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gaming promo.com Welcome to our Crisis 3 video
card performance review so this is uh
we're breaking our rule a little bit guys so more on that in a moment but
this is our evaluation of at a about 100 bucks about 200 bucks about 300 bucks
and higher than that four different price points what is the best video card
to buy we're going head-to-head Green Team versus red team at a bunch of
different price segments so you guys will know exactly what you should buy to
get the most out of Crisis 3 now why did
we break our rule the reason is because Crisis 3 is such a new game um no one
has a a wickle release driver yet that's
fully optimized for it so when we first did our tests with Titan where we
compared uh crisis on the variety of platforms Crisis 3 rather on a variety
of platforms we saw that AMD had a huge Advantage because their driver was
optimized for it now a our NVIDIA just
released their optimized driver so now we have an opportunity to go optimized
versus optimized head-to-head at those different price points so our test bench
is a p9x 79 Deluxe with 16 gigs of mushkin Blackline memory a 3960x at 4
GHz so that's a six core Intel processor we're using an ntech 1000 wat power
supply a 128 gig SSD and for our
software we are using afterburner 2.3.1
to run all of our overclocked settings we overclock every card to within a
reasonable level so we don't go absolute Max because this should be something
that you can obtain just by checking out our spreadsheet which is going to be
linked under the video and dialing those settings into your GPU they're pretty
much safe settings and then we're using beta 34.14 for NVIDIA and beta 13.2 for
AMD now here are our price ranges so head-to-head for round one is the GTX
650 so that's this guy right here actually that's not this guy right here
yes it is the 650 power Edition from MSI versus a Radeon 7770 so these are 115
bucks and 120 bucks respectively we also went for GTX 660 which is this guy right
here versus Radeon 7870 which is one of
these two I believe it's this guy right nope I'm wrong this guy right here uh
yes 7870 and then next was so those are 229
and 239 respectively next was 660ti
which is this guy right here versus 7950 right here so these are 289 and 299 and
finally we have GTX 670 versus Radon
7970 so the 670 is the one that's actually still on the bench over there
and there's a very good reason for that because we got some very cryptic numbers
from our GTX 670 which we think we can explain because we're using beta drivers
which I really don't believe in using but we had to do it for this game
because it's so fresh uh so let's here we go so at our lowest price tier you
can see this is pretty much a dead tie remember guys the GTX 650 is actually
about 8% cheaper than the 7770 so if you
take these two cards overclock them to the max well Max is and run Crisis 3
you're going to get EX pretty much exactly the same experience was it
playable at very high spec with antialising off not really you're
probably going to have to turn this game down a little bit more but for the sake of consistency between the different
cards that we ran we had to pick one setting and kind of go with it next up
we've got the $200 weight class of cards and again we see pretty much a dead tie
uh the GTX 660 does come ahead and remember it was also a little bit
cheaper than the 7870 but this is sort
of within the margin of error when we rerun our Crisis 3 Benchmark which you
guys can check out it's also on the channel our benchmarking procedure if
you when we rerun that over and over and over again we get a variance of about a
couple percent so you can kind of take all the results and factor that into it
as well so moving on to our $300 weight
class we've got another tie because remember again the 660 Ti was a little
bit cheaper than the 7950 now pricing for the cards we use the latest pricing
on NC we take the second lowest card so
the lowest one we kind of throw it away and go that might be some kind of crazy
deal that people can't get but the second lowest one should be pretty much
obtainable now this is where things get weird when we get into our $400 weight
class the 7970 scaled beyond the 7950
which makes sense because it's a slightly more powerful card but our GTX
670 actually didn't perform any better than our 660 Ti so the 670 is the same
architecture as the 660ti it has um more
functional units it's clocked higher even when we're overclocking both of
them where it's like it's clocked higher so we can only chalk this up to a bit of
driver weirdness in the beta that probably won't be observed once that
beta driver makes its way to being a finished driver so to me it looks like
this is going to end up being another dead tie once that optimization is done
but it just shows you sort of amds a little bit further ahead from NVIDIA but
we knew this because their Crisis 3 optimized driver was released before
NVIDIA when it comes to Crisis 3 finally here are all of the cards so
you can clearly see other than the 670
falling below where it's supposed to be up next to the 7970 that each of those
price segments clearly defines itself with a performance Improvement so you
can also track on this spreadsheet this is really cool where the best bang for
the buck lies because the GTX 660 and
the 7870 literally offer you d double
the performance of the lower tier cards whereas when you move up to 660 Ti and
7950 you might get another 25% but
you're actually spending 50% more than the previous uh than the previous tier
of cards so when it comes to Crisis 3 if you want
playable performance okay so average around 40
FPS you want to spend a couple hundred bucks you're going to get the best bang
for your buck so we can safely say that either the GTX 660 which is Da Da Da Da
Da this guy right here or the radon hd7870 either of these would be
fantastic options for a Crisis 3 gaming rig because they're able to maintain
average frame rates of around 40 FPS which is very playable this is at very
high system specs running at 1080p anti-aliasing is off so if you want to
start turning up those details those higher end cards will start to pull away
more but for the basic gamer HD gaming
these cards are a great value so either of them is a fantastic choice uh so I
guess my usual recommendations also stand if you're going to be gaming in
surround I do recommend ifinity over NVIDIA surround it is a little bit
easier to configure and the compatibility is very strong and if
you're going to be playing in stereoscopic 3D I definitely recommend
GeForce over Radeon because the NVIDIA 3D Vision ecosystem is much more stable
and much easier to use than the equivalent from the AMD side so that
pretty much wraps it up thank you guys for checking out our Crisis
3 video card Roundup I hope this is made
your life a little bit easier if you're trying to buy a video card for Crisis 3
and as always don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips from unboxings reviews
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