Gadgetory

welcome to our Far Cry 3 roundup graphics party so we're going to do this in a slightly different way than we've done before and that is to say instead of taking a big schwag of video cards and testing them we're going to take a schwack of price point so about a hundred bucks about 200 bucks and about 300 bucks and tell you head-to-head GeForce vs. Radeon which one comes out ahead at that price point now besides our standard graphics card test bench which has our OC z ZX 1250 watt it's got a vertex for 128 gig 16 gigs of kingston hyperx ram and a CSP 9 X 79 deluxe motherboard and obviously the graphics card varies a little bit we've got a 13s 3930k on here now whatever it is it's overclocked to 4.4 gigahertz meaning that we've removed the CPU as a bottleneck as much as possible and aside from all that we are overclocking every graphics card to within what is according to lei forums a reasonable level that most people can expect to attain so because we've done graphics card overclocking guides we expect you to overclock your graphics card because if you're not you're basically throwing away free performance so we no longer test graphics cards at stock which means whatever models we have here actually doesn't really matter the important thing is the GPU and then the fact that it's overclocked to within what you can probably attain with the same GPU so let's start with our lightweight showdown so at the approximately a hundred dollar price point we had the Radeon HD 7770 and GeForce GTX 650 unfortunately at about 100 bucks we couldn't afford the 650 Ti so it was a hundred and twenty three dollars for the Radeon card and one hundred and fourteen dollars for the GeForce card we take all of our pricing from NCIX at the time of filming our video we are using the latest drivers on all of these cards so that's catalyst thirteen point one and whatever the latest GeForce one is so we take the second lowest card on NCIX so that it's a price that you can reasonably find and we leave off mail-in rebates because not all territories have them so in this case it was a bit of a one-sided battle with the 7770 beating the GTX 650 by about 40% if the 650 Ti had been able to squeeze into this price bracket we'd probably see it come in quite a bit closer if not approximately the same as the 7770 but we weren't able to make that happen with the constraints that we set for ourselves so we're going to move on to our next price point in this one we've got the GeForce GTX 660 this is the non TI version so it is significantly slower but it is based on the same core as the 660ti up against it we have the Radeon HD 7870 so this is their top line whatever this core is not Tahiti the other one can't remember don't worry about it 78 70 there we go oh yeah we're using the ultra preset in Far Cry 3 we're using our custom benchmark which of course you can check out in a video that we made on our channel for how to run our exact benchmark no anti-aliasing 1080p and our pricing was pretty close now it should be noted that the Radeon card does cost about 8 percent more than the geforce card in this case but it performs about 25 to 30 percent better in this case so I would personally spend an extra 8% to get another 20 percent performance so to speak so in this case yeah it was a bit of a Radeon Radeon sort of win as well next up we've got the about $300 price points so 660ti is going to be up against the 7950 both of these cards are very well positioned they're the ones that I generally recommend on either side of the fence you want a geforce card i usually say okay get a 660ti you want a Radeon card generally I say get one of these bad boys and the reason for that is they're both great overclockers and great performers at stock remember these are all overclocked numbers were showing you so in this case our Radeon card was around 300 bucks our geforce card was around 290 bucks so they're very close in terms of pricing however once they're both overclocked the Radeon card does come out ahead by about 12 13 14 whatever 10 to 15 percent so there it is a win for the Radeon camp I mean all of this should probably stand to reason given that far cry 3 was a never settled bundled game with Radeon graphics cards so it looks like it looks like Ubisoft and AMD we're working together on making sure that it's optimized for AMD platforms hopefully we'll see some kind of a driver update from Nvidia that will address the sort of performance disadvantage however it should be noted this is just one game what I'd love for you guys to do now though is tell me are you interested in seeing these videos done on a game by game basis moving forward in the future or is this kind of a forum on that forum format not that useful for you let us know and also guys if you check the description under the video we are going to post these graphs so you can review them at your leisure without actually skimming through the video and finding them so there you go don't forget to 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