Help solve an argument - what is the better card(s)

[davie jambo]

What would be better in terms of performance

2x 7970s in crossfire or 1 x 780ti

I think the 7970s , mate thinks a single 780ti

 

[Deders]

Are we talking GHz editions or standard 7970's?

 

[nitromullet]

780 Ti vs 280x CF:
http://anandtech.com/bench/product/1072?vs=1058
Titan vs 7970 GHz CF:
http://anandtech.com/bench/product/764?vs=769

The 7970 and 780 Ti are technically from different marketing generations, which is why you don't see them compared directly.

The Crossfire rig gives higher FPS, but I'd personally take the 780 Ti or a 290X over the CF rig.

 

[davie jambo]

780 Ti vs 280x CF:
http://anandtech.com/bench/product/1072?vs=1058
Titan vs 7970 GHz CF:
http://anandtech.com/bench/product/764?vs=769

The 7970 and 780 Ti are technically from different marketing generations, which is why you don't see them compared directly.

The Crossfire rig gives higher FPS, but I'd personally take the 780 Ti or a 290X over the CF rig.

Yeah I was hunting for benchmarks

I'd probably take the 780ti too , newer , not in crossfire and less energy but I have twin 7970s at the moment so was proving a point to my mate who has a 780ti

Are we talking GHz editions or standard 7970's?

it's the GHZ editions

 

[3DVagabond]

Most of the time the 7970 crossfire would be faster. There will be situations/games that it won't be though. Depends on whether the overall higher performance is better than the more consistent performance. That's subjective.

 

[Deders]

The 7970Ghz edition and 280X listed above are the same card and are clocked significantly higher than the standard 7970.

It also depends on what game you are playing, Company of heroes 2 for instance favours AMD cards. Also you are not guaranteed full crossfire performance from every game so the 780TI would be more consistent.

 

[davie jambo]

The 7970Ghz edition and 280X listed above are the same card and are clocked significantly higher than the standard 7970.

It also depends on what game you are playing, Company of heroes 2 for instance favours AMD cards. Also you are not guaranteed full crossfire performance from every game so the 780TI would be more consistent.

I am well aware of the problems with cross fire trust me !

 

[BrightCandle]

The pair of 7970's will be faster almost all of the time, no doubt about it. The same is true when you take 2x 680's and compare it to a 780 ti, they destroy it in terms of performance and are cheaper as well. In a few games the competition is much closer because xfire/sli don't scale very well but for games that use the GPUs heavily the dual cards will be faster.

 

[Silverforce11]

If you are sensitive to microstutter, then older gen CF will never be good enough.

Otherwise, CF 7970 Ghz ed is heaps faster in most games.

 

[Arkadrel]

What would be better in terms of performance

2x 7970s in crossfire or 1 x 780ti

I think the 7970s , mate thinks a single 780ti

depends on the game, but sometimes the 2x 7970's have about 40-50% more FPS than the single 780ti.

To me that means better "in terms of performance".

 

[bystander36]

To me, performance does not mean FPS, it means everything that goes into giving you a good experience, including how smooth the frames are delivered. That means that a crossfire/SLI rig needs to beat the single card by a fair percentage before I'd consider them to have as good of performance.

 

[2is]

I have a 7970 in one of my computers. Without taking cost into consideration, if given the choice between a 2nd 7970 or a single 780Ti I'd chose the 780Ti

 

[dn7309]

if I have the money I would just get a single 780TI

 

[Gikaseixas]

Check this brand new review
http://www.ocaholic.ch/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=1300&lang=english

For the lazy here's their conclusion:
Conclusion

First of all lets talk about prices. Let's consider that the two R9 280X together cost 422 Euro. Compare that to the 541 Euro you'd have to pay for the cheapest reference NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 TI we can find. Therefore this one high-end card is is about 23 percent more expensive than the two mid-range models.

To dive a bit deeper into the results, we start with performance differences in 3DMark graphics score where we see that the CrossFire of the two R9 280X is between 50 and 53 percent faster than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti. In the next theoretical test we ran, Unigine Heaven, we see that the two R9 280X's are on average 18 slower than the NVIDIA GTX 780 Ti. In case of games it turns out that for example in Sleeping Dogs one the one NVIDIA card is about 18 percent quicker than the two cards in CrossFire. A closer look at Call of Duty Black Ops 2 shows the other end of the scale, where the two R9 280X's score 32 percent better than the single NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti. In this case we see a rather huge variance in the test results.

Overall the two R9 280X cards are performing really well and there is no doubt the two of them are seriously quick, actually, on average they're 9.1 pecent quicker than one GTX 780 Ti. But the problem is that the average value is not even telling half the story. It turns out that in quite a few games, the two 280X cards together are slower than the one GTX 780 Ti, which make performance rather unpredictable. Other than that ther is power consumption. In idle the power consumption of our test system is twice as high with the two R9 280X then with one GTX 780 Ti and under load conditions the setup with AMD cards can almost be used as a heating system. Concluding it can be said, that under certain circumstances the two R9 280X cards are quicker than one GTX 780 Ti and they're also cheaper but if you want to invest your money in an as sustainable way as possible, then we'd recommend to buy a single card.

 

[realibrad]

Check this brand new review
http://www.ocaholic.ch/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=1300&lang=english

....Concluding it can be said, that under certain circumstances the two R9 280X cards are quicker than one GTX 780 Ti and they're also cheaper but if you want to invest your money in an as sustainable way as possible, then we'd recommend to buy a single card.

Wait...are you saying that you should choose the setup that most favors the games you play?

Poppycock!

 

[Squeetard]

I'm still waiting for xfire support for ESO. I've got 2-7970's.
I am probably going to get the ROG SWIFT in June and then switch to a single nVidia card when the next gen 22nm hits.

 

[BrightCandle]

My advice about Xfire/sli remains the same always - if you wouldn't be happy with the performance of a single card in a game you really loved then don't get it. Because at some point you are going to be turning SLI/xfire off on release day of your new shiny game. Much of the performance we see in games (more so on AMD for some reason they seem late with a lot of profiles the last few years) comes many days after release. But there is no doubt its cheaper and faster all the reviews show this to be the case. Its just not always true.

 

[24601]

Crossfire on anything before 290/290x is beyond atrocious.

I would rate 2x 7970 as less than 1x 7970 in this comparison.

 

[thesmokingman]

Crossfire on anything before 290/290x is beyond atrocious.

I would rate 2x 7970 as less than 1x 7970 in this comparison.

That's a lot of hyperbole.

 

[BrightCandle]

That's a lot of hyperbole.

I also don't think its accurate today, the issue that was there with the 7970's in xfire (which admittedly lasted over 2 YEARS) is resolved for modern games as far as I can tell from the benchmarks. There are plenty of examples on gamegpu.ru where 2 cards produce less overall absolute stutter than 1 card because they double the frame rate but don't double the variance resulting in a significantly smoother experience. Xfire/SLI is pretty good actually, in the last 1.5 years I have had very few problems with it. Before that I had a lot of issues on the 7970's, but that was then, now there is FCAT and an industry watching out for stuttering and measuring it and people finally care about it.