Should I exchange my 7970 for a 670?

[Ime]

I'm not looking to start a flame war, I just want some honest advice.

I detailed my issues with my 7970 here: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2298231

I'm getting conflicting advice from real life friends on what to do, so I'm going to spell out what I want, and maybe some kind souls here can point me in the right direction.

Basically, I want stability. I'm not interested in overclocking (factory OC is OK), I'm not interested in which brand gives an X fps boost in Y game. I just want a solid card and drivers that don't cause games I want to play to have texture flickering, white flashes of textures, and weird lines running through graphics.

Games I've been playing lately:
Guild Wars 2
Skyrim
Saint's Row 3
Rage
Deus Ex: HR

So with the above in mind, and the fact my 7970's issues appear to be driver related. I have to ask: Do I return my 7970 to newegg for a refund and buy a MSI or Gigabyte GTX 670, or do I wait and hope upcoming AMD drivers provide a full fix? (13.2 betas helped but didn't eliminate my issues)

Or another way or asking: Does the NVidia 670 have fewer artifact issues than the 7970 in the games I listed?

 

[Tweak155]

Tough to tell. Obviously the 7970 is the better card, but it isn't some grand difference.

If I were in the situation, and if I wasn't happy with the card I'd send it back. You buy it to play games and it doesn't do that right. I find that a valid reason for a return.

 

[SolMiester]

To expand of the above, the 7970 is obviously a quicker card in a ratio of approx 65/35 of games, however it would appear that AMD still have issue with there drivers. TBH, I have never understood why people have to update there drivers every month....or how they keep track of which ones to use. Id rather have 90% of the performance with a more stable platform any day of the week.

 

[Qbah]

I absolutely love my ASUS GTX670 in Skyrim. Rage runs great too - I can report zero issues. Especially in heavily modded Skyrim (3GB+ VRAM use )

I finished DX:HR on my previous Toxic HD5850 and the experience was flawless too. Skyrim was another thing, the 1GB VRAM on the Radeon was killing it. But apart from that, game ran fine (at lower IQ though), if a bit stuttery P).

What I really appreciate is that I can force global v-sync + triple buffering in nVidia control panel. I had to use D3DOverrider for that on the Radeon. Also, the coil whine is a lot quieter on the ASUS

I guess I'm saying both brands worked great for me and only IQ technology caught up with the older Radeon But if you're hoping a driver update will fix your issues, I wouldn't bet on that happening. It might, it might not. I have no issues with my GTX670 and if you don't loose $$$ on that exchange, it might be worth it to switch.

 

[Rvenger]

Basically, I want stability. I'm not interested in overclocking (factory OC is OK), I'm not interested in which brand gives an X fps boost in Y game. I just want a solid card and drivers that don't cause games I want to play to have texture flickering, white flashes of textures, and weird lines running through graphics.

Both of my GTX 670s textures flickered in BF3, Rage, 3dmark, and heaven benchmark. I honestly would maybe look into a clean install and try a different driver other than 13.1 until 13.2 is released.

The truth is, no game is going to run 100% flawless unfortunately. What I mean is if you are playing 10 games, at least 1 title could have issues. Usually when a driver team fixes one issue for a particular game, something breaks somewhere else. lol

 

[BrightCandle]

I have had a lot less driver issues on my 680 than the 7970 without a doubt. Every week I would irritated with often gaming breaking bugs on the 7970 and on the 680 I genuinely haven't reported a bug yet, there is just nothing that seriously wrong.

I published a list of known bugs on both recently which have confirmations and the relative level of severity is frightening, some of the 7000 series bugs are both really old and pretty bad.

 

[3DVagabond]

What are you trying to find out that's different than the original thread? From reading it there are two options given.

1, It is apparently a driver issue. They have a way of coming and going. You can wait and hope for a fix.

2, It doesn't appear that nVidia suffers from this. Possibly some lighting issues looking at the original thread, but not the white flashing. If you don't want to wait for a driver update from AMD get nVidia. If you do this you will likely be giving up some raw performance, but if you don't O/C it's not much difference. Maybe slightly lower IQ in a few games.

Whatcha gonna do?

 

[R0H1T]

Do you have a bunch of stuff installed on your PC ? If so it'll negatively impact the performance of your rig, not just talking about stuff running in the background, so as another posted suggested start afresh & try not to install too many things especially software that you won't use very often as there'll be internal conflicts eventually & the Windows registry will get bloated giving you all sorts of trouble !

 

[Jstn7477]

I'm hanging onto my 7950 and seeing what new drivers bring. I've contemplated getting a GTX 670 as well, but I didn't feel good about shelling out $400 for a "mid-range" card (I say this because the 79xx has more memory, a bigger bus and hasn't had its GPU compute abilities nerfed to lower power consumption) just for supposedly better drivers which isn't always the case. If I were stuck using Steam on Linux, I would switch to NVIDIA in a heartbeat because AMD's drivers are terrible for Linux, but on Windows I'm mostly content with my 7950 despite the artifacts and whatnot.

 

[Fx1]

i have yet to see problems with the drivers with my 7970 on BF3 GW2 and Far Cry 3. All maxed out on Ultra at 1900x1200.

Quite honestly i never do all this driver cleaning business. i have had both nvidia and mad drivers on this PC.

 

[3DVagabond]

i have yet to see problems with the drivers with my 7970 on BF3 GW2 and Far Cry 3. All maxed out on Ultra at 1900x1200.

Quite honestly i never do all this driver cleaning business. i have had both nvidia and mad drivers on this PC.

There's logic to what you are saying. I think that sometimes all of these additional programs/apps that interact with the drivers... and write to the registry... and get installed and uninstalled... and cleaning and sweeping... etc... create "some" of people's issues.

 

[Ime]

Thanks for the input everyone. It was very helpful.

I've RMA'd my 7970 to Newegg, and I'll be ordering a 670 2GB.

 

[Eureka]

Don't be too optimistic. While there doesn't seem to be any major issues with my 670, I've noticed subtle shadow flickering with my 670. Shadows like to 'jump' when the POV is moving.

 

[Ime]

Don't be too optimistic. While there doesn't seem to be any major issues with my 670, I've noticed subtle shadow flickering with my 670. Shadows like to 'jump' when the POV is moving.

It's preferable to white texture flashing and artifacts.

As an extra piece of information, I installed my old XFX 6950 1GB into my new rig. It runs hot, loud, and I get quite a bit fewer FPS. However it has no white flashes, and no artifacts! Runs smoothly too, whereas the 7970 seemed jerky in places. All this running the same 13.1 drivers that gave my 7970 fits of flashing textures. (I did I clean re-install of the 13.1 drivers after swapping cards)

So either I had a bad card, or the entire 7000 series is junk. Either way, I'm switching to NVidia. When the time comes to upgrade my video card I'll take a look at AMD again and see if their 8000 or 9000 series cards are as good as their 6000 series line was.

 

[3DVagabond]

It's preferable to white texture flashing and artifacts.

As an extra piece of information, I installed my old XFX 6950 1GB into my new rig. It runs hot, loud, and I get quite a bit fewer FPS. However it has no white flashes, and no artifacts! Runs smoothly too, whereas the 7970 seemed jerky in places. All this running the same 13.1 drivers that gave my 7970 fits of flashing textures. (I did I clean re-install of the 13.1 drivers after swapping cards)

So either I had a bad card, or the entire 7000 series is junk. Either way, I'm switching to NVidia. When the time comes to upgrade my video card I'll take a look at AMD again and see if their 8000 or 9000 series cards are as good as their 6000 series line was.

There are other options besides the 2 you've listed. Driver fault, faulty driver install, other software conflict, other hardware fault/conflict, just off the top of my head.