And since I blame you gerbils handily for encouraging me to grab a Dell U3011 while the going was good, I'm going to put the graphics question back to you:
Do you think the GTX 680 is good at the "1600p" resolution?
I'm looking for your opinions, please (but not flame wars), based on the TR review, any other reviews you've seen, and your experience with cards and monitors and such. This is where my thinking is right now with this:
- - In the TR review and other places, I've seen the 680 trade blows with 7970 a little. This tended to happen more at x1600, where the performance delta was small between the two.
- Additionally, it seems that in cases where the green team is superior, it seems as though their lead opens up much wider at lower resolutions, which lead me to think that the 2GB VRAM/smaller memory bus is handicapping it a bit at x1600
- This makes me think of the reviews/system guides where TR is saying "At 4 megapixels, you want to have at least 2GB of VRAM" noting that the size does make a difference. Do you think the 3GB cards show there's still room for this to apply, or am I starting to fall for "more is better" mentality?
Me, personally personally? I've got a bit of pro ATI (ok, ok AMD) bias *right now*, but I feel like its on the way out. I only say that because I'm not sure how much its affecting my judgement, not because I'm interested in which company is superior. I've bought both, I've been pro green and pro red--I'm a mercenary when it comes to this sort of thing and tend to pick which one suits my needs more. Certainly, nVidia has impressed me with their power draw under load and noise of reference design, + overall performance of what we generally suspect was developed to be a "mid tier class" product (i.e. price class aside).
But does that matter as much if its performance is starting to thin at 2560x1600? Especially if AMD goes into price cutting mode*
* to be perfectly fair, I was originally speccing out to buy a 7950 on the TR recommendation that it handled 1600p just fine for cheaper than the 7970.