Buying a 7950 at this point in time, wise?

[VirtualLarry]

I will say this: I plan on doing some significant GPGPU DC work, using OpenCL, and AMD supports OpenCL much better than NV does. (NV is only interested in pushing CUDA, and has buggy and neglected OpenCL drivers on Maxwell, according to some DC projects that run OpenCL and still don't run on Maxwell because of NV's bugs.)

 

[Mondozei]

No, I don't think it's wise as of now. Half a year ago, maybe. Look at what NV has to offer in just a few weeks time with the 960/960Ti. If anything, prices could drop on better cards than the R280. You could see the R290 for 220-230 dollars. Which would be a much better card.

Or maybe one of the 960Ti will be a good contender. Either way, wait still for a few more weeks and then do a reevaluation. The R290 is at this stage a high-end midrange card, not a high end card. It is outperformed by the 970 which is the new midrange. I'm expecting to see price drops on that card as the 960Ti version(s) could beat it. AMD would then have to lower prices.

 

[el etro]

All but one plays fine dont they.

Crysis 3 and BF4 may show "galloping" FPS even at low details. FX4 series play better but not much(Omega driver helps here), and i3 plays very well the games.

 

[RussianSensation]

Crysis 3 and BF4 may show "galloping" FPS even at low details. FX4 series play better but not much(Omega driver helps here), and i3 plays very well the games.

Linus has a review of G3258 vs. 5960X, and he confirmed that even with GM204, Crysis 3 is completely unplayable with an overclocked 3258, with minimums hitting 17 fps. BF4 multiplayer, Ryae Son of Rome would also be terrible with that CPU.

 

[cbn]

Linus has a review of G3258 vs. 5960X, and he confirmed that even with GM204, Crysis 3 is completely unplayable with an overclocked 3258, with minimums hitting 17 fps.

He must have used very high detail settings then.

I had no problem playing Crysis 3 on 1080p low with just a R7 250X even in the very difficult (for hardware) Welcome to the Jungle Level--> http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37023656&postcount=90

 

[cbn]

BF4 multiplayer, Ryae Son of Rome would also be terrible with that CPU.

I haven't played Son of Rome, but BF4 64 player worked great for me with my OC G3258/R7 250X at 1080p low with Mantle API enabled.

The only game (so far) that gave my OC G3258/R7 250X problems was COD : Ghosts as I did have stuttering in the larger maps/highest # of player games. However, 6GB is listed as the minimum ram for that game with 8GB recommended. I only had 4GB RAM.

 

[cbn]

Would I be too bottle-necked with a 3.8Ghz G3258?

Yes, you will probably be very bottlenecked.

And if you paid a lot of money for your video card you won't get the full money's worth of value out of it for that reason.

However, if the card is cheap and the performance unbalance is not too bad....

 

[el etro]

You did not saw my Pentium G620 plus GTX670 galloping low as 10FPS on Crysis 3 very low details.