Amd or nvidia...

ginyen95

Honorable
Sep 15, 2012
77
0
10,630
hi... currently im using dual monitor setup.. 1080p( main monitor gaming screen :p) and 1 more 1600 x 900 monitor( for youtube or facebook during gaming)

now i dont know which 1 i would like to choose
1) sapphire hd 7970 vapor X (3gb or vram) or galaxy gtx 670 gc oc (2gb of vram)

pls do not suggest any video card ( no offense ) which one would be better?? im gonna overclock both of them if i bought them :D

sorry for my bad english
 

need4speeds

Distinguished
Both cards are pretty decent, so it's not a easy choice. Both cards are very fast gaming cards.

Nvidia has 3d support (with the glasses and with certain monitors)
physx and cuda. They have more limited open cl than amd.

Amd has better open cl support. But no physx, cuda or nvidia 3d support at all. It seems like amd's open cl is going to become the next "x86". This maybe matters more for slower laptop apus that need this help more. Most faster clocked desktop cpus or apus don't need the help of open cl.
Amd also has their free video converter, avio video upscaling software, and "hydravision" that lets you have multiple desktops with fast switching between them with a hotkey.

With hydravision you don't need to run two monitors to do the tasks you mentioned. It gives you up to 9 desktops, but running 2 or 3 is more useful most of the time.

Nvidia also has this, but i have never tried the nvidia one. It's called multidesk.

Both cards are pretty close in speed, i would pick the one that has the features that you want.

Don't expect the already factory overclocked 670 to overclock even more, i kinda doubt it will.
The hd-7970 should overclock a bit, but most card makers are now cherry picking the better gpus for their oc editions. As a result the non oc edition cards don't overclock so well.
I would judge them at the speeds they ship at, and any overclocking you get out of them is a bonus.

Look at benchmarks for the games you like to play first. Some games favor either amd or nvidia cards. If most of your games favor one card, then that is the one to go with.
 
I'd definitely recommend the GTX670. As need4speeds says, performance is so close you're not not going to be able to tell the difference in average performance. But the GTX670 is cheaper and also gives you PhysX and (more importantly) FXAA and adaptive v-sync. GTX670 really is an exceptional card - there no single-GPU card in existence that's significantly faster.
 
Adaptive v-sync and FXAA are bigger selling points, but PhysX is good to have too - not talking about framerates in PhysX games but the added realism. There's certainly no guarantee that in the future, the rate of PhysX adoption won't increase and become common in lots of games. And of course there's no guarantee it will do either, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

As I say though, FXAA and adaptive v-sync are more beneficial, plus the GTX670 is cheaper despite being near enough the same in performance (you honestly wouldn't be able to tell the difference in average performance).
 
Yeah I was really excited about morphological AA when AMD released it with the 6 series GPUs - thought AMD had a really huge edge when they announced it - the AA holy grail of supersampling quality with little to no performance hit. First thing I did was enable it. Second thing I did was disable it, and it stayed off since!

Blurs the image horribly and has a weird effect that distorts HUD text. FXAA on the other hand is dependent on the implementation - Max Payne 3 is a great example of FXAA done right. One of the selling points of FXAA is ease of implementation for developers, so we should see it used more and more moving forward.

If you do choose AMD, I'd recommend against morphological AA. Give it a shot by all means, but you're better off combining MSAA with adaptive AA (set to performance on the Catalyst control panel slider). Much nicer results than morphological, just you take a bit of a performance hit. If you still get acceptable framerates in the game you're playing, you could try shifting the slider to 'quality'.
 


The price is exactly the same for the 670 and the 7970. The only reason you should purchase a Nvidia card right now is for the features and the games your play. That is it. If you play Battlefield, you want the 670. If you play any other game you will want the 7970. The Vapor sapphire card is great but I just purchased there lower end card and have it overclocked higher than the Vapor and it runs extremely cool.

1125MHz
1550MHz
Stock Voltage
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202008

It also comes with free games! ^^