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The video card you should buy today:
There are really only two good values on desktop video cards today:
Radeon HD 7770 for $130
GeForce GTX 670 for $400
Yes, that's a huge chasm between the two, but nothing between them is a good value relative to those two cards. I do expect that to change soon, however. AMD has tons of Pitcairn chips to sell, and surely they want to sell something higher end than $130 cards. A Radeon HD 7870 for $300 or a Radeon HD 7850 for $200 would be a good value, and should still be profitable for AMD. I do expect to see the 7870 approach $300 soon.
Whether the 7850 falls so far depends largely on yields. If 2/3 of Pitcairn chips can meet the 7870 specs, then the 7850 doesn't have to be that good of a value for AMD to sell off all that they need. It is likely that this is essentially the reason why the 7750 isn't a good value: too many Cape Verde dies can meet 7770 specs, so AMD would rather sell a 7770 for more. If far more dies go in the 7850 bin than the 7870, then I'd expect to see the 7850 going for $200 sooner rather than later.
Nvidia will presumably shake things up with new cards, too. But GK106 is still nowhere to be found, and GK107 is very much taking its time in coming to desktops. GK107 will probably be quite a bit slower than a Radeon HD 7770, but could still be a compelling value at $100 if Nvidia prices it appropriately.
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Edit: I meant to put this in the hardware section, not The Pub. Sorry. My mistake.
Comments
Oddly enough, I was just looking for a post on this exact matter as my 9800GT has finally died.
There's nothing wrong with this £100 HD 7700 I presume?
http://www.pixmania.co.uk/uk/uk/11742165/art/sapphire-technology/radeon-hd-7770-edition-oc.html
That would work.
But perhaps I should have said, with an exception for if you find something else at a greatly discounted price. Like this:
http://www.pixmania.co.uk/uk/uk/11823181/art/vtx3d/radeon-hd-6850-x-edition.html
I've never heard of VTX3D, though.
I've ordered myself one of the latter. Thanks again for your help mate
They popped up a couple of months ago on OcUK as well, they seem to be doing a lot of discounts with the retailers atm and haven't been seeing many complaints.
MSI 6850's for the same price, one with dual fan the other an OC version http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?groupid=701&catid=56&subid=1866&sortby=priceAsc
What power supply do you have? A Radeon HD 6850 will tend to use more power than a GeForce 9800 GT.
That sure looks like a clearance price tag to me. It's not just the cheapest 6800 series card on the site. The MSI cards are less than 2/3 of the price of any of the others. Nice deal if you grab one before they're gone, though.
A Corsair GS800.
http://www.corsair.com/gs800w.html
The 560 TI sits haflway between those two cards in price and preformance so might be a good middle ground choice.
On a budget: f you can track one down on-line (and they are still pretty easy to find), the Radeon 6850 HD is the best value you can get.... 7770 passmark score a respectible 2012 (you can run pretty much any game on mid-settings at 1080p some on max). However for about $150 USD you can order a Radeon 6850 HD and get 1/3 more horsepower (2748 passmark). 6850 HD can run Crysis 2 at 60fps max settings at 1080p without braking a sweat (you can go to higher resolutions than that). It will run Guild Wars 2, Rift, whatever max settings no problem.
The difference in the 7770 and the 6850 are both retailing for about $150. Both cards fully support Directx 11. The 6850 scored 700 points (30%) faster on passmark. On a budget I would try to track down a 6850.
You're set, then. I just didn't want you to plug a perfectly good video card into a piece of junk power supply that will promptly fry it. But you're not at risk of that.
I imagine they're clearing stock for all of that series cards. They have more of those in stock than any of the others so it's probably a combination of getting rid and making sure they have some at prices competitive to other retailers. Plus some of the others are specialist ones that they can afford to charge more for.
At a £100 budget i'd probably put by a little more for a 6870 tbh but i guess you gotta cut it off somewhere.
Another good choice would be a 7850, especially if people like to overclock, since it can easily reach GTX580 speeds with a much smaller power consumption.
@OP:
If one can find a 6870 for similar price/slightly more expensive than a 7770 I would go with that instead.
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
Actually, no. A Radeon HD 7770 offers perhaps 70% of the performance of a GeForce GTX 560 Ti for 60% of the price tag. Meanwhile, a GeForce GTX 670 offers perahps double the performance of a GeForce GTX 560 Ti for significantly less than double the price tag.
If you can find a GeForce GTX 560 Ti for $190, then maybe you've got a case, at least if you can't find any Radeon HD 7770 or GeForce GTX 670 on sale that day. But good luck with that. Now, if you really want to spend $200-$300 on a video card, then maybe you look at the GTX 560 Ti. But you'll get less performance per dollar than if you spend either more or less than that.
It's roughly the same story if you're looking at a Radeon HD 6870, GeForce GTX 560, Radeon HD 7850, GeForce GTX 570, Radeon HD 7870, or GeForce GTX 580. Most of those cards are discontinued, but the 7800 series cards aren't, which is why I expect those ones to fall in price.
From quick glance on-line, all 6850's I'm finding are recommending a minimum 450w psu. That isn't bad at all. 9800 GT looks like you can get by with 400w psu. If you've taken the time to upgrade PSU or built your own system I doubt you would have a 400w psu, prob 500 or 600w so not a big difference.
What are you going to do with the card? If all you're going to do is sit and run synthetic benchmarks all day, that's strange. If you're planning on playing real games with the card, then why do you care how well it performs in synthetic benchmarks? A 6850 was maybe a little faster than a 7770 at launch, but I'd expect that gap to roughly vanish with driver updates, once AMD figures out how to squeeze the best performance out of their new GCN architecture. The 7770 might plausibly have already caught up.
And then the 7770 also uses a lot less power than the 6850, and has a better feature set. Most notably, PowerTune means that you can overclock it and it will be pretty safe--because if the overclock is unsafe, then PowerTune will kick in and force clock speeds back down.
i found the performance of all geforce products is lacking...i built alot of computer and up untill my recently build computers i have used Geforce. the performance and quallity was horrible could not run any game on full res(world of warcraft is one of them) and they were noisey and fans almost always failed.
i now have tryed my first radeon and it far surpasses any and all the geforces i have owned...currently running a 5770 and i have yet to find a game i cant run on full resalution. I now sugggest and build all my computers with radeon cards...and i havent had no complaints from any customers.
I have to question that one statement above. I also recently converted from NVidia to AMD/ATI but I ran WoW at full setting with my 8800GTS and my GTX260 core 216. I agree that my AMD video card pumps out more performance than comprable NVidia cards but the CCC drives me batty. There's so many things in there, like the profiles, resolution over HDMI and display scaling that make me wonder if the software designers ever actually tried to use the program.
If I could get AMD performance with NVidia software/drivers, I'd be a happy camper.
The 7770 is much lower specs than a 6850 :
640 SPs vs 960 SPs
40 TMUs vs 48 TMUs
16 ROPs vs 32 ROPs
128 bit bus vs 256 bit bus, which gives a 72 GB/s vs 128 GB/s in the memory bandwidth department.
The only thing keeping the 7770 in the game vs a 6850 is the higher clocks - 1000 MHz vs 775 MHz for the core and 1125MHz (4500 MHz effective) vs 1000 MHz (4000 MHz effective) for the memory.
You can overclock a 6800 series very safely at stock volts - power tune is just something to keep TDP in check.
And while the 7770 power consumption is smaller, the 6850 is already a very "green" card.
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
It depends on which card you get. A GeForce GT 520 will struggle with a lot of games. A GeForce GTX 680 won't.
Apart from reference cards, some of the board partners build both AMD and Nvidia cards. MSI will use the same fans whether they put them on a GeForce card or a Radeon card. So will Gigabyte and Asus.
You can find particular GeForce cards where the build quality is a problem, but you can do the same for Radeon cards. It's not the case that one side is systematically better than the other.
Not all shaders are the same. GCN shaders are a lot more powerful than VLIW5 shaders. That's why a 1280 shader Radeon HD 7870 dramatically outperforms a 1600 shader Radeon HD 5870 at just about everything.
Or to take a more dramatic comparison, a 512 shader GeForce GTX 580 will offer around triple the performance of a 720 shader Radeon HD 5750.
For TMUs, the difference in clock speed alone is enough to mean a 7770 has more texture power than a 6850.
The 6850 probably has more pixel power (though AMD did make some changes to ROPs that they say makes them a lot more powerful), and definitely has more memory bandwidth than the 7770. But it's not just how much bandwidth you have; it's what you do with it.
The power consumption differences I am very interested in. How much less power does the 7770 use? Please provide source. I'm having a hard time tracking this information down, all I can find is information on the box. I orginally said 7770 only wants a 400w power supply, but where I can find it listed it seems they both want a 450w psu minimum.
When you say the 7770 has a "better feature set" please elaborate a bit more. Is PowerTune unavailble for the 6850?
Since both cards fully support DirectX 11 in terms of supported effects a player would experinece in game (shader, et al) there should be no difference in the two except for performance, but if the 7770 runs on less power (again, want details not generalities) and can be brought up to the same level of performance. I have a hard time beliving drivers are going to gain you 30% difference. Although passmark scores aren't perfect they do give a general metric to categories performance of video cards. I would like to see other bench marks for the 7770 and 6850. My goal in responding to this thread is to help readers find the best budget solution and now wave a flag saving I have the right answer, because I really don't know.
I don't know what this thread is about actually. For a matter of fact the best gaming-card (looking at cost vs. performance) is the GTX560ti, which is available for some +- 200.
It let's you play all current games at acceptable settings without stretching the budget. It's also quiet silent and cool and doesn't draw too much power.
Oh, and as we're still in the age of games being more optimized for nVidia-cards AMD isn't quiet as good actually.
GCN shaders are a lot more powerful than VLIW5 in DX11. In DX9 not so much.
So one is going to get a few mixed results, with 7770 winning some and the 6850 winning others.
If buying today, I would go for a 6870 though.
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
Die shrinks let you have transistors do the same thing as before while using less power. A quick approximation is that in order to get one made-up unit of graphical performance, a card will need:
Radeon HD 7000 series: 1 W
Radeon HD 5000 or 6000 series: 1.4 W
Radeon HD 4000 series: 2 W
GeForce GTX 600 series (the GTX matters, as GT is Fermi rebrands): 1 W
GeForce 400 or 500 series: 1.7 W (same process node as Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series, but a horrible, inefficient architecture)
GeForce 200 series, except for GTX 280 or older GTX 260: 2 W
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PowerTune is available on the 7770 but not the 6850. Radeon HD 7000 series cards also support DirectX 11.1, not just 11. They have some improved Eyefinity functionality. They also support larger monitor resolutions, for future monitors that aren't yet commercially available; by comparison, the 6850 only supports up to 2560x1600. There might also be other stuff that doesn't come to mind off the top of my head.
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It's not a 30% difference. Look at some launch day benchmarks:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7770/26.html
They found that a 6850 is, on average, 4% faster than a 7770. Could improved drivers make up that difference? It's highly plausible. Even overclocking both cards could make up that difference if you're restricted by the GPU more so than memory bandwidth.
I've learned I really don't know all that much about video cards. This has been an interesting debate focuisng on the 7770 and 6850 HD. For those a bit more hardware savy.
This is my motherboard, it's a bit older mother board and changing it is not an option right now
http://www.ebay.com/itm/GATEWAY-GT5646E-GT5625E-GT5624E-GT5465E-MOTHERBOARD-NEW-/390288067544?pt=Motherboards&hash=item5adefb4bd8#ht_4363wt_1141
So given the motherboard would the 6850 or 7770 be a better choice? Does it make a difference at all?