As long as you keep the 480 cool. Either h20 or custom cooler it will be faster. My 480 with. The stock fan not so much
^ faster than a hd 6970 once you watercool the gtx 480 and keep the 6970 on stock cooler maybe, but the HD 6970 does 1GHz+ on better cooling/h20. The gtx 480 is about the same as my old gtx 295 and my current card is better in every way. The GTX 480 is a great card, but to say it's better than a 6970 is a little far fetched, everything I have seen shows the 6970 perform better, run cooler, make less nose, use less power, have more vram, and of course it can be overclocked too...:infinity: Anyway, staying on topic, I would still think the HD 7850 would be a better choice than all the cards mentioned at the current price point, and also watch out for a comparative kepler based card.
I'm not about to reinstall BF3 just to make a point so you'll have to take my word for it. Ask anyone else who has the same card... Fwiw my 6950 is overclocked to 6970, and the CPU/NB is running at 2600Mhz. It all helps. Anyway it's not like 55fps is uber.....
The only difference between a 580 and 480 is 32 shaders. The only thing I am stating is its faster. Not the other stuff as a 480 is 1st Gen Fermi and will use more power etc and all that other stuff. As long as you can keep it cool and overclock it. It will beat a 6970.
you do know that fermi scales much better than 6970 when oced right? my old 470 at 900mhzoc is faster than a stock 580 by a little bit. an oced 480 will be a killer, but yeah wattage sucks. but yes it is faster overall
You could just as well ultra cool a 6970 and then we're back to where we started, and that's without considering every other parameter. Otherwise I agree, if you keep a hd 6970 at stock clocks on stock cooler, don't care about heat, noise, power, vram and overclock the gtx 480 on a custom cooler/H20 then it'll be faster. So unless the gtx 480 is a lot cheaper who would buy it over a 6970.
I remember a comparison on the 580 and 480 and at the same clocks the difference was 6%. A 580 is more than 6% faster than a 6970. I think you can clock the 6970 too. The 580/480 has more oc headroom too and Fermi scales better with oc. Just saying.
Not sure if the OP is still wanting opinions, but I would say between those 2 cards definately the 6950 2GB is the better choice. Not only is it better now, but is also more future proof, because of the 2GB frame buffer. So many Nvidia fans will tell you the 560Ti is better, but it just simply is not. Also most of the problems/complaints about AMD drivers are related to Crossfire, so in other words if you just have one 6950 2GB, your experiences with it should be quite satisfying, very powerful card for mainstream PC gaming.
It's not really the texture packs using up the vram; it's more the tweaks I've made in the .cfg files ( gridstoload, increased draw distrance and a host of others) plus a bunch of other installed mods. FNV also uses approx 3.5GB worth of system Ram as well (mind boggling I know :gape. I don't know dude I can't really answer that...it's hard to say without knowing the conditions of each benchmark test....*shrugs*. Edit- Slightly OT but just for laughs thought I'd share this..check out the FalloutNV.exe process...
Why increase the girds to load? There isn't any real graphical benefit to increasing it. All you'd be doing is wasting system resources that could be spent further improving the game's graphics o.o Fair enough. Though between two sets of benchmarks, both of which are using all ultra settings, one at 1920x1080 & 4xAA, the other at 2560x1440 and no listed AA ( I would assume the level of AA is the default ultra preset, which I believe is 4xAA + high MLAA ), it should be easy to get a pretty good idea of what to expect between the two cards in question in regards to BF3.
so after underclocking the 580 by 10% it was 6% faster than a 480? From what I can make of those numbers a gtx 580 at stock clocks is 15-20% faster than a gtx 480. At the same time the gtx 580 obviously uses a completely differerent architecture from a HD 6970 and can be 10-15% faster in most games, while in some games it can be slower (serious sam 3, alien vs predator etc.) Based on that you'd have to overclock a gtx 480 by 5-10% for it to match a HD 6970. So assuming a gtx 480 overclocks 20% to around 850Mhz you only need to overclock the hd 6970 10% to be be pretty much even and the 6970 overclocks to 1Ghz quite regularly with better cooling so don't see how the 480 has any sort of measurable advantage while all it's down sides are apparent. So would I want a hotter, louder, more power hungry card in my system for little to no advantage in any games but lots of drawbacks (slower in some games, less vram)? hell no So, no I don't think a 480 is a better buy than 6950/6970 unless it's much cheaper, which it currently is and why I suggested it earlier in this thread.
I bought mine with the shaman for £160. It reaches 68C max, inaudible, idles around mid 30s. Overclocks like crazy. I was just saying that if the 480s are cheap note, they're worth it if you can squeeze a nice cooler. So yeah, for 210 usd outta it's a great buy.
because you can funnily enough get a 480 with a custom cooler. but personally wouldnt ever have a got a 480 myself (stock anyways). otherwise nothing wrong with the 480's perf v a 6970...
I completely agree, in fact I even linked to an evga gtx 480 earlier in this thread because I felt it was an excellent buy at £185 and that was with just a stock cooler. Funnily enough, the thought did cross my mind
dunno about that i'd prefer a 560 ti with 2gb and a decent aftermarket cooler over a stock 480 for the same price.. no way i'd want a hair dryer in my pc...
