.5 or 2.0 GB of Vram. BF3 is a very demanding game.

I think their stock 1.3gb is fine on 1920x1080.

Yeah you are right, boy my head is in the clouds today for some reason.

Are you sure? Because I've heard reports of people maxing it out with a 6870. I thought DICE seriously underestimated GPU's, when they said 2 580's.

A 6870? I highly doubt that. Maxing it at what resolution?

Yes it will run BF3 @ ultra @1080P without any problem, it will generate around 47 FPS which will make the game very smooth and very playable, seeing that GTX 560ti is around $200 you can get HD 7850 for $250 for the optimal performance.

You don't need to SLI at all.

Really? I had it in my head that you would be looking at around 40FPS with a 560 ti. Guess I was wrong. Are you saying this out of past experience or was it something you read? I Don't consider a game maxed unless you can hit the refresh rate of the monitor but that is just my opinion.

40-45 FPS in a gameplay makes the game very smooth , fast and flawless. Hitting a constant 60 FPS in game just gives you a "feel" that you have a beast GPU and the game is completely smooth. Anything beyond 60 FPS (most 1080P's monitor's refresh rate) will not give you any additional benefit unless you do the jump to a 120hz monitor.

I played the BF3 @ ultra 1080P with my HD 6950 ranging from 41 FPS to 58 FPS depending on the locations, when OCed to 950 MHz I never dropped to 40s.
last bench i saw for the GTX 560ti was hitting 47 FPS with the new drivers, with a little overclock i guess it will go beyond this.

Some people care much more about FPS than others. ilysaml isn't too picky. Personally, I think the difference between 45 and 60fps is night and day, and I'll lower whatever settings I have to to get up there.

Here are some hard numbers for BF3 on ultra settings with today's (actually today's: the 690's in there) fastest cards: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-690-ben...

ily, do you have AA on? The Tom's 580 only gets 55fps on average with 4x enabled.

Everything was on ultra, and I ranged between 41-58 depends on the location and game effects (smokes, shadows,...etc) it wasn't constant.

That is more like the numbers I was expecting to see. I had sli gtx 460's 1GB and overclocked to 850MHz I had to play with No AA in order to maintain 60 FPS. I am pretty sure that a single gtx 560 ti will not out bench sli 460 1GB. The last review that i read put sli gtx 460 1GB between a 570 and a 580.

I have to agree with kajabla on this one. The proof is in the pudding. alrobichaud you are also right about the 460's in SLI are up there. That is one reason that card is still around.

460 SLI vs 570
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/314?vs=306

460 SLI vs 580
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/314?vs=305

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-stut...

Interesting article. So based on what they are saying, any AMD gpu with a core clock less than 800MHz suffers from micro stuttering when in crossfire due to the core being too slow to keep up but with 3 cards the problem goes away. I can honestly say that have never heard that before.

It's subjective. I've never experienced micro-stuttering myself, and I'm not willing to buy another 460 to test it out, but it apparently bothers some people quite a lot and others not at all.