Crysis 3 Gaming Graphics Card Benchmark Showdown Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,470 words · ~7 min read
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this video is brought to you by our trusted partner Intel for a limited time
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only with the purchase of any unlocked Core I5 or core i7 Intel CPU get a free
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Intel beanie with a chance to win an Intel snowboard valid for Canadian and
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US customers only some restrictions apply for complete details visit Intel
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gaming promo.com Welcome to our Crisis 3 video
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card performance review so this is uh
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we're breaking our rule a little bit guys so more on that in a moment but
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this is our evaluation of at a about 100 bucks about 200 bucks about 300 bucks
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and higher than that four different price points what is the best video card
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to buy we're going head-to-head Green Team versus red team at a bunch of
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different price segments so you guys will know exactly what you should buy to
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get the most out of Crisis 3 now why did
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we break our rule the reason is because Crisis 3 is such a new game um no one
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has a a wickle release driver yet that's
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fully optimized for it so when we first did our tests with Titan where we
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compared uh crisis on the variety of platforms Crisis 3 rather on a variety
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of platforms we saw that AMD had a huge Advantage because their driver was
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optimized for it now a our NVIDIA just
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released their optimized driver so now we have an opportunity to go optimized
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versus optimized head-to-head at those different price points so our test bench
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is a p9x 79 Deluxe with 16 gigs of mushkin Blackline memory a 3960x at 4
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GHz so that's a six core Intel processor we're using an ntech 1000 wat power
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supply a 128 gig SSD and for our
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software we are using afterburner 2.3.1
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to run all of our overclocked settings we overclock every card to within a
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reasonable level so we don't go absolute Max because this should be something
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that you can obtain just by checking out our spreadsheet which is going to be
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linked under the video and dialing those settings into your GPU they're pretty
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much safe settings and then we're using beta 34.14 for NVIDIA and beta 13.2 for
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AMD now here are our price ranges so head-to-head for round one is the GTX
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650 so that's this guy right here actually that's not this guy right here
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yes it is the 650 power Edition from MSI versus a Radeon 7770 so these are 115
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bucks and 120 bucks respectively we also went for GTX 660 which is this guy right
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here versus Radeon 7870 which is one of
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these two I believe it's this guy right nope I'm wrong this guy right here uh
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yes 7870 and then next was so those are 229
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and 239 respectively next was 660ti
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which is this guy right here versus 7950 right here so these are 289 and 299 and
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finally we have GTX 670 versus Radon
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7970 so the 670 is the one that's actually still on the bench over there
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and there's a very good reason for that because we got some very cryptic numbers
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from our GTX 670 which we think we can explain because we're using beta drivers
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which I really don't believe in using but we had to do it for this game
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because it's so fresh uh so let's here we go so at our lowest price tier you
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can see this is pretty much a dead tie remember guys the GTX 650 is actually
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about 8% cheaper than the 7770 so if you
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take these two cards overclock them to the max well Max is and run Crisis 3
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you're going to get EX pretty much exactly the same experience was it
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playable at very high spec with antialising off not really you're
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probably going to have to turn this game down a little bit more but for the sake of consistency between the different
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cards that we ran we had to pick one setting and kind of go with it next up
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we've got the $200 weight class of cards and again we see pretty much a dead tie
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uh the GTX 660 does come ahead and remember it was also a little bit
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cheaper than the 7870 but this is sort
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of within the margin of error when we rerun our Crisis 3 Benchmark which you
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guys can check out it's also on the channel our benchmarking procedure if
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you when we rerun that over and over and over again we get a variance of about a
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couple percent so you can kind of take all the results and factor that into it
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as well so moving on to our $300 weight
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class we've got another tie because remember again the 660 Ti was a little
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bit cheaper than the 7950 now pricing for the cards we use the latest pricing
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on NC we take the second lowest card so
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the lowest one we kind of throw it away and go that might be some kind of crazy
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deal that people can't get but the second lowest one should be pretty much
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obtainable now this is where things get weird when we get into our $400 weight
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class the 7970 scaled beyond the 7950
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which makes sense because it's a slightly more powerful card but our GTX
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670 actually didn't perform any better than our 660 Ti so the 670 is the same
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architecture as the 660ti it has um more
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functional units it's clocked higher even when we're overclocking both of
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them where it's like it's clocked higher so we can only chalk this up to a bit of
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driver weirdness in the beta that probably won't be observed once that
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beta driver makes its way to being a finished driver so to me it looks like
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this is going to end up being another dead tie once that optimization is done
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but it just shows you sort of amds a little bit further ahead from NVIDIA but
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we knew this because their Crisis 3 optimized driver was released before
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NVIDIA when it comes to Crisis 3 finally here are all of the cards so
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you can clearly see other than the 670
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falling below where it's supposed to be up next to the 7970 that each of those
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price segments clearly defines itself with a performance Improvement so you
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can also track on this spreadsheet this is really cool where the best bang for
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the buck lies because the GTX 660 and
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the 7870 literally offer you d double
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the performance of the lower tier cards whereas when you move up to 660 Ti and
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7950 you might get another 25% but
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you're actually spending 50% more than the previous uh than the previous tier
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of cards so when it comes to Crisis 3 if you want
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playable performance okay so average around 40
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FPS you want to spend a couple hundred bucks you're going to get the best bang
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for your buck so we can safely say that either the GTX 660 which is Da Da Da Da
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Da this guy right here or the radon hd7870 either of these would be
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fantastic options for a Crisis 3 gaming rig because they're able to maintain
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average frame rates of around 40 FPS which is very playable this is at very
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high system specs running at 1080p anti-aliasing is off so if you want to
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start turning up those details those higher end cards will start to pull away
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more but for the basic gamer HD gaming
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these cards are a great value so either of them is a fantastic choice uh so I
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guess my usual recommendations also stand if you're going to be gaming in
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surround I do recommend ifinity over NVIDIA surround it is a little bit
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easier to configure and the compatibility is very strong and if
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you're going to be playing in stereoscopic 3D I definitely recommend
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GeForce over Radeon because the NVIDIA 3D Vision ecosystem is much more stable
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and much easier to use than the equivalent from the AMD side so that
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pretty much wraps it up thank you guys for checking out our Crisis
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3 video card Roundup I hope this is made
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your life a little bit easier if you're trying to buy a video card for Crisis 3
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and as always don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips from unboxings reviews
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and other computer videos