Is this a good buy?

Sorry I am not checking question threads that frequently like before. I am sick of bugs that occur, especially the one that doesn't let you check whether there are replies on a thread or not. It happened like 2 or 3 months ago and since now it's not fixed yet and there are no help at all. So if you want to answer back, it's actually better to PM me  .

I would personally go for the Zotac one, eventhough it has a reference cooler. Because, first you can Overclock it more than the 670 because it's still at stock speeds, yet the 670 is already overclocked heavily. And the zotac one is a 680  . Performance wise the 670 might be a little faster, but the 'faster' is not that noticeable, probably max about 5% and of course if you overclock the 680, it would be probably faster than the 670.

But, I really like 7970's prices. One of them (still you have to pre-order, but look at the price). Here:
http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_i...

It's an excellent choice and worth considering over those two cards.

My only problem with going for a 7970 is you lose physx support which i think is just too big of a loss for a few frames per second (that will probably dissapear when Nvidia updates to newer drivers).

With nvidia you lost some bucks...

phsyx isn't that important, why do you look that it's so important?

I just love the look of the effects that physx brings into games like Borderlands 2, atm i have AMD/ATi cards and when I go to a friends house and see him play the same game on an Nvidia rig I definately get jealous about how good some things look.

No problem mate, go ahead with the 680.

I think the same, the physx effect + 3D Vision support + CUDA + Monthly/Weekly driver updates are some points that explain why ATI had to decrease so much the price of the 7970 that was released with a price over U$600...

Not Important, for most users. Including me.



AMD has HD3D



AMD OpenCL is much better in GPU Compute than CUDA (particularly in this generation).



Not very important either, the performance jump between each driver update is not significant. Not like catalyst, where 12.11 will rock out  . So, they have the same performance increase. From my experience their driver are both fine, I found out that nvidia's one is better, but just that. They both have bugs,



It was actually released $550, which that time is just $50 more than the 580, while beating it with a big gap. So it's not because of the reasons that you gave us, it's because they want to take profit when there are not any competition. They had to lower prices because they want to compete with nvidia. If they keep with old prices, there will be no competition.

So, there is no reason why you should get rid of ATi/AMD.

Physx add a lot of nice effects and most of AMD users tend to just ignore it, just because amd didn't implemented this ageia technology. Playing games that support physx, with the effect add a lot of awesome effects, like cloths that rip apart, smoke/fluids that are influenced by the character movement, they are just visual effects, can be removed, but they are awesome.



I use 3D vision and i know it is "overall" the best solution for 3D gaming, other third party drivers don't support a list with so many 3D game like 3D vision drivers do.

HD3D is a gimmick, as oposing with the exclusive 3D Vision drivers, there is actually no HD3D, if you read on amd website, they say that you need to use those third party drivers that i mentioned before, meaning that you can do that with a nvidia gpu if you want too it is not a AMD specific solution...




Yes CUDA depends on the softwares to implement it, and not much softwares implement it, but some great softwares already do and the performance it gives is very impressive.



The performance jump is significant you can see the latest beta drivers added 15% performance upgrade for the 600 series:
http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/nvidia-geforc...

But it is not just that, on a lot of recent games you can check they have some specific AMD fix folders, to install if you have AMD cards, that is something to consider too...




I know there is a lot of other variables, not just what i have said is what made they sell for that price, but the point is that nvidia made they lower the price, instead of matching the price, and i think that AMD would not have done the same. Now they had to "match" the prices to improve the outcome;



Of course there is no reason to get rid of any of them, there should always be competition, that is what cause them to improve the technology and drop the prices. i just pointed out that the extra price of the 680 have some motives. even if they are futile like you said physx is.

I'm not saying that most people doesn't care because it's not good. They didn't care because the games that support Physx are games that nvidia bribed. And, the differences are not as dramatic as you describe and most people are not interested in that stuff.



Quite true, nvidia leads on that 3D division. But doesn't mean that all people need 3D. Nice addition though. While HD3D isn't as good as that of 3D vision, it's pretty acceptable.



Impressive relative to what? To nvidia cards without CUDA? Yes. But not Radeon with OpenCL. I think softwares that support CUDA mostly supports OpenCL too.



That's what nvidia claimed, not in reality. Nvidia released the last WHQL in 10 October and released the one before in 12 September and there is no big performance gap in any means. I said the 12.11 rocks out because I've seen it's performance relative to 12.8 in techpowerup. Not based on what they claim.



Yes, because of they put prices down, they have more value to their cards. Beating the value of nvidia cards.

I'm not fighting of being a fanboy, I am just putting down facts here. Because the thread wasn't about nvidia vs AMD, I will stop here and we should get back to the topic.

Op when you ask people on here its going to be a fanboy issue..As u starting to see..Best results do your own researching and pick. Every time i see amd vs nvidia its so many subjective answers its sad..

Thus is the nature of forums haha. The funniest part is I only listed Nvidia cards, but Im confident that i got the answer i wanted.

Best answer selected by axleh93.