I have been reading myself green and yellow trying to figure out what is best. I currently have 2x 5970 in CF, but i am considering if this is adequate for what i intend. Once battlefield 3 comes out i intend to play it on 3x1 27" monitors in eyefinity. The thing is, i have just bought the 2nd 5970 for crossfire, and i can still return it for a full refund. I have seen some tests were 6970 CF is just abit better then a single 5970, and 5970 CF beats 6970 CF. However, this is on a single monitor setup. I am abit concerned, cause there are alot of talk about the 5970 not having enough VRAM (only 1 GB per GPU), but i have not seen a benchmark yet where this seems to come into effect. My choices are as follows. 1) Keep both 5970s and run em in crossfire 2) Sell them and buy 2x 6970 (will cost be about 370 $) 3) Sell them and buy a single 6990 (will cost me about 339$) I hope someone can advice me on what will best prepare me for running BF3 in eyefinity. Some links to benchmarks proving that 5970 CF is not good if that is so will also be nice
I had 5970 with 5870 then went to single 6990 and found it was slower and it wasnt until i added a 6970 to the 6990 i got a performance upgrade and even then the 6990 was loud and hot so i had to fit a water block to sort it. I cant imagine theres any game out that would tax xfired 5970s but if you want to upgrade id say wait for the new 7 series.
Well even 6950 CF completely annihilates a single 5970.....about 25fps faster on average. Still not great scaling though. Maybe more cost effective to go with a single 6990..?
I'd take option 2 (out of the ones listed) newer tech, more vram, better tesselation with radeon 69xx, probably less scaling issues with 2 cards vs 4, easier to sell once you decide to move on.
^Yeah...prob what I'd do also btw I found out my card is not reference - it's a Dirt3 edition with custom PCB so no shader unlock for me Does have an awesome heatpipe cooler though. Never gets above 54c...
Keep in mind i have 2x 5970 in CF. I can see that 6950 CF beats a single 5970, but i have 5970 quadfire (2x 5970) and they are not on that list, so thats what makes it hard to compare. Would love to see such a benchmark with 5970 in CF.... Just as an example, on metro 2033 i doubled my FPS by going to 5970 CF from a single 5970.
Today with gpuz version 0.5.5 version you can see memory usage. I have your senario 2 at least 4 months and i think its better to move to 2gb ram cards. Crysis 2 1920x1080 all settings maxed out. 3503MB / 2 cause crossfire.
I was replying to this. Of course 5970 CFX will blow away CF 6950/70 cuz you're putting 4 Gpu's up against 2. Not much of a competition...
crossfire does scale very well even more than 100% in some cases, but really do you need 4 cards for eyefinity when two cards will be more than sufficient for the near futre and ofcourse have more vram for eyefinity. Oh well, atleast it's cool and should overclock well
Yeah, but that was the entire point of the question, I allready have 2x 5970 in CF, and i was wondering if i should upgrade to 2x6970. If you disregard cost, would this actually be an upgrade? I think when it comes to GPU power 2x5970 will beat 2x6970. Had this been the only concern i would not have posted this thread, however, I am concerned that the 1 GB per GPU (4 total) will or may be a limiting factor in future games, resulting in 6970 CF beating 5970 CF.
How do you get gpuz to show mem usage ingame? Im just guessing here, but i assume the game will use close to what is available. 2x 6970 will have a total of 4 gig available, 2 gig per card. What Gpuz shows is the total usage, which would be close to 4 in your case. I am fairly certain, that if i did that aswell with my 2x5970, it would show a total usage of close to 4 gig. The question is, whether 1gig per gpu will be a limiting factor
Eventually it will be, games are using more and more video memory all the time, especially at high res. My last card was an 8800GTX 768MB, at the time of release 768MB was an enormous amount - more than anyone needed, but by today's standards it's not really enough, particularly if you like to max out all settings. Heck even Fallout NV uses over 900MB on my card. If like me, you plan to keep your upgrade for the next 3 years then you can't go wrong with the extra memory. It's better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it... I use 2 high res 21' CRT's so available vram was an important factor (as well as price) in my decision to buy a 6950 instead of the GTX 570... Btw in CF/SLI the vram amount isn't doubled, so 2x 6970 CF will still have 2GB available, not 4GB...
