These things can take time, but at last this generation of graphics
cards has been pretty much finalised. AMD did its part early on, having
almost its entire lineup sorted before the summer, while Nvidia has been
dragging its heels like a schoolboy who's forgotten his homework.
The release of the GTX 650 Ti,
though, marks the completion of this generation of cards, and despite
the fact it's taken nearly an entire year to get to this stage, things
have never looked so good for the consumer.
It's somewhat
inevitable that every generation offers more power for less cash than
ever before, but it's still surprising that a card you can buy for less
than £100 will be able to deliver more than 30fps on average at full HD
resolutions in the latest DX11 titles.
It's strange, then, that
people are calling these the end times for the discrete graphics card,
what with all the advances in integrated CPU graphics performance. For
the end user though, us PC gamers, our rigs have never looked so
sprightly.
Being
able to pick up mid-range cards with the sort of performance the
high-end cards of the past few years could only wish for, is making our
gaming experience the envy of the slavering console hordes.
Just
look at the gaming shows of the past year, GamesCom and E3 especially.
All the best-looking titles were being demoed on high-end PCs. Why?
Because there's no way to get the games looking as good on the current
generation of consoles.
With the next generation of those limited
tech bricks not arriving until the tail-end of 2013, the PC has an
entire year of even greater gaming dominance. And by then, chances are
it's still going to hold the technological gaming advantage.
But
what of right now? Who are the winners and losers in the great graphics
arms race? We've lined up the full range of gaming-capable graphics
cards of this generation and we'll tell you where the smart upgrade
money should go.
2012 was a rather strange year in terms of
graphics card releases. It all kicked off in a rather bizarre way just
before Christmas 2011 when AMD 'launched' its HD 7970 - despite only actually having stock in January.
We
could have understood AMD's desire to get the card in front of the tech
press before Christmas if Nvidia was likely to have its brand new card
out soon after, but the green team was a long way behind with its new
GPUs - but we'll get back to that later.
Still, the new top-end
card arrived and it was - somewhat inevitably given the lack of Nvidia
competition - the fastest GPU around. But it was a brand new GPU
architecture, in a year when AMD had also released a new CPU
architecture with limited success.
That new architecture
represented a strange flip in terms of the focus of each side's graphics
card design. Rather than looking to continue with its standard,
one-trick method of hitting gaming frame rates, AMD was now, with the
Graphics Core Next chips, focusing on nailing compute performance. That
had been Nvidia's route with the previous generation Fermi cards and now
AMD was creating a very similar architecture to cope with the graphics
engines of the day.
And then in March, Nvidia dropped the K bomb:
Kepler hit the streets with the GTX 680. It's new 28nm architecture had
almost switched sides with AMD - the Kepler GPUs focused more on raw
graphics performance than the general compute-focused Fermi cards that
came before it.
Where's my compute?
AMD's Graphics Core Next is just about the top GPU around
Nvidia
has left a lot of the compute power out of the consumer-focused cards
then, preferring instead to jam the extra silicon necessary for such
general-purpose calculations into the Tesla series of professional
cards.
That space-saving silicon design means the top consumer
Kepler chip is an incredibly power-efficient graphics processor, with a
TDP of just 195W compared to the 250W TDP of the competing Radeon HD
7970. Nvidia's Kepler GPU also introduced the Intel-aping GPU Boost,
which dynamically ramps the GPU clock speed depending on the power usage
and thermal envelope.
Now it was AMD's turn to play catch-up as
it introduced the PowerTune Technology with Boost - which more or less
did the same thing for its GPUs - later in the summer. In terms of raw
graphics performance, the top two tiers of graphics cards - GTX 670/680
and HD 7950/HD 7970 - are much of a muchness, trading performance leads
in different game benchmarks.
At the top, then, it pretty much
comes down to which card's feature-set you prefer and which plays best
with your favourite games. Things have become a lot less equitable in
the lower echelons of the graphics card market. While AMD had released
its full HD 7900, HD 7800 and HD 7700 series of cards into the wild by
the end of March, Nvidia would take another seven months to actually
flesh out its Kepler lineup.
That meant AMD could keep its prices
high while it was the only new kid on the block, and then take an axe
to its GPUs' price tags when Nvidia's rival cards finally touched down.
We will probably never know the real reason for Nvidia's tardiness on
its lower-end cards, but rumour has it that low silicon yields on its
28nm process had something to do with it.
The GK110 may well find its way onto a desktop near you
Nvidia
just claimed to be waiting for the wealth of big games titles coming
out at the end of the year. Whatever the truth of it, AMD is winning the
price battle, and has better cards available at every price-point in
the sub-£250 market.
One of the big problems, though, is the fact
there are few games out there at the moment that will really tax a
modern GPU. If you've bought a card in the past couple of years and are
still sitting on a native resolution of 1,920 x 1,080, or lower, then
there's really not a compelling reason to upgrade. Chances are you'll
still be hitting reasonable frame rates in the latest games and that
means the upgrade market is a little flat.
If you are looking for
a new graphics card, though, there has never been a better time to make
the move because you can pick up an inordinate amount of pixel-pushing
power for very little cash these days. But are you still going to need a
graphics card in your next PC?
Both AMD and Intel are making
great strides in the integrated graphics market with future generations
of chips. AMD, though, is segmenting things, leaving its top consumer
chips, the FX range without any graphics on die. Intel, on the other
hand, is resolutely sticking its iGPUs in every chip it throws out, bar
the crazy £800+ Sandy Bridge E side.
Discrete days numbered
Nvidia's GTX 680 represented a change in focus to perf/Watt
With
the processor upgrade to Haswell next year, Intel is predicting a
doubling of its graphics performance in Ivy Bridge. In terms of gaming
on the desktop that still isn't going to give you the frames per second
you'll need to get the most out of Star Citizen, but on the mobile side it's talking up the capabilities of the GT3E Haswell graphics.
Speaking
to the graphics guys at IDF this year, Intel seems to think it will be
making dedicated gaming laptops without dedicated graphics cards a
reality in the next generation. With the next generation of AMD's APUs
looking to include the proper Graphics Core Next architecture as the GPU
component, its new lineup could also make things sticky for the
dedicated graphics side.
With no concrete news yet of Nvidia's
Project Denver - it's own ARM-based gaming CPU with a full-fat GeForce
graphics part - the green side of the graphics war is looking a little
ill-equipped for the coming battle - at least on the PC.
AMD re-wrote its own rule book on GPU make up
The
next generation of both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards will simply be
building on the advances of their respective first 28nm parts, so we
don't expect a lot of particularly interesting new tech next year, just a
little faster and a little more efficient. So that makes this
generation even more interesting.
These cards will consistently
drop in price up to the launch of the slight upgrades of the HD 8000 and
GTX 700 series of cards, and with the next generation of consoles not
arriving until the tail end of next year, right now this is all the card
most of us need. But which one is best for you? Let me show you…
Graphics cards on test
1. EVGA GTX 680 Signature 2
The
GTX 680 is still an impressive piece of technical engineering this far
down the line. Released back in March, Nvidia's current flagship card is
still at the top of the graphics tree, duking it out with AMD's HD 7970
for GPU supremacy. That's impressive given the fact that its GK104 is a
far simpler bit of silicon compared to the Tahiti XT behemoth in the
AMD card.
The GK104 is a 3.5bn transistor chip verses the 4.3bn
transistor Tahiti XT core, and as such is smaller and more power
efficient. That's quite a change compared to the Fermi generation where
the top GTX 480 and GTX 580 housed massive, power-hungry GPUs chock-full
of CUDA cores and SM units.
The
HD 7970 GHz Edition is the fastest consumer graphics card, and the best
news is it's not the most expensive. When Nvidia released the GTX 680,
AMD was able to counter with the upgraded GHz Edition of its HD 7970,
upping the clockspeed to cope with the new kid on the block and retain
its top-GPU crown.
This is the card to get if you're powering a
hi-res screen or three. It's got the graphics processing chops to run
pretty much any game at 2,560 x 1,600, on the highest settings, without
batting a silicon eyelid. It may only be a little faster than the GTX
680 in most tests, but in the compute-heavy titles, such as the
lighting-intensive DiRT Showdown, it has a clear lead.
Featuring
an only slightly cut-down GK104 GPU compared to the top-end GTX 680, we
were big fans of the GTX 670 when it first tipped up. It was only a
little slower than the top GeForce card and was much cheaper. It also
had a performance lead on the HD 7950 and was on par with the original
HD 7970.
Time hasn't been kind to the GTX 670 though and with
prices staying relatively high since launch, its relevance has
diminished. The new GHz Edition of the HD 7970 put it out in front of
both top Kepler cards and the Catalyst driver optimisations, and more
compute-oriented game engines have made the HD 7950 a rather tantalising
prospect in comparison.
There's
a tremendous sense of value when you get this Asus version of AMD's HD
7950 out of the box. It really is rather massive. The triple-slot
cooling array, means that you're going to have to think long and hard
about whether you've got enough space inside your PC chassis to house
such a behemoth of a card. That said it's not a bad little performer,
especially at this price point.
AMD has managed to be incredibly
aggressive on pricing as new Nvidia-shaped competitors have hit the
streets, and to have this sort of performance for much less than £300 is
impressive.
This card swaps performance leads with the more
expensive GTX 670 across our benchmarking suite, showing that it has the
chops at both hi-res and in the more compute-oriented games/lighting
engines we've started to come across.
When
we first saw the GTX 660 Ti from EVGA it was hovering around the £260 -
£270 price mark and was then bumping heads with the HD 7950 and that
was a battle it was never going to win. Unlike a lot of the other Nvidia
cards, though, this has had a little price cut in recent times.
Now
it's available for just under £230 and that makes it much more of an
interesting proposition. At this price it's smack bang in the middle of
the HD 7950 and HD 7870, and in performance terms too that's exactly
where it ought to be.
Broadly speaking it's a quicker card than
the HD 7870, even the overclocked Gigabyte version we're looking at in
this test. There are a couple of instances where it suffers by
comparison, but then only very slightly. Interestingly it's actually
quicker than the HD 7870 in the traditionally AMD-centric DiRT Showdown.
When
the HD 7870 first tipped up in March we weren't that fussed about it.
Sure, it delivered decent numbers in the benchmarks, but at about £260
it was way overpriced and left us feeling rather cool towards this
mid-range Radeon card.
Thanks to Nvidia finally getting its act
together with its own mid-range cards, AMD has started aggressively
pricing and now the HD 7870s, and even this overclocked edition, are
sitting below the £200 mark. At this price there really isn't anything
Nvidia can do to compete.
Now the GTX 660 Ti's prices have come
down, though, it does represent a little more competition for AMD's
mid-range master. Still, the Pitcairn XT is pretty much all the GPU you
need for your 1080p screen - it will throw polygons around at impressive
speeds in any game you care to throw at it.
When
Nvidia finally got the GTX 660 out of the door it was all set to go
head-to-head with AMD's HD 7850. And that would have been completely
right - both offer similar performance figures. Among the
Nvidia-favouring titles it does better, and vice versa with the
AMD-centric games.
Had the situation stayed static then Nvidia's
cards would've had their own place in the world. Yay. But AMD held its
pricing at a level before Nvidia's mid-range hit the streets and thanks
to its cards being out for a good while longer, AMD's been able to slash
its price tags. That means the straight GTX 660 is now going up against
the vanilla HD 7870.
Despite the overclocked nature of this EVGA
card, it still can't beat the stock-clocked Radeon. Even on the
Nvidia-sponsored games, like Max Payne 3, it's second best to the current mid-range king.
The
performance of the HD 7850 when it first came out, combined with its
relatively low price tag, made for a very enticing mid-range card. That
impressive start has only gotten better as time has moved on and the
price has dropped ever lower. Once it dropped below £200 it was hard to
really recommend anyone with a 1080p screen spending more.
Now
it's sub-£200 graphics card crown has slipped as its HD 7870 big brother
has usurped the HD 7850's place by making itself a whole lot cheaper
than it used to be. Still, at £150 you'd surely expect us to still be
pretty taken with the HD 7850.
And while it's still a great
mid-range card, there has been one other sibling to make us take a
second look. And that's the 1GB version of this GPU. You might expect
the extra gigabyte of graphics memory to push this graphics card
significantly ahead in the high-res benchmarks - but you'd be wrong.
So,
you thought things looked bad for the HD 7850 in standard 2GB trim when
the 1GB version came out, but spare a thought for the poor ol' GTX 650
Ti. Bless its little silicon socks, it's really trying.
Throwing
off the shackles of the GK107 GPU, Nvidia decided to lumber the standard
GTX 650 with this Ti version, which is rocking the same pumped-up
pixel-pusher as the GTX 660. That means it's actually much more of a
reasonable gamer's graphics card than the standard version. Were it
simply going head-to-head with an equivalently priced HD 7770 then it
would have beaten the AMD card hands down.
Sadly it's all shifted
around and this AMP! edition of the GTX 650 Ti sits in between the 1GB
and 2GB versions of the HD 7850 - and suffers by comparison with each of
them.
We
have to admit this was a bit of a surprise. We wanted to get the 1GB
version of the HD 7850 to test it against the HD 7770 more than anything
else - assuming this would be the card it'd be going up against. After
all, the 2GB frame buffer of the stock HD 7850 must be partly
responsible for its impressive showing at hi-res, right?
And
that's putting post-processing such as anti-aliasing in the mix. How
wrong we were. It seems that the bottleneck to the Pitcairn Pro's
performance is not the memory at all - the GPU itself bottlenecks
performance well before the memory gets anywhere near making things
crawl.
What does that mean though? Well, it means the 1GB version
of the HD 7850, especially the slightly overclocked version supplied by
MSI, is more than able to keep pace with the stock 2GB version of the
Pitcairn Pro card.
This
is as good as it gets if you're looking for a genuinely gaming-capable
card at the sub-£100 level. Granted, it's only just under £100, but
compared with the competing GTX 650, at this price point it's the
gamer's only real option.
Heaven is a great metric for comparing
GPU performance in isolation of any marketing nonsense, or any company
specific extras, and the figures don't lie. The HD 7770 is considerably
faster than the GTX 650 in Heaven 3.0 with only Batman: AC
actually giving any parity of performance between the two cards. Across
all the other benchmarks, whether at 1080p or 2,560 x 1,600, the AMD
graphics card has a pretty significant advantage. When you look at the
different GPU architecture it's easy to see why.
What
both iterations of the GTX 650, in either this or the speedier, pricier
Ti-trim, have going for them is their diminutive size. They're both
pleasingly small little graphics cards, ideal for the wee PC. Well,
ideal for the wee PC that you don't really have any interest in getting
decent gaming frame rates from in any case.
Okay, that's a little unfair - the traditionally Nvidia-lovin' Batman: AC
will still let you top 40fps at 1080p at the top settings. Elsewhere,
though, you're going to have to seriously tighten your
graphical-pretties belt in order to make sure you're getting decent
frame rates.
This is the same GK107 GPU that we've seen in a
number of laptops recently - that twin SMX GPU being perfect for the
power- conscious mobile crowd - and if you're running a 720p screen, at
1,366 x 768 or similar, then you're going to be able to get some decent
gaming speeds.
This
far down the pecking order of graphics cards you will really struggle
to get anything close to decent gaming frame rates out of a normal 1080p
screen. With the Sapphire HD 7750 you're not going to be pushing much
past 20 frames per second in most games without seriously knocking back
the graphics settings or resolution.
This version of the HD 7750,
with the 2GB of relatively slow DDR3 video RAM, is almost irrelevant in
gaming terms. That said, though, you can pick up a low-profile version
which could go into a small machine to stick under your TV.
With
Steam's TV mode, and a drop in resolution, you'll be able to get almost
gaming-capable speeds at 720p on your telly. For another £20, though,
you can get double the gaming performance with an HD 7770, and £50 extra
will get you the awesome HD 7850 1GB.
The
main, indeed probably only, selling point of the GT 640 Zone is the
fact that it's completely silent. With a chunky passive cooler sitting
atop the GPU and memory chips, there are no spinning fans whirring away
like a mini-turbine inside your PC. That means that despite its standard
card height it would make a pretty decent media centre GPU.
Like
the HD 7750, you'll struggle to get any decent gaming frame rates out
of the card at standard 1080p resolutions and top settings, but lower
your expectations and you'll be able to hit reasonable gaming speeds.
Nowadays,
lower settings in current games don't make them look much worse than
their console counterparts but, still, for an extra £20 you can pick up
much more bona fide gaming cards.
Benchmark analysis and winner
Given our penchant for high-performance components it might seem
strange that we've gone all gooey over a £120 graphics card which is
easily outperformed by a good chunk of the cards on test. But a quick
scan of the benchmarks on these 'ere pages should show you why we're so
taken by the HD 7850 1GB.
It beats the other cards in its class
in pretty much every test and gives much more expensive cards a run for
their money. In fact, as the two value tests prove, it offers the most
performance for your dosh of the lot - and you can't ask for much more
than that.
At the top of the tech tree, the HD 7970 and GTX 680
inevitably fight it out, each taking it in turn to top the test. Except
when it comes to price performance - in both tests the Sapphire offers
far better value than the EVGA.
And the winner is… MSI HD 7850 1GB
We've
been accused in recent times of being AMD fan boys here at PCFormat.
That's a rather ridiculous accusation considering that we get to test
every single card on the market and we don't have to make decisions on
what graphics cards to jam in our machines based on tribal loyalties.
What
we do base our decisions on is a combination of gaming performance and
the cost to you, our beloved readers. In this generation it's been an
almost complete whitewash for AMD in terms of performance per pound, and
actually in outright straight-line gaming speed too.
Most of
this is down to Nvidia's tardiness in releasing the new Kepler
architecture into the wild, giving AMD the time to harvest its cards at
the high initial price tags and then the option to slash prices when the
competition finally comes around.
At every pairing AMD comes out
on top. At the top-end, the HD 7970 has held on to the performance
crown thanks to the release of the GHz Edition, even the pricey,
overclocked EVGA GTX 680 Signature 2 can't maintain a consistent
performance lead over the AMD card. The price cuts have also allowed the
HD 7950 to carve out an excellent little niche for itself, sitting
between the GTX 660 Ti and GTX 670.
The GTX 660 Ti has become a
little more relevant thanks to some price chopping on the part of Nvidia
for a change. It's got enough about it to take on the HD 7870 and make a
real fist of it.
The truth of it, though, is that Nvidia
actually hasn't had to make a fight on the pricing front. It has been
happily selling its Kepler cards thanks to existing goodwill among its
user base, and that tribal loyalty sometimes outweighs the actual
performance. If Nvidia is still selling at its current pricing then
there's really no reason to get any more competitive on cost.
That's
where AMD really has to fight its corner, after all, a quick check of
the Steam hardware survey shows that Nvidia still has the advantage in
numbers out in the real world.
The real star of the show, though,
has to be the incredible HD 7850 in lightweight 1GB trim. We really
didn't expect this MSI card to be quite as impressive as it is. We
ostensibly got the card in to go up against the HD 7770, but as it
turned out it made things uncomfortable for the 2GB version, and for
both the GTX 650 Ti and the GTX 660.
In fact, for the gamer on a
budget, the HD 7850 1GB is the perfect 1080p graphics card - it's got
some impressive performance chops in high-resolution trim too. We've had
a play with a pair of these in CrossFire too, and at £240 you're
getting performance that is right up there with the GTX 680 and HD 7970.
The
vagaries of multi-GPU systems in terms of playing nice with modern
games mean it's still not an absolute must-buy pairing, but it's getting
pretty darned close.
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