Welcome to our Far Cry 3 Roundup Graphics party so we're going to do this
in a slightly different way than we've done before and that is to say instead
of taking a big swack of video cards and testing them we're going to take awack
of price points so about a 100 bucks about 200 bucks and about 300 bucks and
tell you head-to-head GeForce versus Radeon which one comes out ahead at that
price point now besides our standard graphics card test bench which has our
ocz ZX12 50 watt it's got a XX 41 128
gig 16 gigs of Kingston hyperx RAM and Aus P9 x79 Deluxe motherboard and
obviously the graphics card varies a little bit we've got a 30 is this a 3930k on here now whatever it is it's
overclocked to 4.4 GHz meaning that we've removed the CPU as a bottleneck as
much as possible and aside from all that
we are overclocking every graphics card to within what is according to lay
forums um a reasonable level that most people can expect to attain so because
we've done graphics card overclocking guides we expect you to overclock your
graphics card because if you're not you're basically throwing away free
performance so we no longer test graphics cards at stock which means
whatever models we have here actually doesn't really matter the important
thing is the GPU and then the fact that it's overclocked to within what you can
probably attain with the same GPU so let's start with our lightweight
Showdown so at the approximately $100
price point we had the radon hd7770 and
GeForce GTX 650 unfortunately at about
100 bucks we couldn't afford the 650 TI so it was $123 for the radon card and
$114 for the GeForce card we take all of our pricing from NC um at the time of
filming our video we are using the latest drivers on all of these cards so
that's Catalyst 13.1 and whatever the latest GeForce one is um so we take the
second lowest card on NC so that it's a price that you can reasonably find and
we leave off mailin rebates because not all territories have them so in this
case it was a bit of a one-sided battle
with the 7770 beating the GTX 650 by
about 40% if the 650 TI had been able to
squeeze into this price bracket we'd probably see it come in quite a bit
closer if not approximately the same as a 7770 but we weren't able to make that
happen with the constraints that we set for ourselves so we're going to move on
to our next price point in this one we've got the GeForce GTX 660 this is
the non-ti version so it is significantly slower but it is based on
the same core as the 660ti up against it
we have the radon hd7870 so this is their Topline whatever
this core is not Tahiti the other one can't remember don't worry about it
7870 there we go oh yeah we're using the ultra preset in Far Cry 3 we're using
our custom Benchmark which of course you can check out in a video that we made on
our channel for how to to run our exact Benchmark no anti-aliasing 1080P and our
pricing was pretty close now it should be noted that the radon card does cost
about 8% more than the GeForce card in
this case but it performs about 25 to
30% better uh in this case so I would
personally spend an extra 8% to get
another 20% performance so to speak so
uh in this case yeah it was a bit of a radon uh radon sort of
win as well next up we've got the about $300 price point so 660 Ti is going to
be up against the 7950 both of these cards are very well positioned they're
the ones that I generally recommend on either side of the fence you want a
GeForce card I usually say okay get a 660 Ti you want a radon card generally I
say get one of these bad boys and the reason for that is they're both great
overclockers and great performers at stock remember these are all overclock
numbers we're showing you so in this case our Radeon card was around 300
bucks our GeForce card was around 290 bucks so they're very close in terms of
pricing however once they're both overclocked um the radon card does come
out ahead by about 12 13 14 whatever 10
to 15% so there it is a win for the Radeon Camp I mean all of this should
probably stand to reason given that Far Cry 3 was a never settle bundled game
with radon graphics cards so it looks like um it looks like Ubisoft and AMD
were working together on making sure that it's optimized for AMD platforms
hopefully we'll see some kind of a driver update from NVIDIA that will
address the sort of performance disadvantage however it should be noted
this is just one game what I'd love for you guys to do now though is uh tell me
are you interested in seeing these videos done on a game by game basis
moving forward in the future or is this kind of a format for format not that
useful for you let us know and also guys if you check the description under the
video we are going to post these graphs so you can review them at your leisure
without actually skimming through the video and finding them so there you go
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