7950 vs 7970 vs gtx 760 2gb and 4gb

[cowfish007]

I'm looking to upgrade my vid card and am undecided as to which would be the best one to get for Skyrim and games in general.

 

Radeon 7950 or 7970

NVidia 760 2gb or 4gb version.

 

I want the price to be about $300 or lower. Any advice would be appreciated.

 

I usually buy Nvidia due to AMD driver issues, but am not sure if that is a factor now.

[rhowington]

Believe me. right now nVidia has as many (if not more) driver problems that Radeon's. That being said I use both, the 7990 is in my testing setup and a GTX 680 in my gaming computer. I suggest as long as you aren't going for Crossfire, if the 7970 is cheaper, go for that one. Keep in mind that AMD is getting ready for a refresh of their cards about October so the price may fall.

[mikec5airguard]

I can 2nd that, as long as your sticking with ONE card you really cant beat the 7970 in terms of price and performance. That being said, I have 3 of them in Trifire, and skyrim is just awful with either crossfire or trifire, (flickering water, no ENB's that work etc) next month i am switching over to team green...

[Rennn]

Nvidia's cards will perform markedly better in games using the newest effects, such as Crysis 3 or Last Light.

[Lord Garon]

I don't want to sound like a fanboi (I have a GEFORCE in my machine right now), but I've had more issues with NVIDIA drivers than Radeon.

 

Its hard to say what the best card is for you. Why are you upgrading? What do you want: FPS? Display resolution? HiRes textures? What platform will the card go in? Do you OC your hardware?

 

Any of the cards you mention will play almost any game available fairly well, but it depends on what you want. Since you are asking in a Skyrim forum, I would say to get whichever model comes with the most VRAM in your price range.

 

As a generic gaming choice, I would simply recommend an HD 7970.

[OozyGorilla]

I'd echo the 7970. It's a great card and a great overclocker. You can't go wrong.

 

If you can wait a month or so, AMD is rumored to be releasing their new 9000 series of cards later this month.

[mightymuffin007]

I'm sorry if my question hijacks the OPs thread, but I didn't want to start a new thread that ended up asking a very similar question. I'm looking to stay with Nvidia simply because the cards I would get from AMD are "too long" (my storage drives are in the way due to my foolishness of buying a non-modular psu.../facepalm). However, I'm trying to decide between 760 and 770, so pricing restriction is out. Instead, its whether the jump from 760 to 770 is worth it. On top of that, its also whether its worth it to upgrade from my 560 ti 1GB to either 760 or 770 4GB now, or wait until I build a new computer to look at all of this.

 

To put some perspective on this question:

 

1.) I could fit a card that is between 11-12 inches without moving anything in my tower. However, I am trying to avoid bending wires and moving things in my tower, and I'm trying to avoid hitting the maximum length to avoid possible returns and such. It could work, but I know it'll be a tight fit. I'd just feel safer getting something under 11 inches.

2.) I could move my SSDs and HDD to another drive cage, but that is where all the unused psu cables are being stored, thus I would need to find a place to move them to that would avoid hitting or rubbing against something else. On top of that, that cage only fits 2 drives, thus I would need to screw in the other SSD card into the top of the cage. In other words - I would rather avoid doing more work for a new card than I need to.

3.) I currently have the MSI twin frozr 560 ti with 1 GB VRAM. It plays most games comfortably, but I really want to upgrade my VRAM for textures, ENB, and such. I also want to play some of the more graphically intense games coming out this year, so I am thinking an upgrade now would be better.

[MAXxDESTROY]

get the 7950. It's 3gb vram is just too good. It is just as good if not better than nvidia cards at the same price.

[dovahkriid23]

im looking to get the evga gtx 760 sc 4gb(has gtx 670 performance)

if you dont plan on mod your skyrim 2gb will be ok for the next year games but i advise you to get the 4 gb version if you want to mod your skyrim or just keep the card for gaming for a few years

if you do that use the 314.22 driver a lot of people are complaining about fps drops with the 320.xxx drivers

 

the hd7950 has enough vram if you want to mod skyrim,it wont be enought if you use every hd texture on nexus but for general mods its ok(i've only seen 1 guy that posted a screenshoot showing he was using 3gb something vram..)if you want vram and performance boost go for the gtx(it has better performance but not much)

you also need to keep in mid skyrim crashes at 3.1 ram(ram not vram)so be sure to use enboost by doing that you will free a lot of ram but it will use more vram

Edited August 16, 2013 by dovahkriid23

[Robynah]

1080p + 4x antialiasing + official HD texture packs = about 1.5gb of graphic memory use maximum

Edited August 18, 2013 by Robynah