Should I buy GTX 680 2GB or HD 7970 3GB?

the AMD issues no longer exist to the person that commented above me. drivers are now very well done and aslong as you buy from a good brand, like with anything, you should have no issues. i recommend buying the MSI cards.

the 7970 hd performs a tiny bit better than the 680 however the 680 supports TXAA so its kind of down to your preference do you think really good AA is needed, then go for the 680.

thanks to some nvidia fanboy i feel the need to edit my answer. the guy claiming intel always beats amd and nvidia always beats amd is wrong. im currently using the gtx 560 as it was better than the 6000 series equivilant however my next upgrade will be the 7870 hd.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/618?vs=555

that is the benches of the 2 graphics cards (assuming you are going ghzedition of the 7970 hd as its the only one that makes sense and still cheaper than the 680).

anyone who thinks passmark is a good measure of hardware cant be trusted to give an honest opinion. it has no relation to real world performance.

cuda cores are nvidias version of amd stream processors that amd had about 2 years before nvidia.

physx means nothing anymore nvidia was the first to have it and have stuck with the name, amd have the same stuff but just dont bragg about it because quite frankly have physics in a game is standard nowadays.

the memory between the 2 wont make any difference really 2 GBs is becoming the standard.

to the guy below me. APUs arent an attempt against nvidia they are a design for tablets and laptops. they have been released to the desktop market as an affordable way to build a £200 gaming pc that can run modern games at very low graphics.

i cant beleive how the guy below me is slating AMD. they were the ones chosen by micrsoft and sony to have their graphics chips in the ps4 and new xbox because they offered the best price and best performance.

the guy below me IS an nvidia fanboy my original post offered the most unbiased opinion possible. the 7970 ghz outperforms the 680 is most cases but the 680 comes with txaa that is the only difference and the thing worth youtubing and considering.

edit:

my god that card looks keen. be aware its increadibly long though so make sure it will fit inn your case

Lots of people fail to realize that when it comes to gaming hardware, there is no actual competition...

CPU: Intel >> AMD

GPU: nVidia >> AMD Radeon

And those are proven fact, not fan boy opinions.

GTX680 is much better than Radeon HD 7970, see here:

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.ht...

And the amount of GDDR graphics memory is not as important as the card model and other specs.

Also, almost all games would only use under 1GB GDDR, as you mentioned in your post.

Having more GDDR only counts when you connect multiple monitors.

The 2GB GTX680 will outperform the 3GB HD 7970 anytime.

nVidia cards have lots of proprietary features that AMD Radeon do not have:

* nVidia CUDA cores (Compute Unified Device Architecture)

* nVidia GPUDirect and nVidia PureVideo HD 1080p, an nVidia hardware feature designed to offload video decoding processes and video post-processing from a computer's CPU (processor) hardware to the nVidia's GPU hardware, used in all series GeForce 6 and later and GeForce M for laptops

* nVidia PhysX (a proprietary realtime physics engine middleware SDK)

All those features lack on the ATI/AMD cards...

What all that translates into, is more stress put on your CPU to compensate when using an ATI/AMD card, and degraded overall performance in games and other graphics intense applications.

That's why AMD uses cheap tricks such as putting the GPU on one board (what they call dual graphics) or creating the AMD APU series processors (an all-in-one CPU+GPU) in a desperate (and failed) attempt to compete against an nVidia GPU from the same price range.

They both are very similar but very different at the same time.

AMD has a slightly better clock speed, But the Nvidia has a better Life Span, Cooling, Trust, and Price.

Nvidia will not let you down, I don't recommend AMD to any clients because over the years i have had clients come to me with run down AMD GPU's and some cases they have literally melted.

But on the other hand i have never had an issue with Nvidia. I don't mean to brag or sound like a Fan Boy but its true.

If you need any more help, Please talk to our Live Support Agents at https://ptnetworx.com.au/

Good luck otherwise

First off, if you will be having multi-monitor then without doubt go for the 7970.

However, the gtx 680 on single monitor generally gets more frames and better benchmark scores.

One more thing you will want to note is, by the sounds of your cpu you might want to upgrade to a 3570k and then downgrade the gpu to a 660ti or a 7870.