NVIDIA VS AMD... need help

1) Which brand do you prefer and why?

2) I am looking specifically at sli evga 580 vs cf 7970, i know 7970 are new but with nvidia expected to release new info about the keplar series early next week. i want to make a good decision and if keplar is expected to outperform GTX580 and the 7970 then i will buy the keplar.

3) my monitor will be 27inch, since i am still in college have dual 27inch monitors is practically impossible with the size of the computer space i work with, but i might have dual monitor setup at my home.

Thank you for your support.

1. Nvidia, it's not a fan boy thing as I've had ATI cards in the past, but Nvidia has been spanking ATI/AMD for years in terms of top performance and there is no indication of that changing. ATI will occasionally take the top spot when they release a new generation of cards first but comparing apples to apples Nvidia always wins.

2. The 580 and the 7970 are generally recommended against because their performance does not justify their high price. The 7970 beats the 580 by about 5fps in most games, in a few games it's only as high as 10fps at higher resolutions and a lot of that has to do with the 7970 having more vram.

There is no game on the market that can be played by the 580 or 7970 that can't be played by the GTX 570 2.5GB. Neither card offers a fps high enough to make a game playable that is unplayable on the 570. Any game that requires x2 570's in SLI will also require x2 580's or x2 7970's, making both of those cards pointless in most cases.

The exception would be if you are playing on some triple monitor 5700x1200 3D set up and you need every single bit of power you can get. In that case you
would have to go with the 580 anyways since ATI does not support 3D.

3. Monitor screen size does not matter, it's the resolution of that screen that is important. You can have a 27" and a 22" monitor both with the same 1920x1080 resolution which will require the same exact hardware. So we need to know the resolution of that 27" monitor in order to know what hardware you are going to need.

For example, at 1920x1080 you will need x2 GTX 570 2.5GB in SLI but at 2500x1600 you will need x3 GTX 570 2.5GB in SLI.

At that resolution x2 GTX 570 2.5GB in SLI will be more then enough power, the 580 and 7970 are in no way needed. The 7970 will come close to maxing out BF3 at that resolution but it will still fall short. You can play it with very high settings with either card though. It's things like AA and AF that keep even the 7970 from maxing it out with just one card.

Going with x2 570 2.5GB in SLI will give you sufficient over head for upcoming games and will better support running a double monitor set up like you said you may do later on.

However, the 670 should be out in about a month and it will be powerful enough to do everything you need with just one card. All indications are the 670 should be 20% to 25% more powerful then the 7970 for the same or less money.

Does anyone have any news on the release of the gtx 680 

Originally posted by tju76 its so hard to decide on getting a 7970 or waiting for the Keplar 600 series, it seems like nvidia has been delaying this release for months, to me this seems like a weakness that they are having troubles releasing 22nm cards

If you can, just wait. It's so soon and many prices could change giving you a lot more options.

If anyone has gotten their hands on Kepler cards they arent releasing anything on them at the moment. Nvidia always has been a ballsy company when it came to competing with AMD/ATI. Just as AMD fell short with their whole 77xx and 79xx families (still waiting to test a 7870 for myself) Nvidia could fall though with Kepler. But if the rumors are true and Kepler shows 20%+ performance increases across all tiers with similar pricing,  you can bet your bottom dollar that it'll be the way to go.

Now the 79xx is powerful, don't get me wrong, the TDP is crazy low, not very noisy at all, great compute speed, it's just so f**king expensive! Now granted that's probably just because AMD is the only ones with 28nm GPU's so they can charge that much, but the price/performance ratio for the 79xx is just bad imo. In almost every aspect other than Frame-rate output, the 79xx dominates. But the frame-rate output is what matters most to ALOT of people.

I'm probably saying it wrong, but what i meant by Frame-rate output was just the visual performance of the card in terms of FPS.