I think I'm pretty much sold on the idea of a 7970 now. Just for the fact that I'd feel safer knowing I had 3GB VRAM and that I think I could pick one up for less cash than the 680.
Does it matter what version you buy though for performance, or once overclocked are they all pretty much the same. Was thinking of buying the following one, but I see the same card for sale at a higher factory clock.
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-144-MS
At 1080p the 7950 is the champ. Quite simply as it can do everything the other two do at that resolution without sacrifice (IE it still sports 3gb vram).
I strongly urge you to avoid both the 680 and 7970 if you are gaming at 1920x1080 or 1900x1200 or whatever it is. The differences are impossible to see, so you gain absolutely nothing by spending £100 more.
The 7950 is also the champ should you need to turn to a multiple GPU set up.
What I mean is, when a game comes along that renders the core of the 7950 not good enough then the 7970 and 680 will most certainly suffer the same fate.
Not only that, but you can get a custom 7950 with an enormous cooler on (directcu II) for £100 less, and it will be quieter than both cards that use a blower cooler.
I don't think a price has been announced for the 4 gbs yet.
It doesn't take much working out if you understand how things work.
Nvidia use much more expensive vram than AMD. *THAT* is why they always offer less card to card.
3GB 580 cost £95 more than the 1.5gb version. Which BTW, would not exist if it did not serve a purpose (that purpose being two in SLI running three screens, and need the vram).
The 2gb 560ti cost around £80 more than the 1gb. So that wasn't worth buying either, not when the 2gb 6950 could be had for £170 or so, so it wasn't worth £45 more for a 2gb ti.
Adding 2gb of vram to an Nvidia card will very easily add AT LEAST £100 to the price. Their vram is far more expensive due to it being used on their high end server cards (Tesla) that NEED some sort of on the fly memory checking.
IE - servers can not BSOD. They need the ability to crash, then repair themselves on the fly without needing to be rebooted. This is why they use error correcting ram and so on.
Otherwise Yahoo and MSN would be offline regularly whilst the server is rebooted to recover from a BSOD.
