(GPU)advice on getting either 660ti vs Hd7970

onionhead_o

Hey guys, Im looking to upgrade my gpu. Currently Im using gtx 460, which im not happy with. So I decided I need an upgrade. So far I narrowed it down to Either the Nvidia gtx 660ti or AMD Radeon 7970.

I ve tested mudbox on a friends comp with the 660 ti 2gb, and things were running way smoother than the 460. But I hear that Radeon 7970 is better than 660ti in Performance. But I am worried about the compatibility with 3dsmax, maya and mudbox as it is my main 3 software. I read on the Autodesk Certified Hardware that "Wire Mode view in VP 2.0 makes the driver crash HWCT-1193" for maya. Did anyone with the 7970 run into any viewport problems?

Any advice is appreciated. Thanks

wirrexx

Well wasn't GTX 780 supposed to get released this month. I've personally never had a problem with nvidia nor the Amd cards. But i prefer the GTX for geforce experience (tells me when a new update is released). And the comparision list for GTX 780 vs 7970

http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-HD-7970-vs-GeForce-GTX-780 check there which one suits your taste. And go for it!

Santewi

Well, the 7970 is a bit faster and has 1GB of RAM more than the 660ti. Otherwise from the price/performance standpoint they are relatively similar.

Didn't nVidia cards require two or more GPUs for multimonitor systems at some point? Unless they have changed it, it might be worth getting the Ati card just so you don't have to get a second GPU if you need a second monitor.

I really don't know about the nVidia stuff, the last nVidia GPU I has was the GTX 9800 :P

Brendan

Santewi wrote: »

Well, the 7970 is a bit faster and has 1GB of RAM more than the 660ti. Otherwise from the price/performance standpoint they are relatively similar.

Didn't nVidia cards require two or more GPUs for multimonitor systems at some point? Unless they have changed it, it might be worth getting the Ati card just so you don't have to get a second GPU if you need a second monitor.

I really don't know about the nVidia stuff, the last nVidia GPU I has was the GTX 9800 :P

I don't know about the physical requirement for 2Gpus for multimonitor stuff...I often ran my laptop with a second monitor (either VGA or HDMI) and that was some firebreathing version of the (basically last) 9000 series NVidia. Roasted 2 motherboards (not joking), but it didn't have any other GPUs.


Of course for higher resolutions (over 1080p, multimonitor, etc) I'd recommend on something more beefy than the 660ti, like a 680. My 660Ti runs everything fine, but anything >HD, or with a ton of full-size render textures (or anything sorta similar, like supersampling) and it starts to drop off a bit in performance.

I'm sure there's some technical term for it, but at that point it just herp runs out of resolution derp de derp.


If you're just running Mudbox and photoshop, then you should be fairly fine though.

the_Adri

Nvidia anytime of the century, decade, year, month, week, day, hour, minute, second.

ubeor

yeah, never use amd!! their drivers are a piece of.... if you think updating it's gonna fix your problems you are totally wrong, any new drivers break the compatibility with your programs, if it's not maya, it's photoshop, or mudbox, or max or whatever.
stay away from amd!!!

gray

if you are willing to troubleshoot the amd in case there are driver issues because you want more cores or vram then that is an option. i have heard there cards are much better now.

but nvidia cards are better supported. you will have less trouble i think. the EVGA GTX 660TI is a nice card.

iniside

I bought Radeon 7850.
What can I say... Now I remember why several years ago I promised my self to never buy Radeon again.
I had hope something changed in terms of drivers, but after all those years they are still crap compared to NVIDIA.

Next time I updated my PC I'm going back to NVIDIA again.

Bek

The last two cards I've had have been ati/amd and the drivers have been rock solid. The only recent error I can recall having was a colour problem in photoshop with one of the beta drivers (Certail colours displayed black if using Advanced GPU accel). When was the last time amd released a drive update that fried your gpu? /anecdotalevidence

Also if you people have anything specific to say about amd drivers I'd be interested in hearing them, and being less vague would only help your argument.

iniside

Well. For example For a long time my system crashed entirely if I had any 3d accelerated app running with flash in background. Or two 3ds apps.
Or they couldn't recovery after long time or inactivity.

jfeez

ive used amd cards for a around 5-6years and ive never had driver issues with 3d apps. Amd have a bad rep from along time ago but i dont know many people who have had problems, i think still using bad drivers is crap these days, its more likely you had a hardware issue with your card and should have returned it, and tbh i know more people who have trouble with nvidia cards(last nvidia card bsod my pc, and even after a return the next one did as well so i went amd). Imo nvidia cards are a premium, you will pay considerably more for a small performance gain unless its cuda accelerated, but if you can afford it, go nvidia. You will be unlucky to get a problem but with high performance computing its gonna happen every now and then.

EarthQuake

If you want to do anything cuda now or in the future, like gpu baking/rendering/etc, go nvidia

MM

i tried out 7970 but had to return it due to some wierd bugs i noticed in Maya.

one of the issue is noted here (search "Radeon 7970")

http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/maya2014_readme_enu.html

i also had some unsusual crashes with Maya. so if you use Maya i would recommend not to get 7970.

iniside

jfeez wrote: »

ive used amd cards for a around 5-6years and ive never had driver issues with 3d apps. Amd have a bad rep from along time ago but i dont know many people who have had problems, i think still using bad drivers is crap these days, its more likely you had a hardware issue with your card and should have returned it, and tbh i know more people who have trouble with nvidia cards(last nvidia card bsod my pc, and even after a return the next one did as well so i went amd). Imo nvidia cards are a premium, you will pay considerably more for a small performance gain unless its cuda accelerated, but if you can afford it, go nvidia. You will be unlucky to get a problem but with high performance computing its gonna happen every now and then.

No. After several drivers updates problems seems to be gone. Ergo it was drivers issue.

jfeez

iniside wrote: »

No. After several drivers updates problems seems to be gone. Ergo it was drivers issue.

Wierd... im using a 6970 and theres no problems, as i said i know people who have problems with both nvidia and amd. The pcs at my uni used nvidia cards and if we had a 3d app running we couldnt let the screensaver turn on or lock the pcs as the directx driver in 3ds max would crash.

Also if people have issues with running 3d apps at the same time, try setting the affinity of the apps so they run of different cores, motionbuilder and max used to have a problem where they wud use the same resources and forget theres other cores to run off

onionhead_o

Thanks for all the suggeestions. In the end I went with 660ti, and so far so good, no wierd problems yet. Bought the card off a friend who upgraded his gpu.

Vii

Good choice, ATI cards are horrible in general (driver issues for one thing) and even worse for 3D (shit opengl support).

MM

Vii wrote: »

Good choice, ATI cards are horrible in general (driver issues for one thing) and even worse for 3D (shit opengl support).

i am have been quite skeptic too but...

I recently got the AMD Firepro W7000 mainly because i needed a fast gpu that is certified by autodesk for mudbox and at the same time runs dx11 games pretty well.

i took a risk, and to my surprise it is doing both of them very well so far.

i can now sculpt in mudbox with 60mil+ models without any viewport lag.
games like metro 2033 runs super smooth at highest setting @ 1920x1200

mAlkAv!An

Vii wrote: »

Good choice, ATI cards are horrible in general (driver issues for one thing) and even worse for 3D (shit opengl support).

This prejudice is getting so old, it was already outdated and incorrect like 10 years ago. AMD cards are not horrible, espacially not in general.
CUDA support for GPU rendering is a valid argument for Nvidia, particulary if you do CG work. Although 660TI vs. HD7970 is a somewhat misleading comparison.

Ace-Angel

ATi cards aren't bad, it's just that nVidia, Intel and Max are kind in bed together, there have been a few instances of nvidia cards disabling the buffer-render of Max in 2010+ versions, or even throttling.

So the issue is, with your DCCP applications, ATi is kinda left behind, as there have been MORE then a few cases of ATi having to fix issues by themselves, with no help from Autodesk.

So if you get any kind of problem, good luck, you're going to need it, you'll be lucky if you get a bug in Max 2014 and ATi is even able to fix it within 6 months, I know I had to wait 6 years for an nvidia sponsored App to get it's fix for my old ATi card.

Vii

mAlkAv!An wrote: »

This prejudice is getting so old, it was already outdated and incorrect like 10 years ago. AMD cards are not horrible, espacially not in general.
CUDA support for GPU rendering is a valid argument for Nvidia, particulary if you do CG work. Although 660TI vs. HD7970 is a somewhat misleading comparison.

It's not invalid, AMD drivers are still bad. And it's a correct statement to this day. I'm sure AMD's hardware is perfectly fine.

Kwramm

mAlkAv!An wrote: »

This prejudice is getting so old, it was already outdated and incorrect like 10 years ago. AMD cards are not horrible, espacially not in general.
CUDA support for GPU rendering is a valid argument for Nvidia, particulary if you do CG work. Although 660TI vs. HD7970 is a somewhat misleading comparison.

+1
using Unreal, ZBrush, Max, Maya and Unity just fine with my AMD card. No difference to the nVidia cards I had before. Sometimes there's small glitches, but my nVidia cards had this too. Guess that's just something you have to deal with when it comes to 3D.

next card will probably be a nVidia card. OpenCL is just not catching on