Gadgetory

this video is brought to you by our trusted partner Intel for a limited time only with the purchase of any unlocked core i5 or Core i7 Intel CPU get a free Intel beany with a chance to win an Intel snow board valid for Canadian and US customers only some restrictions apply for complete details visit intel gaming promo calm welcome to our crysis 3 video card performance reviews so this is we're breaking our rule a little bit guys so more on that in a moment but this is our evaluation of at about a hundred bucks about 200 bucks about 300 bucks and higher than that for different price points what is the best video card to buy we're going head-to-head Green Team versus Red Team at a bunch of different price segments so you guys will know exactly what you should buy to get the most out of Crysis 3 now why did we break our rule the reason is because Crysis 3 is such a new game no one has a wickel release driver yet that's fully optimized for it so when we first did our tests with Titan where we compared a crisis on the variety of platforms Crysis 3 rather on a variety of platforms we saw that AMD had a huge advantage because their driver was optimized for it now a our Nvidia just released their optimized driver so now we have an opportunity to go optimized versus optimized head-to-head at those different price points so our testbench is a p9 x79 deluxe with 16 gigs of muskan black line memory a 39 60 X at 4 gigahertz so that's a 6 core Intel processor we're using an end tech thousand watt power supply a 128 gig SSD and for our software we are using afterburner 2 point 3 point 1 to run all of our overclock settings we overclocked every card due to within a reasonable level so we don't go absolute max because this should be something that you can obtain just by checking out our spreadsheet which is going to be linked under the video and dialing those settings into your GPU they're pretty much safe settings and then we're using beta 3 14.1 4 for nvidia and beta 13.2 for AMD now here are our price ranges so head-to-head for round one is the GTX 650 so that's this guy right here actually that's not this guy right here is the 650 power edition from MSI versus a Radeon 7770 so these are 115 bucks and 120 bucks respectively we'd also went for gtx 660 which is this guy right here versus radeon 7870 which is one of these two I believe it's this guy right nope I'm wrong this guy right here is 78 70 and then next was so those are 229 and 230 nine respectively next was 660ti which is this guy right here versus 7950 right here so these are 289 and 299 and finally we have GTX 670 versus Radeon 7970 so the 670 is the one that's actually still on the bench over there and there's a very good reason for that because we got some very cryptic numbers from our GTX 670 which we think we can explain because we're using beta drivers which I really don't believe in using but we had to do it for this game because it's so fresh so let's here we go so that our lowest-priced here you can see this is pretty much a dead tie remember guys the GTX 650 is actually about eight percent cheaper than the 77 70 so if you take these two cards overclocked them to the max well max ish and run Crysis 3 you're going to get eggs pretty much exactly the same experience was it playable at very high spec with anti-aliasing off not really you're probably going to have to turn this game down a little bit more but for the sake of consistency between the different cards that we ran we had to pick one setting and kind of go with it next up we've got the $200 weight class of cards and again we see pretty much a dead tie the gtx 660 does come ahead and remember it was also a little bit cheaper than the 7870 but this is sort of within the margin of error when we rerun our Crysis 3 benchmark which you guys can check out it's also on the channel our benchmarking procedure if you when we rerun that over and over and over again we get a variance of about a couple percent so you can kind of take all the results and factor that into it as well so moving on to our $300 weight class we've got another tie because remember again the 660ti was a little bit cheaper than the 7950 now pricing for the cards we use the latest pricing on NCIX we take the second lowest card so the lowest one we kind of throw it away and go that might be some kind of crazy deal that people can't get but the second lowest one should be pretty much obtainable now this is where things get weird when we get into our $400 weight class the 7970 scaled beyond the 7950 which makes sense because it's a slightly more powerful card but our GTX 670 actually didn't perform any better than our 660ti so the 670 is the same architecture as the 660ti it has more functional units it's clocked higher even when we're overclocking both of them were it's like it's clocked higher so we can only chalk this up to a bit of driver weirdness in the beta that probably won't be observed once that data driver makes its way to being a finished driver so to me it looks like this is going to end up being another dead tie once that optimization is done but it just shows you sort of AMD's a little bit further ahead from Nvidia but we knew this because their Crysis 3 optimized driver was released before in videos when it comes to Crysis 3 finally here are all of the cards so you can clearly see other than the 670 falling below where it's supposed to be up next to the 7970 that each of those price segments clearly defines itself with a performance improvement so you can also track on this spreadsheet this is really cool where the best bang for the buck lies because the gtx 660 and the 7870 literally offer you double the performance of the lower tier cards whereas when you move up to 660 TI's and 79 50s you might get another 25% but you're actually spending 50% more than the previous than the previous tier of cards so when it comes to Crysis 3 if you want playable performance ok so average around 40 fps you want to spend a couple hundred bucks you're going to get the best bang for your buck so we can safely say that either the gtx 660 which is this guy right here or the Radeon HD 7870 either of these would be fan tastic options for a crysis 3 gaming rig because they're able to maintain average frame rates of around 40 FPS which is very playable this is at very high system specs running at 1080p anti-aliasing is off so if you want to start turning up those details those higher end cards will start to pull away more but for the basic gamer HD gaming these cards are a great value so either of them is a fantastic choice so I guess my usual recommendations also stand if you're going to be gaming and surround I do recommend Eyefinity over Nvidia surround it is a little bit easier to configure and the compatibility is very strong and if you're going to be playing in stereoscopic 3d I definitely recommend GeForce / Radeon because the Nvidia 3d vision ecosystem is much more stable and much easier to use than the equivalent from the AMD side so that pretty much wraps it up thank you guys for checking out our Crysis 3 video card roundup I hope this has made your life a little bit easier if you're trying to buy a video card for Crysis 3 and as always don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from our unboxings reviews and other computer videos