Hi guys I'm looking for a bit of advise in regards to a graphics upgrade. A couple of months ago I went from a 1080p screen to a dell u3011, I'm still running a 460gtx 1gb and now the cost of buying the dell has worn off I'm looking at getting some graphics to keep up! As you can imagine the 460 is really struggling with any kind of game, bf3 is running on lowest quality and still struggling on some maps and even minecraft gives it a run for its money. I have a £200-300 budget to get the best performance I can at this resolution, my main uses for the machine is 3d modelling/ animation with a bit of gaming on the side so that rules out AMD/ATI already as 3ds max only supports nvidia cards. My first thoughts were to grab a new 670 gtx, but the 2gb ram is putting me off and I would much rather get the 4gb version but the price jump is a bit much. I don't mind dabbling in the 2nd hand market as long as there is a warranty involved. Would a 580 3gb be equal to the 670? Here is the current spec of the machine: i7 930 (running stock atm) Asus sabertooth mobo 6gb Corsair Dominator 1600mhz Evga 460gtx 1gb Antec TruePower New 650w Any advise is greatly appreciated.
I'm not expert as I haven't really kept up with things on the GFX front, but it is to my understanding that a 670 GTX is far superior to a 580 GTX, even if it has less VRAM. I don't think that the newest 6XX series suffers so badly with less VRAM compared to the last offerings from Nvidia so a 670 would be your best option. I was actually just comparing the two you mentioned with Anandtech GPU bench this morning and the 670 seemed massively better in most games at higher resolutions, althought the model listed is only 1.5gb. I'm not sure how much extra performance you will see for the extra ~£100+, but I think thats what I would go for.
I can't recall if they tested the 670s, but the 680s showed little or no benefit from having 4Gbytes - you'd probably get more from clocking the standard card.
Don't worry about the 670 "only" having 2 Gb of VRAM. I'm running a Dell 3008 at 2560x1600 with two GTX 570's in SLI (and they only have 1280 Mb each!) and I don't run into VRAM limitations with 4x AA, even on demanding games.
VRAM limitation is only really an issue when running below 16x PCI-E bandwidth. So on X58 it should be a non issue.
I just gave it a try - in the first proper outside level (not counting the initial bit in the train, which isn't very demanding) I get 30-odd FPS with everything on the Ultra preset including 4x AA and 16xAF. Dropping the AF to 8x and removing the 4x AA entirely makes it 50-odd FPS. According to the figures here: http://www.guru3d.com/article/battlefield-3-vga-and-cpu-performance-benchmark-test/6 that's better than a GTX 580, but not as good as a 590. Seems about right to me, it doesn't seem like a VRAM limitation. This game doesn't let you force higher AA than 4x, so I did some benchmarking with Heaven too: At 2560x1600 with 4x AA and 8x AF I got 51.7 FPS average, 35.3 FPS minimum At 2560x1600 with 8x AA and 16x AF I got 16.1 FPS average and 0.8 FPS minimum I believe the latter of the two scores there is what happens when you run out of VRAM - performance drops to a crawl. Since we are talking here about the OP getting a GTX 670 with 2 Gb of VRAM vs. my 570's with 1280 Mb, I don't think he will have any trouble.
The 670 is obviously superior to the 580 in games. But does anyone know which is best for 3d modelling seen as that is his main usage.
Get the 2GB version. It's fast. The 7970 isn't slow, in fact it's not bad at all, but if you must have Nvidia get the 670 2GB. The problem with 3D modeling is that unless you can hack it to function like a Quadro FX card, it won't really help much one way or the other.
7970 and 670 680 Are poor for 3d rendering The 580 is a beast at it If your main goal is 3d rendering work then the 580 is only choice of 3 For pure gaming 670 is cheap and faster than the equivalent amd card (7950)
Thanks for all the great advise so far then! So the 670 is a faster card for gaming by quite a long way at this resolution, but the 3d modelling/rendering is going to be a lot slower? Is there any reason why the 670 is that much slower? Immature drivers? Or is it that the architecture of the card itself hampers the ability to do the rendering tasks? When I get back to Uni the computer will basically be solely for 3d work with the odd game of battlefield 3 or project cars, so it looks like the 580 would be the better choice. Which manufacturer would be best to go for as I know some don't allow the coolers to be replaced under warranty and there is a real possibility the card will go under water in the next 3/5 months. Cheers again!