You can find a ton of reviews which will show one brand beating the other, but at the end of the day I go with what I find is best value for money for my needs.

I was planning on getting two 670s because I wanted to try out nVidia after years of buying ATI, but here in Australia both the 7970 and 670 are virtually the same price, the 680 is about $200 more on average. Because I have triple screens and the 7970 as more VRAM it was my choice.

If you're looking at the 670 or 7970 and have a single screen, even a 32", either of them would be good cards for CloD.

P.S. As for overclocking, if the manufacturer decides to increase the clock speeds of the reference cards, then the new speeds become the standard. The point is the 7xxx range of cards have enormous overclocking headroom compared to the 6xx nVidia cards, also the nVidia cards automatically overclock themselves when under load, so the argument about either brand not sticking to defaults clock speeds is mute.

that is a pretty good summary :)

i have just been doing some window shopping for these high end cards, and reading reviews and comparisons online to bring my information on them up to date (hope in the next couple of months to get a high spec'd gfx card and a new cpu), and concur with your summary.

however good the 7970 looks on specs and performance, it does it at the cost of significantly greater heat and noise. having the card so firmly oc'd also would shorten its lifespan (might not matter for frequent upgraders). its better performance for running multiple screens however is a big step in its favour, and would matter for me in making my final choice.

Omg, okay. It seems, there is bashing around and you don't want to read all I have written. My card is running on 1080p with up to 2.7gb vram usage, at least 2.4.

Some other people also report this and we are now talking about "crank up means only high?". If I talk about crank up the system, please totally crabk it up, not half!!!

I just see our beloved gtx 680 users taking part in stutter discussions. This is not only, because the drivers are bad for it. Or do you still believe in santa claus? It is lag of memory!! -> that means, you cannot run it cranked up and you COULD get stutters.

Crazy, that lynch is writing something about pro gamer and that I said, that you are all casual gamer. Never talked about that. You just have to avoid mentioning games, which are definetly built to be used with low ram to serve all systems. I never talked about you, i talked about the games, which you are comparing with clod.

The sentence " why is clod running so bad and skyrim not?" just feeds me up and I cannot believe, that someone of this com really wrote that!! Sry, bit that is sad.

I also never talked about the 680 is worse. I said, that the 7970 with its vram should have less problems. The opinion, that even 670s are running faster than 7970 is simply not true.
Bf3 is an nvidia game and the 680 initially was not faster, which was a shocking moment for all nvidia guys. They now solved it with bf3 patches and nvidia patches. Some of you should be aware of that tactics, working closely together with the game developer and solve out the competitor. Giys, who are into it, know that this was often the case in the fight ati/nvidia. Just wanted to mention that.

Noise, heat and evetually life time lose from overclockinf are just weak statements out of the brochure.

80% of the gamers, deciding to buy one of these cards, will overclock it. Ati has the better bill of material and you will not reduce life span on both cards, except you want to run your card over 6 years. All cards are consuming power and noone in high end will care. It is not much and the standby power consumption is nearly the same.

I do not want to discuss the whole thing. I stated, which is the better card in my opinion and comparing 670 and 7970 is nuts. Take out the boost in the 670 or overclock the hd 7970 will cause, that hd7970 is simply faster!

Btw: I never heard of ati user having generally more problems. Il2 1946 was ati game and clod is also ati game in its current situation, if I just do a wild shot into the dark. Never heard a 7970 user taking part of stutter discussions...

I am no pro gamer, just a guy who really read alot of the situation between 680 and 7970. Only few sides really switch on their minds and benched the cards realistically. What is realistically? High end card users will tweak and overclock. So the only comparison to do is: overclock both cards to its stable maximum and than compare. You can see, that they are closely together and when it com to real high resolution, the 680 in its nvidia nature just cannot compete anymore. High res is not 1080p btw....

Just my opinion, but I dont want to discuss it, as it gets boring. Buy a half kepler, quickly released to avoid damage and be happy.

Hi Stublerone, Il2 was always better on Nvidia cards due to it's better drivers/handling of openGL. With the two new cards to choose from it depends on what games you want to play but both do well enough to make it not matter. In the Toms Hardware list they come out equal due to the nature of the different cards working better with different games. You can get a per game speed test on Anandtech if you want to investigate further.

Sorry but this whole rant is nonsense, he claims to have experience in the technical side of computers, building them and an understanding of the hardware involved. He clearly doesn't have clue and and isn't very experienced in the matter, he hasn't read any hardcore computing magazines that review the whole computing industry and devoted to hardcore gaming or been to any technical websites/forums and devoted to debating at length stuff like this. Since the new nvidia cards have come out AMD, and now no longer ATI as AMD took over the ATI company completely in 2006 for 5.4 billion dollars, has been on the back foot. The nvidia cards are a whole redesign of the Fermi architecture which they began with the 500 series of cards. Overclocking kills cards plain and simple and his statement that overclocking doesn't kill cards shows his complete ignorance on the subject. Overclocking stresses the components and puts them under greater strain to perform, which causes heat and which puts the fans and cooling system under more strain to deal with said heat. Running any sort of rig under those conditions even if your cooling system is a water system eventually those components are going to wear out, and playing demanding at high settings will lower that that threshhold even more! The rreason he doen't want to discuss it anymore is proof he hasn't got a clue about the subject he's talking about and subsequently wouldn't like to show his ignorance! I've been playing IL-2 from the very beginning way back in the days of the IL-2 Sturmovik beta, which I still have somewhere on disc, the nonsense he said about nvidia users having issues with forgotten battles and not ATI users is complete and utter nonsense. I remember discussions going on for hundreds of pages at a time on this forum and also over at the ubisoft forum about graphical issues that ati users encountered with every patch, and discussions at length how tweak the config.ini for a work around! Remember when Pacific Fighters rolled out and the problems ati/AMD users had with the new clouds and water settings? Sorry but don't listen to his half arsed attempts to sound knowledgable. From a computer geek and MCSE/ACMT professional! Oh and stublerone MCSE stands for Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer and ACMT stands for Apple Certified Macintosh Technician go look them up ...

S!

Well, AMD had problems with original IL-2 that were FIXED! I know that for sure as I used both AMD and nVidia in IL-2, since beta as well. And I tested beta on TNT cards, Kryo cards etc. to get feedback to Oleg's team. Talk about a swap-o-rama and numb arse testing! ;) :D

nVidia and AMD both make good hardware that run any game today. Even I could not use Water=4 straight with AMD there were ways to get around it, but for me FPS was more important than some a bit shinier water ;) AMD gave me a solid 60fps with VSync, that is all that mattered at the time. So did nVidia cards I owned(up to 580GTX). So better not say AMD was nothing but trouble with IL-2.

What annoys me is this nVidia lobbying "let us give you some money to game developing..in exchange we give code that gimps AMD and you have to add that TWAT logo spinning at start up"..Every freaking game nV is involved with has something extra installed that AMD can not use..look at Skyrim and some other titles. PhysX is just a gimmick, won't go into that. AMD is not any better in this regard either so "pot and kettle" ;)

I pondered hard if I should go for 680GTX over my current 7970HD. I did not as it does not offer anything SIGNIFICANTLY better in IQ or performance in games I currently play. And those titles are not seen in the hardware reviews, go figure. In CoD for example AMD and nVidia are equally good performance wise..if nV offers me only very little increase in FPS the cost difference for that is too big IMO, even the card itself is a good one. So I settle with 7970HD for now..next time I will review need for a new card is when the 8xxxHD and 7xxGTX series come out next year. No need to slap ePeens around which one is better before that :)

Like i said, i didnt want to start anything and like you say, the closest truth is that both 7970 and 670 is good cards.

The thing i reacted to was the complete misinformation provided.

And to Stubleron: I really dont know how you manage to use up 2.7 GB memory. I myself run on 1920x1080 and my memory usage peeks at 1061 MB (Black Death) with everything set as high as it goes and i use NVidias FXAA to, witch works like a charm im glad to say.

I,m no expert.

But I got a Jetstream 680 gtx with 2g DDR3 at it runs Clod just fine at max with just AA at X2.
No stuttering exept at 1st loading up,then smooth as silk.

i5 2.9 Quad,
Gigabyte GA-h61 chipset,
8g 1300mhz Ram,
Palit Jetstream 680gtx 2g DDR 3,
microsoft FF2 Stick,
CH pro Pedals.
750w PSU Icecooler.
2x Sata HD,
HP Dvd 1260 Sata Drive.
X4 Cooling fans.

When talking about the current generation of GPU’s, that’s not necessarily true.

With the fact that the GPU vendors have released “OC” versions of the 7xxx, and the fact that nVidia will automatically “overclock” their GPUs via their GPU Boost functionality, AND still provide a warrantee, means that these new GPUs can be “overclocked” and still remain with in their tolerances.

With this round of GPU’s the term “overclocked” or “superclocked” is a smoke screen, it’s marketing pure and simple. These puppies can go much higher in terms of raw clock speed and heat and still live to fight on.

Indeed they will, but constantly put under such stresses will eventually wear them out, that's what I'm saying, saying that'll never take damage when clocked is not what happens in reality ...