I personally think a lot of the hd7970 reviews showed that there are obvious driver issues with DX9 games that will most likely be fixed in future updates. The drivers for these cards are still very new, and this is a completely different architecture than what AMD has been using. I expect to see some pretty impressive performance increases from driver updates for GCN hardware.
AMD's inferior performance in Blizzard games has been documented for years. AMD was never able to beat Blizzard with HD3800, 4800, 5800 or 6900 series vs. their competitors. Not only that, but 2x GTX570s in SLI would cream an HD7970 in 2 games the OP asked about - WOW and BF3 (which OP asked about). And that performance is available right now. Even if drivers improve performance in WOW and BF3, AMD's lead in those 2 games is far too small to overcome the GPU power of adding a 2nd GTX570.
Russian, please buy some 580s to
end the misery
I am sorry but that's uncalled for.
I love how suddenly I am biased because I pretty much disagreed with the entire forum on the fact that HD7970 isn't that great. Wow. Amazing. Now I am an NV fanboy.....Notice the card in my sig? Ya, I love it; and it's made by AMD. Just because I am not satisfied with a card that's $550 and is only 40% faster than mine and is only 25% faster than GTX580 14 months later, doesn't make me an NV fanboy. If GTX680 was only 40% faster than GTX580, I would have also been unimpressed. If you've followed my threads since 2003, I have severely criticized NV's 5800 and 5900 series, and recommended ATI's 9700, 9800, X800, X1800, X1900, HD5xxx and HD6xxx series on many occassions.
I just present information and let the reader decide. If you have information that shows that a single HD7970 will outperform 2x GTX570s in SLI in
WOW and BF3, please share it in this thread. If the OP wants to spend $1100, of course HD7970s are faster.
I can and do play many different games in DirectX11 on my 4870x2. I never claimed it is able to use all of the DirectX11 features. It runs in DirectX11 using the DirectX10.1 feature level,
I know what you meant to say in your post and you clarified it above. A card that cannot run DX11 code automatically defaults to the next level that the game engine uses. If the game supports DX10 or DX10.1, then your card will run the game in DX10/10.1 mode. If the game only supports DX9 or DX11 (like WOW or Dirt 2 and 3), then your HD4870 series will automatically default to DX9 code path, not a DX11 codepath. But you already know that.
What you are missing is that DX11 code in WOW allows for DX11 videocards to perform certain operations quicker than they can do in DX9 mode. This is why in WOW, there is a very large performance increase from running a DX11 videocard in DX11 instead of a DX9 mode. For example, you could run an HD7970 in DX9 but it would be faster in DX11 mode.
In your case, your card
cannot take advantage of this increased speed level since it
cannot execute DX11 code (only subset of DX11, which doesn't share those speed increases). Which is why you should upgrade to a DX11 capable videocard and run WOW in native DX11 mode.