Alienware M18x - Which Graphics Card?

Dual GTX 680m or dual AMD 7970m?

  • GTX 680m in SLI

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • AMD 7970 in CrossFireX

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    0

rhelme

Distinguished
Oct 4, 2008
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Back Last year in May through October 2012, I would have said GTX680m. Given at that point the 7970M had been out for a while already, the 680m really gave the mobile GPU market fresh air and forced AMD to really work on their driver.

Well with the 13.1 driver being official and before that, the 12.11 Beta 8 driver, we saw what AMD had been bragging about when it came to their GCN architecture. The 680M was 15-20% faster than the AMD card, and that was to be expected, however, what caught many off guard was that AMD was able to push their GCN architecture back past the 680M. So now a card that was close to a year old was beating a card that was pretty much new. I think the Keplers initial strength is now the downfall. They pulled all of their CUDA support and other support to support all power going to rendering only. Thats why OpenCL is dominated by AMD and their GCN architecture.

Personally given the 13.1 driver and the cheaper prices of the AMD card, and in most every game, the AMD now wins more than 3/4 of the bench marks and has OpenCL support... Overall, once the drivers were ironed out, the card exploded(in a good way) and this card is worth every penny, and the best part is the $ for performance...