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Higher vram vs better card?

THere are far too many things to consider.

Firstly cost, do you WANT to spend £280, or can you but you'd prefer to save money. The 560ti and 6950/6870 are all pretty awesome cards that offer significantly more for your money. At £100 less than the 570gtx, the 560gtx isn't 40% slower than the 570gtx, so its better value.

The 6970/570gtx are similar price but I'd give performance, memory, longevity to the 6970. The 6950/560ti offer noticeably better value for money, and still very good performance for almost any game around now and for the next while.

Question really is, what are you upgrading from and how much do you REALLY want to spend rather than how much you can afford at a stretch.

With new cards not that far away(Nvidia miles away, so if you need Cuda thats less of an issue buying now, AMD are fairly close), its probably better to wait a month or two if you can.

If you've currently got a 5850 or something, then anything less than a 6970 you won't even notice the increase in performance, even then, its not worth it, if you have a 285gtx or something, a 560 might not be a huge performance increase while the 570gtx would be very noticeable, if you have something like a 8800/3870, then even a 560ti/6870 will be a HUGE upgrade, good value and they won't get that much cheaper when new cards come out anyway.

Ultimately, for any cost, and performance, the basic idea of 2gb mem on a weaker card is useless, cheapest 570gtx rather than an expensive 2gb 560ti without question. Which you'd actually buy boils down to cost, if value or absolute performance is the most important thing, and how important it is to upgrade in the first place.
 
What would be the better out of those listed above if playing at a resolution of 1920x1200??

Cleeecooo = GTX 570

and also for games that require lots of vram like BF3 and more than likely MW3?

Cleeecooo = 560ti

Thanks

So which one then as i've got 2 responses of a 560ti and 570.... lol.... As i said it has to play at 1920x1200 and games like BF3 and MW3..... Thanks... lol
 
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So which one then as i've got 2 responses of a 560ti and 570.... lol.... As i said it has to play at 1920x1200 and games like BF3 and MW3..... Thanks... lol

BF3 beta is using more than 1.5GB vram so you might want to get more than 1.5GB vram if you are going to do SLI/CrossfireX.

MW3 should be easy to render with low-end graphics cards so don't worry about it.
 
Bare in mind that I'm maxing BF3 out on 480 sli at 1920x1200 and hitting 100-120 fps in tunnels and sitting around 60fps outside. I would take the 570, though it won't max it out. Turning down the AA should be ok though.
 
How would a 6950 perform on BF3 then? I'm thinking about going for that for now and eventually upgrading to CrossfireX.

Thoughts?

Sorry for going off on a bit of a tangent by the way :D
 
How would a 6950 perform on BF3 then? I'm thinking about going for that for now and eventually upgrading to CrossfireX.

Thoughts?

Sorry for going off on a bit of a tangent by the way :D

A single 6950 (2GB) is more than capable of playing BF3, you won't however be able to play it on ultra. Whereas, Xfire 6950 will eat up BF3 on ultra with no problems, and is relatively cheap for the performance it gives - do be aware that people have been reporting problems of video stuttering with xfire, but it might just be a case of a driver fix.

Edit: Friend of mine has just told me he was playing with quite a few settings on ultra with playable FPS, so I may have overstated. One thing to keep in mind though, Dice did state that ultra options or some ultra settings were disabled during the beta, even if they appeared to be on. Xfire 6950 is definitely a nice setup :)

Goodluck!
 
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How would a 6950 perform on BF3 then? I'm thinking about going for that for now and eventually upgrading to CrossfireX.

Thoughts?

Sorry for going off on a bit of a tangent by the way :D

I disagree with the above poster. I think you'll be able to at least run it with some options on ultra with no AA. However I think even with crossfire you might struggle running full AA just because nvidia does better than ati usually with AA and i'm generally 60fps with sli 480GTX (also a more powerful card). While you'd have the extra vram memory I don't feel you can directly compare the cards solely based on having more vram memory as they are different technology.

That being said, you might instead be running it at 40 fps instead of 60. This is still playable.
 
I disagree with the above poster. I think you'll be able to at least run it with some options on ultra with no AA. However I think even with crossfire you might struggle running full AA just because nvidia does better than ati usually with AA and i'm generally 60fps with sli 480GTX (also a more powerful card). While you'd have the extra vram memory I don't feel you can directly compare the cards solely based on having more vram memory as they are different technology.

That being said, you might instead be running it at 40 fps instead of 60. This is still playable.
was playing bf3 the other day for quite some time.with my 2 6950's every thing maxed out with 4x AA. and was getting 50-60 to 80-90 fps out doors, inside in to the 100's. very playable.that was on metro. love these cards....
 
was playing bf3 the other day for quite some time.with my 2 6950's every thing maxed out with 4x AA. and was getting 50-60 to 80-90 fps out doors, inside in to the 100's. very playable.that was on metro. love these cards....

Thats pretty decent then. Not far off what I get. I've never done proper benchmarking on it but I can hit 120 outdoors but it's rare, almost always am between 60-70, usually closer to 60. For the price difference the 6950s seem like a no brainer.
 
So what would be the best single card to start up with ??

Remember playing at 1920x1200 and also using it for video editing / encoding

Maybe but not 100% i would either sli/xfire them in the future but not sure as yet
 
So what your saying is the 6950 2gb and the gtx570 1.2gb is ok at 1920x1200 ??
Only I read in some forums on here that BF3 uses 1.5gb of vram and so I didnt know how the 570 would perform on that and also for being a little more future proof..
 
yes, and since the 570 has more power it balances out the vram issue, vram may only be an issue if you play with high aa
 
Unless you're gaming at 2560x1600 with lots of AA, the GTX570 will be better than the HD6950/HD6970 overall across a number of games. But at those settings, the two latter cards would struggle anyway, not because of VRAM limitations but because they lack the sheer horse power to drive them.

Like KiiYzOo says, VRAM may only be a limitations with high AA and I'll add the high resolution (2560x1600) to that as well.
 
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