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Upgrading from a 6950

tommybhoy said:
Until the stutter problem is 100% fixed, it's a problem, as I stated in another thread they said it will 'hopefully' be fixed, not that it 'will' be fixed.

In order to keep selling the cards in a healthy fashion, they need to be actively voicing that it will 'hopefully' be fixed in order to cover their backs.

My suggestion would be to keep what you have for the moment and wait for a concrete fix, otherwise you are taking a gamble.
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Manuel said:
We have received reports of an intermittent vsync stuttering issue from some of our customers. We’ve root caused the issue to a driver bug and identified a fix for it. The fix requires extensive testing though and will not be available until our next major driver release in June (post-R300). For users experiencing this issue, the interim workaround is to disable vsync via the NVIDIA Control Panel or in-game graphics settings menu.

Regards,
Manuel
NVIDIA Forums Technical Advisor
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Someone needs to learn to read.. I don't see any 'hopefully' in that post.. To me, that looks like they have the fix ready for the next major release.. This is coming from an ATI 6950 user also..
 
arc@css said:
Although more than some of the others which I think are around £310 - £320, the Gigabyte would be my personal choice. I have the windforce cooler on my gtx480 SOC. Great cooler. :)
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The only thing that really keeps me from ordering it, is the 2 GB VRAM instead of 3 GB and its bus is 256-bit compared to 384-bit, but I guess neither should affect performance even at 2560x1440?

The only game I really play where I could see this come into effect, would be modded Skyrim, but even then, I don't think it exceeds 2 GB?

I've been asking for advice elsewhere as well, and some seem to think that the 7970 would be more future proof? What do you think?
 
guywithtwohands said:
The only thing that really keeps me from ordering it, is the 2 GB VRAM instead of 3 GB and its bus is 256-bit compared to 384-bit, but I guess neither should affect performance even at 2560x1440?

The only game I really play where I could see this come into effect, would be modded Skyrim, but even then, I don't think it exceeds 2 GB?

I've been asking for advice elsewhere as well, and some seem to think that the 7970 would be more future proof? What do you think?
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If someone drops in here that has used either card, and / or has gamed at your res with 2gb of vram, then maybe they'll give their opinion. To be fair I haven't used either card and don't run at 1440p (1200 in fact), though as I say, I'm not yet convinced by what I've read that it'll make enough difference to warrant the outlay for a single screen at 1440p (future titles / heavy mods aside - always a possibility). Even for most titles at 1600p and multi-screen set-ups, I've been surprised at how well the current cards with 2gb of vram cope. :)

However, if money is no object, then get the best you can. :)
 
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arc@css said:
If someone drops in here that has used either card, and / or has gamed at your res with 2gb of vram, then maybe they'll give their opinion. To be fair I haven't used either card and don't run at 1440p (1200 in fact), though as I say, I'm not yet convinced by what I've read that it'll make enough difference to warrant the outlay for a single screen at 1440p (future titles / heavy mods aside - always a possibility). Even for most titles at 1600p and multi-screen set-ups, I've been surprised at how well the current cards with 2gb of vram cope. :)

However, if money is no object, then get the best you can. :)
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But what is the best :)? I'm certainly not looking at purchasing a GTX 690... Now, that is too much.

Are there any GTX 670/680 with more than 2 GB of VRAM that use a non-reference design cooler?
 
guywithtwohands said:
The only thing that really keeps me from ordering it, is the 2 GB VRAM instead of 3 GB and its bus is 256-bit compared to 384-bit, but I guess neither should affect performance even at 2560x1440?

The only game I really play where I could see this come into effect, would be modded Skyrim, but even then, I don't think it exceeds 2 GB?

I've been asking for advice elsewhere as well, and some seem to think that the 7970 would be more future proof? What do you think?
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The thing is, if you stick a mild overclock on a 670/680 and 7970, the 7970 will come out ahead at that resolution, so will be more future proof.
For reference, I use upto 1.8gb of vram at 1080p on BF3 multiplayer.
 
Sparx said:
Someone needs to learn to read.. I don't see any 'hopefully' in that post.. To me, that looks like they have the fix ready for the next major release.. This is coming from an ATI 6950 user also..
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That wasn't the post the hopefully came from though.

They have 'identified' a fix isn't the same as 'having' a fix, the latest betas from what I gather 'have' the fix, yet it is still happening.:(

Hopefully they will have a fix soon enough for everyone though, this coming from a guy who's nvidia purchases outnumber his amd purchases to the ratio of roughly 5 to 1.:)
 
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dave_beast said:
The thing is, if you stick a mild overclock on a 670/680 and 7970, the 7970 will come out ahead at that resolution, so will be more future proof.
For reference, I use upto 1.8gb of vram at 1080p on BF3 multiplayer.
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I use 1.5. Interesting as that's 300MB more which is 10% of the 7970's VRAM. Wonder how the caching when lots of memory is available works in practice.

Also whether or not the 7970 is ahead depends on the game. It isn't an across the board 'victory'.
 
If you don't know how to overclock or are not into overclocking, the 670 is the no brainer card. If however you are decent at overclocking then the 7950/7970 cards are very viable.
If you can over clock a 7950/7970 to around the 1200 mhz range, you will have the same performance as a overclocked 670/680, with more vram and no possible stuttering.

If you can over clock and can get a 7950/7970 for a decent price, get it. There is more chance you will notice possible stuttering than a possible tiny performance difference.
 
Hello again.

Thanks for all of your replies.
I know very little of overclocking, so yes, the GTX 670 did seem like the obvious choice.

I went ahead and said **** it and just ordered the GTX 670. Let's hope I'll not be disappointed. 2 GB should be enough for 1440p, right? RIGHT!?

:)

Once again, thanks. I'll report back in here once I receive the card and have it tested out.
 
guywithtwohands said:
I went ahead and said **** it and just ordered the GTX 670. Let's hope I'll not be disappointed. 2 GB should be enough for 1440p, right? RIGHT!?
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It should be fine for now. Worst case is you may have to use 2xAA instead of 4xAA, but honestly with 2560 res I don't think you would even really noticed the difference between the two.
 
Well, received my Gigabyte GTX 670 Windforce edition yesterday and have been trying out some games.

I tried Battlefield 3 with everything on its highest setting at 2560x1440 - this resulted in a framerate between 40 and 70 (usually). I'm guessing it'll be around 40-ish on a 64-player server in the heat of battle. Still pretty decent for a single card at that resolution with everything on max.

Skyrim plays quite smoothly on ultra high settings as well - getting frames around 50-60. I do have various graphics enhancing mods turned on, though, so this will of course vary based on the setup.

The Witcher 2 is a similar experience with everything on the highest settings (ubersampling turned OFF) - 45-60 FPS.

So far it has been quite an improvement over my 6950.

In Starcraft II I don't NOTICE much of an improvement as my old card played that very well too; of course, this isn't a very demanding game either, but in pure numbers, improvements can be seen. I was getting around 80-90 frames per second (at least in the early game - I haven't played a full multiplayer match yet)

I haven't had the time to test out much else, but as I'm typing this, I am installing Metro 2033 from Steam and plan to run the benchmark and post the results here.

EDIT: Here it is. Metro 2033 has always been a little tough, especially the benchmark :).
 
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guywithtwohands said:
In Starcraft II I don't NOTICE much of an improvement as my old card played that very well too; of course, this isn't a very demanding game either, but in pure numbers, improvements can be seen. I was getting around 80-90 frames per second (at least in the early game - I haven't played a full multiplayer match yet)
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For SC2, I would say you would be CPU limited when lots of units on screen, so the graphic upgrade won't do much for it.

Is you 2600K on stock clock or overclocked? If it is not overclocked, overclocking should help not only with SC2, but BF3 64 players maps as well.
 
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I also recently made the upgrade from 6950 to a reference MSI oc edition.

It is quite a nice upgrade and performs very well at 2560x1440 at the highest/high settings in all the games I've tried so far.

I will be sending it back and getting a Windforce edition instead, I want to OC more than 1190 ish top boost!
 
Marine-RX179 said:
For SC2, I would say you would be CPU limited when lots of units on screen, so the graphic upgrade won't do much for it.

Is you 2600K on stock clock or overclocked? If it is not overclocked, overclocking should help not only with SC2, but BF3 64 players maps as well.
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Yeah, SC2 is more CPU-heavy as far as I know.

My CPU is running on stock clocks, yes. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I don't know much about overclocking. Do you perhaps have any recommendations :)?

My CPU-cooler is an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev. 2.
 
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