Am I right taking a GTX 580 over a 5970?

[jacktesterson]

I'm only working a 1/2 day today. Going to go home and install it this afternoon. Never had a chance to last night.

 

[BrightCandle]

I wouldn't mind crossfire's quirks if it was a matter of tweaking the profiles. But AMD has made it impossible to do it within the drivers so you are messing around with third party tools and not being able to access all of the profiles and code paths AMD has enabled for other games to find it working. If AMD actually released the profiles BEFORE the games came out then I might be installing new drivers every week but at least games would be playable on release.

The real problem with the dual core card is the trade off. You loose 1GB of RAM per core and you loose valuable clock speed. The combination in hindsight has hurt its performance in modern (console ported!) games.

Its the dual core cards I think are the problem more than crossfire/sli in general. Sure that has its issues but the 300W limit on a single card limits the dual core cards too much as it reduces their single core performance to keep it in the power limits, and you need a fast single core quite a lot.

 

[mrjoltcola]

I'm only working a 1/2 day today. Going to go home and install it this afternoon. Never had a chance to last night.

I think you'll be happy.

I game on 2560x1600, and when I benchmarked back to back 570 and 580s, jumping from the 570 to the 580 was like "Oh, this is how it is Crysis is supposed to feel".

I'd been looking at the cards on paper for a long time, and putting in my 2 cents on the forums as if.. but there is a difference in reading benchmark charts, and playing a game with both cards. Somewhere around 33FPS (GTX 570 in Crysis) I was ok in single player mode, then dropping in the 580 made the jump to say 37-38 FPS avg, but the playability took a MAJOR leap. I can't quantify it, maybe it is minimum framerate, or framerate consistency, but whatever it is it doesn't look like that much on paper. When you actually play a 580 after playing any other single GPU, you know it. Once you play it, your tolerance for minimum framerate also goes down.

Now if we can just get a GTX 680 or a 7970 that will finally put my 2560x1600 framerate over the top without SLI, I might be satisfied.

 

[jacktesterson]

Very happy.

I always use the benchmark in Just Cause 2. Since I have used it on so many cards/builds, I was very impressed.

I was able to the run the game completely maxed out as much as possible with average FPS above 60. First time I've ever done that with a single card.

 

[notty22]

I think you'll be happy.

I game on 2560x1600, and when I benchmarked back to back 570 and 580s, jumping from the 570 to the 580 was like "Oh, this is how it is Crysis is supposed to feel".

I'd been looking at the cards on paper for a long time, and putting in my 2 cents on the forums as if.. but there is a difference in reading benchmark charts, and playing a game with both cards. Somewhere around 33FPS (GTX 570 in Crysis) I was ok in single player mode, then dropping in the 580 made the jump to say 37-38 FPS avg, but the playability took a MAJOR leap. I can't quantify it, maybe it is minimum framerate, or framerate consistency, but whatever it is it doesn't look like that much on paper. When you actually play a 580 after playing any other single GPU, you know it. Once you play it, your tolerance for minimum framerate also goes down.

Now if we can just get a GTX 680 or a 7970 that will finally put my 2560x1600 framerate over the top without SLI, I might be satisfied.

I need to put your post to music.
Tina Turner - The Best

 

[bryanW1995]

I think you'll be happy.

I game on 2560x1600, and when I benchmarked back to back 570 and 580s, jumping from the 570 to the 580 was like "Oh, this is how it is Crysis is supposed to feel".

I'd been looking at the cards on paper for a long time, and putting in my 2 cents on the forums as if.. but there is a difference in reading benchmark charts, and playing a game with both cards. Somewhere around 33FPS (GTX 570 in Crysis) I was ok in single player mode, then dropping in the 580 made the jump to say 37-38 FPS avg, but the playability took a MAJOR leap. I can't quantify it, maybe it is minimum framerate, or framerate consistency, but whatever it is it doesn't look like that much on paper. When you actually play a 580 after playing any other single GPU, you know it. Once you play it, your tolerance for minimum framerate also goes down.

Now if we can just get a GTX 680 or a 7970 that will finally put my 2560x1600 framerate over the top without SLI, I might be satisfied.

The area where a single card really shines is in the max details, 25-45fps and 15-35 mins. Going from low 30's to high 30's is huge, and the corresponding mins certainly went up as well. Even though I game at 1680x1050, I've noticed a night/day difference going from my gtx 460-768 @ 905/4400 to a gtx 480 @ stock. I'm not necessariy using higher details now except maybe some TRSAA in older games, but the "feel" of the game is enormously better now.