Far Cry 3 Gaming Graphics Card Benchmark Showdown Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,003 words · ~5 min read
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Welcome to our Far Cry 3 Roundup Graphics party so we're going to do this
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in a slightly different way than we've done before and that is to say instead
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of taking a big swack of video cards and testing them we're going to take awack
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of price points so about a 100 bucks about 200 bucks and about 300 bucks and
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tell you head-to-head GeForce versus Radeon which one comes out ahead at that
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price point now besides our standard graphics card test bench which has our
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ocz ZX12 50 watt it's got a XX 41 128
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gig 16 gigs of Kingston hyperx RAM and Aus P9 x79 Deluxe motherboard and
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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
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overclocked to 4.4 GHz meaning that we've removed the CPU as a bottleneck as
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much as possible and aside from all that
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we are overclocking every graphics card to within what is according to lay
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forums um a reasonable level that most people can expect to attain so because
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we've done graphics card overclocking guides we expect you to overclock your
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graphics card because if you're not you're basically throwing away free
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performance so we no longer test graphics cards at stock which means
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whatever models we have here actually doesn't really matter the important
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thing is the GPU and then the fact that it's overclocked to within what you can
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probably attain with the same GPU so let's start with our lightweight
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Showdown so at the approximately $100
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price point we had the radon hd7770 and
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GeForce GTX 650 unfortunately at about
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100 bucks we couldn't afford the 650 TI so it was $123 for the radon card and
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$114 for the GeForce card we take all of our pricing from NC um at the time of
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filming our video we are using the latest drivers on all of these cards so
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that's Catalyst 13.1 and whatever the latest GeForce one is um so we take the
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second lowest card on NC so that it's a price that you can reasonably find and
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we leave off mailin rebates because not all territories have them so in this
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case it was a bit of a one-sided battle
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with the 7770 beating the GTX 650 by
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about 40% if the 650 TI had been able to
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squeeze into this price bracket we'd probably see it come in quite a bit
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closer if not approximately the same as a 7770 but we weren't able to make that
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happen with the constraints that we set for ourselves so we're going to move on
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to our next price point in this one we've got the GeForce GTX 660 this is
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the non-ti version so it is significantly slower but it is based on
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the same core as the 660ti up against it
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we have the radon hd7870 so this is their Topline whatever
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this core is not Tahiti the other one can't remember don't worry about it
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7870 there we go oh yeah we're using the ultra preset in Far Cry 3 we're using
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our custom Benchmark which of course you can check out in a video that we made on
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our channel for how to to run our exact Benchmark no anti-aliasing 1080P and our
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pricing was pretty close now it should be noted that the radon card does cost
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about 8% more than the GeForce card in
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this case but it performs about 25 to
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30% better uh in this case so I would
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personally spend an extra 8% to get
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another 20% performance so to speak so
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uh in this case yeah it was a bit of a radon uh radon sort of
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win as well next up we've got the about $300 price point so 660 Ti is going to
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be up against the 7950 both of these cards are very well positioned they're
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the ones that I generally recommend on either side of the fence you want a
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GeForce card I usually say okay get a 660 Ti you want a radon card generally I
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say get one of these bad boys and the reason for that is they're both great
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overclockers and great performers at stock remember these are all overclock
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numbers we're showing you so in this case our Radeon card was around 300
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bucks our GeForce card was around 290 bucks so they're very close in terms of
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pricing however once they're both overclocked um the radon card does come
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out ahead by about 12 13 14 whatever 10
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to 15% so there it is a win for the Radeon Camp I mean all of this should
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probably stand to reason given that Far Cry 3 was a never settle bundled game
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with radon graphics cards so it looks like um it looks like Ubisoft and AMD
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were working together on making sure that it's optimized for AMD platforms
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hopefully we'll see some kind of a driver update from NVIDIA that will
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address the sort of performance disadvantage however it should be noted
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this is just one game what I'd love for you guys to do now though is uh tell me
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are you interested in seeing these videos done on a game by game basis
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moving forward in the future or is this kind of a format for format not that
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useful for you let us know and also guys if you check the description under the
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video we are going to post these graphs so you can review them at your leisure
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without actually skimming through the video and finding them so there you go
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don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips for more unboxings reviews and
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