GeForce GTX 680 vs. Radeon HD 7970: is upgrading to the latest graphics card worth it?

Batman: Arkham City

52/25

85/51

68/43

One of the few games to resist our attempts to play at max quality and 1080p resolution, Arkham City would only produce playable frame rates on our incumbent GTX 560 Ti when we turn its DirectX 11 processing off. That’s a downer, since DX11 is where the shiniest and prettiest new graphical innovations can be found, but even without them, the game looks very attractive. Needless to say, you can enjoy the DirectX 11 extras with the new generation of cards at that resolution, but what’s truly impressive about them is the ability to expand the non-DX11 gaming experience to three screens. The Radeon HD 7970 and GTX 680 both push a 4800 x 900 resolution with ease when DX11 is switched off, and come decently close to providing playable frame rates with it on: both averaged 29fps at the game’s Extreme setting.

Also, if you’re wondering about how the Gaming Rig might fare with Mass Effect 3, use our Batman: Arkham City numbers as a guide. Both games are built on Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, with the caped crusader title throwing up the tougher GPU challenge.

Battlefield 3

53/40

42/36

48/38

A repeat of our experience with Batman: Arkham City, Battlefield 3 was not smooth enough for our liking with Ultra settings enabled on the GTX 560 Ti, but the new cards fixed that and added the option to play on three monitors with High graphics quality selected. There’s no readily perceivable difference in detail between those two top-end quality settings for this game, so don’t fret about missing out on some infinitesimally small upgrade. The Radeon HD 7970 and the GTX 680 match each other in performance terms, with the Nvidia card also averaging north of 30fps on Ultra mode at 4800 x 900 — it’s just a shame that its 36fps average was spoiled by regular dips down into the 20fps range where gameplay starts to get choppy.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

43/40

DNF

DNF

Although it spent the majority of the 2011 holiday season being compared to Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3 is a far less intensive game graphically. This is owing to the fact that BF3 was designed specifically to push PCs until they cry for mercy whereas the Call of Duty devs were content to port the console game over. In any case, you can max out everything in MW3 at 1920 x 1200 with the card already present in the Verge Gaming Rig, and our expectation was that you should be able to expand that same quality to three displays with the HD 7970 and GTX 680. Regrettably, in spite of seeming to support the crazy 16:3 aspect ratio and high resolution, the game stretched itself horizontally when we tried to play it on multiple monitors, leaving you without any tangible upgrade over the already competent GTX 560 Ti (unless you’re willing to invest the time and effort required to figure out a workaround solution).

Crysis 2

44/36

42/33

43/36

Like Modern Warfare 3, Crysis 2 is a game preceded by its reputation, and also like MW3, it’s actually lighter on your system than you might imagine. We were pleasantly surprised to see it maintain perfectly fluid frame rates at its Hardcore graphics setting on our oldie card at 1920 x 1200, which the Radeon HD 7970 and GTX 680 promptly converted into a 4800 x 900 future soldier battlefield. AMD and Nvidia’s new high-end cards produced almost identical frame rates.

Diablo III

50/37

96/71

52/37

You won’t be shocked to hear that Blizzard’s latest isometric loot parade is handled just fine by our original configuration, never dropping below 37fps at 1920 x 1200. It’s lacking proper support for tri-screen gaming, but we figured out a way to trick it into playing along. Switching the game to its Fullscreen Windowed mode extended it across our three monitors, giving us a truly widescreen view into Sanctuary, but also a few issues as well. Occasionally, large sections of the peripheral displays would, like the gray squares in a mapping application, be left temporarily unrendered, plus enemies would randomly pop up and disappear on those screens. That's fine for Blizzard to do, since the game thinks that bit of rendering is happening off-screen, but it does spoil what's otherwise a pretty fun experience. These problems arose a lot more often on AMD’s card than Nvidia’s, but the entire solution is hacky and imperfect, whatever your graphics card of choice. Overall, the only in-game lag we encountered was caused by the connection to the Battle.net servers; the GPUs' frame rates were never a problem.

Dirt 3

50/41

52/47

60/52

If you need just one reason to justify upgrading your graphics card, it might be the glint of sunlight gently rolling along the roof of your rally car as you glide through the snow in Dirt 3. This game has a wonderful habit of serving up breathtaking visuals like that on a regular basis, which is ably supported by the GTX 560 Ti at our typical single-display resolution. The Radeon HD 7970 and GTX 680 maintain the same standard of maxing out graphical options, only at the even more impressive 4800 x 900 resolution.

L.A. Noire

30/26

29/23

30/24

A weird 30fps cap on this game confounded our testing somewhat (given that we’re looking for a 30fps minimum frame rate to consider something playable), but the GTX 560 Ti was once again capable of handling the maximum visual quality at 1920 x 1200. Moving to the newer cards and three monitors was no problem in terms of load, however there was an issue in how the game dealt with the extreme 16:3 aspect ratio. Instead of filling out the side monitors with more visual information, L.A. Noire expands your regular field of view to fill them, cropping out the top and bottom of the image. That leaves you with a really tight view unto the game, one which you may consider playable, but not comfortably so.

Max Payne 3

49/33

44/36

41/31

None of our cards were capable of maxing out all the graphics options on this DirectX 11 title at 1920 x 1200, however the last few notches that remain out of reach are, as with Battlefield 3, measuring extremely small upgrades that most people won’t ever notice. Our first attempt at starting up Max Payne 3 with the Radeon HD 7970 in place was met with a crash, as were our subsequent dozen tries until we figured out the problem. AMD’s Catalyst Control Center — the very software you need to configure your multi-monitor setup — was causing some sort of incompatibility that made the game crash repeatedly. Although we were running the latest drivers, that version of CCC was the one shipping in the box with the GPU, and once we wiped it from the machine and reinstalled it, everything worked correctly, leading to an even sweeter 4800 x 900 Max Payne 3 experience at nearly maxed-out settings. Still, this is a major black mark for AMD’s software team. The GeForce GTX 680 kept up in the performance stakes without causing any such headaches.

Rage

48/35

56/50

55/39

John Carmack’s latest contribution to the realm of PC graphics isn’t as daunting as Doom 3, which immediately turned everyone’s gaming rig obsolete upon its release. Rage is pretty, but also smart about where it uses its graphical flourishes, resulting in a balanced game that most people should be able to play at reasonable quality. Our trusty GTX 560 Ti did better than that, keeping consistently high frame rates at almost maximum quality. AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 had no problem matching that performance and adding two further displays, a performance duplicated by Nvidia’s GTX 680.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

49/37

45/27

DNF

Guess which superbly popular Bethesda game doesn’t have triple monitor support. Go on, guess. Our default GPU keeps up the trend of playing Skyrim at nearly full quality — once you turn off the memory-intensive antialiasing, you can have all the extras and Ultra options you like — but the HD 7970 and GTX 680 are stuck offering only minute improvements while locked down to a single-screen resolution.

We managed to dig up a forum thread with a solution to this little omission, but it only worked with AMD’s card: you just set your ultra widescreen display res in the game’s config file and, although its menus will appear highly zoomed-in, the actual gameplay will adapt perfectly well to 4800 x 900. You’d be right to recoil at the thought of having to search inside your Documents folder to mess around with unfamiliar files, but that seems to be the state of multi-monitor gaming at the moment, you have to be prepared to hack your way to success.

The Witcher 2

36/28

DNF

DNF

Another no-show for the multi-display support party. As we noted in the original Gaming Rig writeup, The Witcher 2 can be played with almost everything turned on, but its Ultra setting and the brutally punishing Ubersampling remain out of reach — even with the shiny new HD 7970 and GTX 680. Nvidia’s latest GPU comes close with a 32fps average frame rate, which translates to decent, usually smooth gameplay, but on occasions it reaches down to a 20fps rate that detracts from gameplay fluidity. Given the choice between the highest quality setting and a consistently smooth frame rate, we always prefer to ensure That’s actually a limitation of our overall system specification, with the bottleneck clearly lying outside the graphics cards, but the bigger issue here is that a game lauded for its graphical chops can’t be played on three displays.

The overwhelming conclusion from our testing was that the major upgrade when moving to a card in the $499 tier comes from vastly expanding your playing canvas: 1920 x 1200 resolution on one monitor offers 2.3 megapixels of resolution, whereas 4800 x 900 on three raises that to 4.32 megapixels. That’s nearly double the resolution while sacrificing nothing in terms of visual fidelity, a staggering feat achieved by both the Radeon HD 7970 and GeForce GTX 680. We haven’t discussed tri-screen gaming on the GTX 560 Ti we already own for one simple reason: the card doesn’t support it. You’d need to buy a second GPU, to work in SLI mode with this card, in order to power a game across three displays. While that might be a reasonable (and more budget-friendly) solution for most people, we opted to to focus on what the true high-end cards can do, particularly since this 28nm generation is the first to really promise tri-screen gaming from a single card and deliver it.

Alas, it’s not all smooth sailing, as a number of games exhibit either incompatibilities or weird behavior when plugged into a trifecta of displays. You’d do well to make sure that your favorite game supports tri-screen output with the particular graphics card you have in mind before deciding to pull the trigger on making a new purchase. Other games we tested, such as Driver: San Francisco and NBA 2K12, also exhibited problems: the former completely refused to recognize any resolution above the standard single display options, while the latter emulated L.A. Noire in cropping the top and bottom off its field of view to fill the full width of our triple-widescreen setup.

The issue with NBA 2K12 stems from its rather two-dimensional perspective — if the game tries to keep the action in focus on the center screen, when it moves closer to either basket it’ll be forced to draw parts of the crowd that it’s probably not designed to display. We can imagine the same issue affecting football sims (of both the American and European variety), with first-person games like Crysis 2 representing the other extreme in being best suited to a super widescreen view.

Is it worth it?

Triple-monitor gaming is simply amazing. A sensory revelation. You still spend the majority of the time with your eyes anchored on the middle screen, but the sense of atmosphere that comes from the two auxiliary displays is spine-tinglingly good. After a while, you may even learn to look at things with your own neck rather than the mouse. In truth, this is how any sort of visual simulation is supposed to operate. The tight horizontal field of view of a typical monitor, no matter how resplendent its color reproduction may be, is just unnatural — human beings have peripheral vision which has gone (mostly) neglected, and it’s only once you move to this sort of surround view that you’ll understand what you’ve been missing.

Remember, gaming is, in and of itself, a luxury activity. So when you're trying to make a value judgment about money spent on equipment for playing games, the thing you're really measuring is how extravagant you want to be in satisfying your itch to play. You're not weighing up the purchase of food versus booze here, you're just trying to decide how much you're willing to spend to get your fix of intoxication.