GTX 660 vs Radeon HD7870

     Hi guys I am building a new computer and I am tossing up between two video cards. The cards are the MSI Twin Frozr III GTX 660 and the MSI HAWK Radeon 7870. Both cards are overclockable and 2GB. I know everyone has different opinions but I would like to know what's best for me. I will be gaming and doing 3D rendering aswell as other types of things on it. I would like to have nice frame rates when I am playing a high end game. I would also like to be able to play most new games on ultra settings without lag. I don't want to upgrade cards or anything I would just like to know the best out of those. Thankyou

Depends on the games you want to play, check out these benchmarks:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/660?vs=548

Should help your consideration, if your going to be using programs that make use of OpenCL you may want to lean towards the GTX 660 because of the CUDA core.

Alright thankyou

stillgamma till having a little bit of trouble choosing. Hopefully this question will make my answer. Does cry engine or unreal technology support cuda?

It doesn't depend on the games you play, it depends on if you care about the big picture or the here and now.

AMDs new drivers give up to 20% performance increase across the board so that's great.

Complimenting the new drivers is the 256bit memory bus, which is greater than the artificially reduced 660s 192bit bus.

You're going to notice a huge difference not now, but in the future with games (following the path of BattleField 3)  that use increased amounts of GPU memory.

You're going to want the 256 bus speed especially next year or the year after. 

It's not really going to be worth using SLI for the 660s but for a 7870 a year from now when crossfire is a little more stable you will have a viable option.


I'm not a fanboy. I'd rather have a GTX670 than a 7970 I'm just saying the viable option is the greater memory bus. You'll see each card have strengths and weaknesses and "trade blows" in performance testing, but for the real world actual performance you're going to see for games in the next 2 years it's a no brainer to go with the WIDER MEMORY BUS SPEED. 

Alright that makes up my mind then. thankyou

for once, canuk is right.....