yasamoka
vegetaleb wroteMSI 650 TI from pcandparts.
I didn't like ATI nor for their support (windows 8) nor for the loud fan noise when playing
Ummm, what? What's wrong with their Windows 8 support? They have unified drivers for Windows 7 and 8. Their drivers are *exactly* the same between the two.
Loud fan noise when playing?? So now all AMD cards have loud fan noise when playing...
You know, you can use manual fan control, if you find AMD cards are more aggressive with their fan profile to keep the card cool.
The 7790 goes against the 650Ti and beats it. It sells for same / less than the 650Ti.
It's not smart to avoid AMD graphics cards. Nvidia are mostly screwing with their customers with their high prices, for nothing.
You mostly don't read about it much, but Nvidia have got their fair share of issues, too. The asymmetrical memory controller, crippled compute performance, low memory bandwidth, BF3 stutter issues, Adaptive VSync stutter issues, etc... but unfortunately, all the bashing you see online these days is directed at AMD.
I'm telling you this out of personal experience; between me and friends, we have
4 7970s and 4 7950s; none have any serious issues whatsoever.
Skip HWCompare when comparing graphics card. It indicates nothing. 3 metrics that are not always the most important are misleading. Use Anandtech GPU charts or GPUBoss if you want a quick compare. Even then, they're not as accurate as can be, as with drivers performance can change.
yasamoka
Let me clarify some things:
VRAM: 1GB is the amount of VRAM that shipped with 2008's flagship graphics card, the Nvidia GeForce GTX280. The card is now around 5 years old. 5 years is obsolescence in hardware terms.
Nowadays games easily push over 1GB VRAM and you'd have to tone down many settings just to get VRAM consumption down, even when the GPU itself can handle those higher settings easily.
There's a bare minimum that games have to use to function properly. As this bare minimum draws closer to 1GB, you'll find you have to sacrifice too many options to stay under such a limit, even when the GPU's performance itself is sufficient.
The problem is that 2GB of VRAM can be overkill for certain cards; in this case, the 650Ti. 1GB is too low an amount these days, it's the BARE MINIMUM. 2GB is too large for such a card as by the time the game is consuming 2GB, it will be running too slowly on the 650Ti due to the GPU not keeping up anymore.
If you do go for the 650Ti 1GB, you have to know that very soon, it will be obsolete and you will not be satisfied as you were when you first got the card. It's clear that 1GB is the bare minimum these days, as no graphics cards ship with less than 1GB of VRAM anymore.
If you decided to go for the 650Ti 2GB, that extra you have spent could have went towards a higher-tier card.
You're in a sticky situation; sticking to an exact budget (number) is not likely to be beneficial; an extreme example would be someone who has a $190 budget, not $1 more, and he has to choose between a $120 card that offers mediocre performance at best and a $200 card that offers wicked performance and comes with a few surprises.
Those few extra $ could mean a big difference when deciding between a GPU for which 2GB is overkill but 1GB is not enough, and a GPU for which 2GB is awesome. Shipping the 650Ti with 1.5GB would have put Nvidia at a disadvantage since AMD offer 2GB cards at good prices, so Nvidia has no reason not to offer 2GB cards as well. The 1GB 7770 is matched, in terms of VRAM, with the 1GB 650Ti.
AMD is extremely underrated. Let me explain a bit:
1) Previous gen, Nvidia's GTX580 had the upper hand over the 6970 in almost everything gaming. It also consumed more power, released more heat, and came with less VRAM. There were also 3GB 580s, those were amazing. Nvidia generally had the upper hand in compute performance, too, to be specific.
2) Current gen, AMD knocks out cards that eventually turn out to be less expensive and perform better than Nvidia's competing cards, almost at every tier. 650Ti? 7770/90. 660? 7870. 660Ti? 7950. 670? 7970. 680? 7970 GHz.
3) So with this, since the release of the 680, with the 7970 basically beating the 680 only at very high resolutions, Nvidia fanboys starting whining. 7970 has high power consumption! 7970 is a loud card that releases a lot of heat! 680 = 7970 for less power. *goes for 680*.
4) Eventually, AMD knock out drivers that make its cards perform better than the competing Nvidia cards. The whining stays.
Now, what they fail to recognize is that AMD's chips are compute monsters, and this comes with a trade-off; more complex chip design and higher power consumption. What they also fail to recognize is that games that use compute features, like Dirt: Showdown and Sniper Elite V2, are a clean sweep for AMD cards.
Nvidia dumped compute performance to further separate their GeForce and Quadro / Tesla lines, to reduce chip complexity, improve yields, and, [as a byproduct, mind] shout out that their cards are green and more energy-friendly and quiet yada yada.
What they also fail to recognize is that when the 680 released, it was a mythical card; stocks were very low, and, magically, in April-May, le legendary GTX670 appears. $400 for a card which essentially performs very close to a 680? *throws out money*. The 670s were a result of 680s not yielding. They are 680s with disabled bits and pieces. The memory was fine, it's exactly the same memory configuration, so no artificial segregation was in place. So the 680s had low yield. Yet they claim that the 680's GPU was intended to be a mid-range GPU, but it turned out soooo good against the 7970 that Nvidia released it as a high-end GPU and kept the REAL DEAL GK110 GPUs for itself, (gathering dust). Yeah right.
5) Now with the power consumption issue moved aside, magically some *new benchmarking techniques* come out to demonstrate a SERIOUS issue with AMD cards not being as smooth as Nvidia cards. A FULL SET of FOUR DirectX9 games are run, one that has had trouble with AMD since the start, Skyrim (the game has a crappy engine, nice). People go CRAZY on the subject, and people start going for the 660Ti instead of the 7950, even though the latter lays it to waste in pretty much everything that matters.
OK, AMD fixes the issues. Now, notice. *FPS doesn't matter anymore.* This is the motto for 2013. Smoothness, even at lower framerates, matters most. Ok. *goes and grabs inferior card for allegedly smoother gameplay*.
With the issues fixed, and AMD bundling all sorts of AAA titles with their cards (selectively): Hitman: Absolution, Far Cry 3, Sleeping Dogs, Crysis 3, BioShock Infinite, Tomb Raider, AMD sells more cards in the first quarter of 2013 than it has sold in all of 2012.
6) Now something ELSE pops up: CrossFire microstutter. Nvidia releases a tool called FCAT. Frame Capture Analysis Tool. The tool looks sweet, nice Nvidia. But the whole deal is to show how bad frame-timing is on AMD's CrossFire technology. Fine.
AMD acknowledges the issue and promises a driver to optimize smoothness. Check out the prototype drivers that they have released, they show the issue mostly fixed. It took AMD a month; Nvidia has been at this for 2 years, and only this gen they managed to reduce frame-timing issues considerably.
NOW, what did reviewers miss? Hmm hmm. I ran CrossFire. Toggle VSync on, cap your frame-rate, hmm WOW no microstutter anymore. No tearing as well. Rock solid smoothness. Almost NO reviewer mentions this!
As refined as VSync is, and with FPS caps reducing input lag caused by VSync, who seriously does not use VSync more and more these days? Triple Buffering raises framerate and doesn't let it dip to divisors of the refresh rate (from 60 to 30,20,15,12,etc...) like VSync ON alone does.
7) Ok, so by now, AMD offers cheaper, better-performing cards with more VRAM, better compute performance, better overclocking, quite better performance at higher resolutions and multi-monitor, and throws in some free AAA titles that, if bought separately, are seriously costly.
AMD releases the 7990 to counter the Titan, at its price point, and beats it up pretty badly. Granted, this is a dual-GPU card, but it gets the job done. It *crushes* Titan, and beats the 690 almost everywhere as well.
So what happens now?
Yeah, rumors get thrown out that Nvidia plans to release the 7xx series in May. 760Ti and 770 are refreshes of the GTX670 and 680 for cheaper. The 780 is a Titan LE, a reduced Titan (like 670 is to 680), for...$600. Then, rumors shift that price further and further away from $600. MUCH further away from $600. Nvidia are selling Titan for $1000, why would they give you a 7% slower card for $400 less?
People, naturally, are advised to wait for the 7xx series cards. People stop buying cards. Genius.
Nvidia are playing us for fools dude. Be wiser.
