You must have missed the bit where I talked about stuttering on SINGLE cards and on crashing drivers in the initial release and poor performance up until October.
Because 99% of gamers never had issues you had. I bought my card way early in 2012 and I had 0 BSOD and no driver crashes that's the card's fault. The only time I had driver recovery in the Start Bar, which is how AMD now resets the driver from a bad overclock, is when I pushed my card to 1250mhz+.
Regarding the stuttering, you again keep using selective memory. When HD7970GE came out, it beat
after-market pre-overclocked GTX680s in
frame rate times delivery. That was June 22, 2012.
At TPU, 7970GE was already faster than GTX680 as of June too:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7970_GHz_Edition/28.html
Your claim that HD7970 had poor performance for nearly 1 year up to October is bullocks when HD7970GE beat GTX680 as of June 22nd on most review sites and continued to have that lead. The stuttering was actually in very few games, while 90% of games exhibited no such issues. The key game that left 25%+ performance on the table was BF3 and that was fixed around November. Everyone was aware of that.
If you want to roll that way, you ignored all the games that used DirectCompute where GTX680 got destroyed, when Shogun 2 performance on GTX680 was very poor for months after it launched and when NV's cards
exhibited issues in Shogun 2 until late 2012, when it took NV until end of October 2012 to fix LOD IQ issues when you enabled SSAA on their cards. While Skyrim stuttered on HD7970 at times,
NV's IQ in Skyrim was horrendous with SSAA, while with
ENB graphical mods, GTX680 trailed 20-28% to 7970GE in Skyrim! NV only fixed Skyrim performance for 680 early this year. I heard none of that from you while you brought up everything under the sun for HD7970 series. You made it sound as if your 680s were nearly flawless in IQ and performance. Why is that?
Your comment on poor DX9 performance with HD7970 is also out of thin air. What DX9 games had awful performance on 7970 exactly? Why don't we look at DX9 games performance to see if your claims are valid:
Payday 2 - HD7970GE is
26% faster than GTX680
Divinity Dragon Commander - HD7970GE is
24% faster than GTX680
Castlevania: LoS - HD7970GE is
10% faster than 680
HL Black Mesa DX9 mod - HD7970GE is
29% faster than GTX680
DX9 games is where 7970GE is beating 680 even more than in DX11 games.....
The interesting part is this review has
nothing to do with Cross-fire performance and it compares the generational leap someone would experience from a GTX480/570/6950 unlocked/6970 if they stepped up to GTX770/7970GE in recent months with up-to-date drivers. Instead of focusing on today's excellent performance of 28nm chips from both camps, you derailed the thread into problems HD7970 had 1.5 years ago to justify why your 680s are better. No one denies that GTX680 SLI > HD7970GE CF and it was the better choice all these months. We are talking about single GPU performance in this thread and for most of 2012 and for all of 2013, HD7970GE beat out GTX680 and it now matches with GTX770 for a fraction of the cost. Everyone is aware that HD7970 had a poor launch for the first 3 months that required driver releases and driver updates and price drops. However as of June 2012, the card was rock solid in most games. Unless all you did was play SKYRIM or Borderlands 2, then sure, you were probably very unhappy but you said you sold your cards way before BL2 came out. So in which games you had stutter exactly?
