Great review. Goes to show just how much AMD has improved GCN over the years. Here's what Anandtech had to say about the GTX680 about a decade ago: "This time AMD once again spoiled NVIDIA by releasing the Radeon HD 7970 nearly 3 months early, but as always, at the end of the day it’s NVIDIA who once again takes the performance crown for the highest performing single-GPU card."
I remember back when i had a HD 7950, it overclocked like crazy with a bios mod. The HD 7970 was "the fastest" IF you overclocked vs the 680 oc, but the GTX 680 did edge it out stock v stock. I used the early versions of liquid metal that had to be 'refreshed' every 6 months lol, but i got the card to run 1450Mhz silent or 1650Mhz with about 60-80% fan around 85c (used around 260-280 watts lol) Still have it on a shelf, and i'm sure can play any modern game with medium/low settings at 1080p/60fps. Which is nuts to think, before DX12 you where SOL and had to upgrade your GPU every few years. Crazy to think DX12 has been around for a whole decade
Nice comparison, i had the GTX 670 FTW (almost a stock gtx 680 in performance) and a HD 7970 Lighting Edition and the AMD aged better, between the support of APIs (Vulkan DX12(11.1)) and the one extra Gb of Vram, the last thing i play before selling the radeon was the remake of Mafia 1 but it didn't dissapoint for a 10 years old gpu
Nice i just bought this card! But i have to say that i love the "bad" blower design a bit more then the custom design! The red- black color looks extremely gorgeous on that one! And i was surprised. The relately small blower design is way heavier then my big and bulky GTX 970 Asus Strix custom design.
I actually struggled with so many driver related issues with my HD 5870 and 5970 in a lot of games like Battlefield 3. When I "upgraded" to the GTX 680, it was actually such a breath of fresh air for me that the drivers just simply worked. Those early Radeon drivers were simply terrible.
I picked up a EVGA GTX 680 2gb a few weeks ago from FBMP for $10. It's for my DDR3 2012 era system that I am putting together for fun. Most of the parts are leftovers. I spent only another $10 on 8gb of DDR3 ram, to get to 16gb. I found 2012 era apevia case in my dumpster last week, almost like it was supposed to happen..lol. Dusty but in very good condition. I had a Asus GTX 660ti that I bought when it launched, just to play Borderlands 2, so this system will be close to what I had around then.
Kepler has aged quite poorly due to the "weird" architecture it had. This is one of the main reasons HD7000 series is much more desirable in the second hand market and it still has a higher price. In general GCN 1.0 has aged so good. There are many architectural similarities even as far as RDNA 1 (RDNA 2 is quite a redesign)
Hello Gorjah, Thanks for checking out the video :) I'm looking forward testing the 2.0 and newer, just to see how they scale and improve over time. I've skipped 600 series personally between having 500 and 700 for my rig :)
I think both cards are good, but the fact AMD went from same or slower to faster across the board is impressive. I wonder what future testing tells us, I think there might be some more green dominance soon! haha! Thanks for checking out the vid!!
I had a pair of water-cooled 7970's in Crossfire from 2012 to 2015. They were clocked at 1200MHz, and rarely reached 50C under full load, which is more than a 20% overclock. I had to increase voltage a tiny amount to ensure stability. AMD left a _lot_ of headroom in those cards.
Yeah, I had the 280X - they retailed for about 300 USD back when they launched, so 200 less than the older 7970. Performed the same, maybe like 1% better.
Thanks great video i still use my HD7950 its a gigabyte windforce 3gb and is great for retroarch i love dreamcast and gamecube games so does the card. 😁
Great video and serie! Would like only to point out that the 7950 was the “sister” of the 7970, not the 7870. And at day1 was really bad priced according to the default performance chosen by AMD. I had one 😅
The 7970 is a beast! A more modern architecture and 50% more VRAM the cards cost about the same here at €40 used. I’ve seen 7970 and 280X which is the rebranded card for as little as €20 though. I had the 280X and it was a good card. You said it was the end of the legacy battles? Will you not do 290X vs GTX 780 or 780ti after the dual GPU battle?
Hello mate :) 40 Euros is very cheap for this card! Yes, for now, the legacy battles ends with 7990 vs GTX 690! I will of course continue with testing, 700 series, 900 series...all the way up to 3000 series. But the channel needs more different content in between, I have CPUs mobo's coolers etc. Time is of essence as of lately, hope you and fam are doing well :)
@@nexus_tech Glad to hear the legacy GPU series will return one day and interested to see the other content. The family is doing fine. We just today got the news that there will be a new government in Sweden. It was a very close election. We will see how things go going forward as the nationalists will be the largest part of the coalition since they got the most votes of the right wing parties. I’ve abandoned retro gaming for now but I am instead playing more modern games on Windows 10 but on a CRT for some old school feeling.
I would always pick a GCN card over any kepler GPU as from my experience nowadays the GCN cards work so much better under Vulkan/DX 12 despite not really having the full feature set, in those games that do start they perform better, and to be honest I really love the 7000 series of cards, those cards were just great. As always very nice video :) I am curious, how much did you pay for the cards?
I love the Kepler cards. especially the eVga GTX 680 Classified 4Gb Version 😁😁 Although the AMD HD 7970 makes it on paper i will still take that 680 Classified. Great Video btw.
I have 6 half dead 7970 asus DirectCu2, faulty memory on all. From Tahiti lineup best experience with saphire 280x xxx toxic ( orange one) 1300mhz.gpu / 1800mhz memory Oc. Funny thing is 7970 is harder to find cos after 11 years they can still mine few crypto coins with profit ( at least during last year)
@@ggmgoodgamingmichael7706 ventilatore sam prodao pre 5god a hladnjaci ne znam dal pasu, cini mi se da nema isti vrm asus (siri je Pcb od fabricke verzije i ima vise faza) Moja preporuka za turbo verziju da trazis Accelero III extreme hladjenje. Moze i acellero 2. th-cam.com/video/v3l_TGld3jU/w-d-xo.html
Ok, I watched more of your GPU reviews my friend. Here are some tips. 1. Always specify VRAM amount for the cards tested 2. Stop pushing max MSAA or max AA in general. Use FXAA/SMAA if you must. You should redo your older GPU videos, they're not representative of the performance shown.
290X also kills a 780ti these days, lol. If you are like me and "retire" your old high end cards into the living room pc or friend's pc's, AMD is the far better option, especially with higher res textures.
always love asus design i use to have gtx 560ti asus r9 270x asus hd7970 asus even gtx 480 asus and now is rx 5700xt rog strix the design always make me feel nice~ big fan
I have HD 7970, but it start glitching in games (and I still don't know why), but it was few years ago, didn't have time and I have money so I move on, but to see that this old as hell GPU still can play games?
Unfortunately, Kepler has aged very badly. When they were new, they were ahead of AMD. But in almost all games that came out 1 or 2 years later, GCN is simply better. Still, I like Kepler, it was the GPU generation that really got me into PC gaming. I had the GTX 670 and the 780TI from that generation back then and have now bought a Titan Black for my Lan Party PC for nostalgic reasons.
Like this card was a game changer- nvidia was losing. It wasn’t neck and neck anymore. It wasn’t small die, crossfire anymore- it was a single gpu winner! Not only did AMD compete with nvidia, but they BEAT Nvidia. And yeah, there was driver difficulty at first, but GCN was an entirely new design, completely disconnected from Terascale- these drivers were entirely new and worked entirely differently from the old drivers. Nvidia on the other hand had evolved their GPU architecture and drivers along with it.. this card saved AMD, this was the boost they needed to survive until Ryzen! GCN did an amazing job of keeping the company afloat.
Back in the day, i would have probably chosen the Nvidia. But now, as i am older and "wiser", the AMD one would have been the smarter long term choice.
@@nexus_tech I had more Nvidia cards than ATi/AMD. But not by much, i say about 60% Nvidia cards and 40% ATi/AMD cards. My first ever was a ATi Mach64 2MB and my first "graphics accelerator" was Riva 128ZX 8MB.
8:38: Why test RE2 in DX12? It's slower across the board than DX11. You're doing all GPUs a disservice. Even more so after the recent DX12 patches for RE7, RE2R and RE3R absolutely destroyed performance in DX12 vs DX11 even more than before.
Hey, Thanks for heads up, was not aware of this, seems like up to 15% performance loss! For the testing purposes, both cards were used same settings, results are valid
@@nexus_tech DX12 vs DX11 BEFORE the patch was a 15% performance loss. Now it's 30-50% performance loss. You need the Beta Branch for RE7-RE2R-RE3R to undo the disastrous DX12 update for these games and test DX11 then. Good luck.
Simple as, for current series, I've decided to stick with official AMD drivers that are available to download. Future single GPU content with will cover benefits of using custom drivers on GCN 1.0 +
@@nexus_tech Thank you very much for giving NimeZ drivers a try. You'll be seeing more improvements in newer games than older games tho, so keep that in mind.
I remember when DOOM 2016 came out the 680 couldn't even launch the game because of VRAM and they had top release a patch for the game to start on the nvidia card.
Great review. Goes to show just how much AMD has improved GCN over the years. Here's what Anandtech had to say about the GTX680 about a decade ago:
"This time AMD once again spoiled NVIDIA by releasing the Radeon HD 7970 nearly 3 months early, but as always, at the end of the day it’s NVIDIA who once again takes the performance crown for the highest performing single-GPU card."
That was true statement back then, I'm happy to see how well the AMD matured! Did you onw either of the two?
I remember back when i had a HD 7950, it overclocked like crazy with a bios mod. The HD 7970 was "the fastest" IF you overclocked vs the 680 oc, but the GTX 680 did edge it out stock v stock. I used the early versions of liquid metal that had to be 'refreshed' every 6 months lol, but i got the card to run 1450Mhz silent or 1650Mhz with about 60-80% fan around 85c (used around 260-280 watts lol)
Still have it on a shelf, and i'm sure can play any modern game with medium/low settings at 1080p/60fps. Which is nuts to think, before DX12 you where SOL and had to upgrade your GPU every few years. Crazy to think DX12 has been around for a whole decade
Yup GCN was brand new and drivers needed to mature, while game engines and games were yet to be optimized for GCN.
Nice comparison, i had the GTX 670 FTW (almost a stock gtx 680 in performance) and a HD 7970 Lighting Edition and the AMD aged better, between the support of
APIs (Vulkan DX12(11.1)) and the one extra Gb of Vram, the last thing i play before selling the radeon was the remake of Mafia 1 but it didn't dissapoint for a 10 years old gpu
Nice i just bought this card! But i have to say that i love the "bad" blower design a bit more then the custom design! The red- black color looks extremely gorgeous on that one! And i was surprised. The relately small blower design is way heavier then my big and bulky GTX 970 Asus Strix custom design.
02:35 You can use HDMI with a simple passive adapter over either a DVI port or DisplayPort connector on the 7970.
I actually struggled with so many driver related issues with my HD 5870 and 5970 in a lot of games like Battlefield 3. When I "upgraded" to the GTX 680, it was actually such a breath of fresh air for me that the drivers just simply worked. Those early Radeon drivers were simply terrible.
I found a 7970 in a thrift store for 7$. Shocked by how capable it was for that budget lol
What!! That is bargain, when was this ? :)
I picked up a EVGA GTX 680 2gb a few weeks ago from FBMP for $10. It's for my DDR3 2012 era system that I am putting together for fun. Most of the parts are leftovers. I spent only another $10 on 8gb of DDR3 ram, to get to 16gb. I found 2012 era apevia case in my dumpster last week, almost like it was supposed to happen..lol. Dusty but in very good condition. I had a Asus GTX 660ti that I bought when it launched, just to play Borderlands 2, so this system will be close to what I had around then.
Wow!!! Talking about good luck 🙂 thanks for sharing
Thanks for this comparison, the fast and furious reference was spot on
The competitor to the gtx 670 was the HD7950 not the HD7870, the HD7870 was the competitor to the gtx 660.
Kepler has aged quite poorly due to the "weird" architecture it had. This is one of the main reasons HD7000 series is much more desirable in the second hand market and it still has a higher price.
In general GCN 1.0 has aged so good. There are many architectural similarities even as far as RDNA 1 (RDNA 2 is quite a redesign)
Hello Gorjah, Thanks for checking out the video :) I'm looking forward testing the 2.0 and newer, just to see how they scale and improve over time. I've skipped 600 series personally between having 500 and 700 for my rig :)
Pretty awesome
Thank you for the video
Tahiti really was a monster GPU, I'm not surprised. If you ran even more modern games it would be a slaughter for the 680
It's like 10-15% faster. "big slaughter."
I think both cards are good, but the fact AMD went from same or slower to faster across the board is impressive. I wonder what future testing tells us, I think there might be some more green dominance soon! haha! Thanks for checking out the vid!!
I had a pair of water-cooled 7970's in Crossfire from 2012 to 2015. They were clocked at 1200MHz, and rarely reached 50C under full load, which is more than a 20% overclock. I had to increase voltage a tiny amount to ensure stability. AMD left a _lot_ of headroom in those cards.
Great cards! Love to see them in action!
The R9 280X uses the same chip as the HD 7970 - maybe that one is a bit more affordable? Here in Romania, they go for about the equivalent of 70 GBP.
Yeah, I had the 280X - they retailed for about 300 USD back when they launched, so 200 less than the older 7970. Performed the same, maybe like 1% better.
Wow modern games on mid-high settings with 60 fps... crazy. I love those old monsters. Im playing on a GTX 970 right now. :)
TA!
Thanks great video i still use my HD7950 its a gigabyte windforce 3gb and is great for retroarch i love dreamcast and gamecube games so does the card.
😁
You could easily get away with up to PS3 emulation if you have a good enough CPU, and some lighter games.
Great video and serie! Would like only to point out that the 7950 was the “sister” of the 7970, not the 7870. And at day1 was really bad priced according to the default performance chosen by AMD. I had one 😅
The 7970 is a beast! A more modern architecture and 50% more VRAM the cards cost about the same here at €40 used. I’ve seen 7970 and 280X which is the rebranded card for as little as €20 though. I had the 280X and it was a good card. You said it was the end of the legacy battles? Will you not do 290X vs GTX 780 or 780ti after the dual GPU battle?
Hello mate :) 40 Euros is very cheap for this card! Yes, for now, the legacy battles ends with 7990 vs GTX 690! I will of course continue with testing, 700 series, 900 series...all the way up to 3000 series. But the channel needs more different content in between, I have CPUs mobo's coolers etc. Time is of essence as of lately, hope you and fam are doing well :)
@@nexus_tech Glad to hear the legacy GPU series will return one day and interested to see the other content. The family is doing fine. We just today got the news that there will be a new government in Sweden. It was a very close election. We will see how things go going forward as the nationalists will be the largest part of the coalition since they got the most votes of the right wing parties. I’ve abandoned retro gaming for now but I am instead playing more modern games on Windows 10 but on a CRT for some old school feeling.
agree! I played a long time on the 280x. Games like Metro Last Light Redux, Fallout 4 etc. on high settings over 60 fps. Worked great, legendary card!
My $10 EVGA GTX 680 from FB marketplace brought me here.
This is were era of AMD FineWine began.10 years ago.With the exception off Fury cards.
I would always pick a GCN card over any kepler GPU as from my experience nowadays the GCN cards work so much better under Vulkan/DX 12 despite not really having the full feature set, in those games that do start they perform better, and to be honest I really love the 7000 series of cards, those cards were just great.
As always very nice video :)
I am curious, how much did you pay for the cards?
Hello mate, how are you doing ? I paid £85 for AMD card and £68 for Nvidia card :) Much love for the 7000 series!
I love the Kepler cards. especially the eVga GTX 680 Classified 4Gb Version 😁😁
Although the AMD HD 7970 makes it on paper i will still take that 680 Classified.
Great Video btw.
The MSI GTX 680 has practically the reference GTX 680 PCB, just like the Gigabyte GTX 670 had.
I have 6 half dead 7970 asus DirectCu2, faulty memory on all. From Tahiti lineup best experience with saphire 280x xxx toxic ( orange one) 1300mhz.gpu / 1800mhz memory Oc. Funny thing is 7970 is harder to find cos after 11 years they can still mine few crypto coins with profit ( at least during last year)
Pozdrav. Bi li prodao 2 ASUSovke? Trebaju mi hladnjaci za standardne blower verzije da zamijenim.
@@ggmgoodgamingmichael7706 ventilatore sam prodao pre 5god a hladnjaci ne znam dal pasu, cini mi se da nema isti vrm asus (siri je Pcb od fabricke verzije i ima vise faza) Moja preporuka za turbo verziju da trazis Accelero III extreme hladjenje. Moze i acellero 2. th-cam.com/video/v3l_TGld3jU/w-d-xo.html
Ok, I watched more of your GPU reviews my friend. Here are some tips.
1. Always specify VRAM amount for the cards tested
2. Stop pushing max MSAA or max AA in general. Use FXAA/SMAA if you must. You should redo your older GPU videos, they're not representative of the performance shown.
290X also kills a 780ti these days, lol. If you are like me and "retire" your old high end cards into the living room pc or friend's pc's, AMD is the far better option, especially with higher res textures.
always love asus design i use to have gtx 560ti asus r9 270x asus hd7970 asus even gtx 480 asus and now is rx 5700xt rog strix the design always make me feel nice~ big fan
Just sold bunch of my older cards and realized how many of them were ASUS branded :)
If you think asus has good designs, wait till you get your hands on a sapphire nitro
Probably the best graphics card, tbh. Loved my 7970
My 7970 has passed a prayer for the dead
When RX 580/570/560 video?
I have HD 7970, but it start glitching in games (and I still don't know why), but it was few years ago, didn't have time and I have money so I move on, but to see that this old as hell GPU still can play games?
There is no way that the gtx 680 can be not UEFI card. I'm confused with that. Look at 1:16 .
Thanks for the video.
Unfortunately, Kepler has aged very badly. When they were new, they were ahead of AMD. But in almost all games that came out 1 or 2 years later, GCN is simply better. Still, I like Kepler, it was the GPU generation that really got me into PC gaming. I had the GTX 670 and the 780TI from that generation back then and have now bought a Titan Black for my Lan Party PC for nostalgic reasons.
People complained about 7970 using more power
Like this card was a game changer- nvidia was losing. It wasn’t neck and neck anymore. It wasn’t small die, crossfire anymore- it was a single gpu winner! Not only did AMD compete with nvidia, but they BEAT Nvidia. And yeah, there was driver difficulty at first, but GCN was an entirely new design, completely disconnected from Terascale- these drivers were entirely new and worked entirely differently from the old drivers. Nvidia on the other hand had evolved their GPU architecture and drivers along with it.. this card saved AMD, this was the boost they needed to survive until Ryzen! GCN did an amazing job of keeping the company afloat.
I have a healthy HD 7970 with 6gb of VRAM if you’re interested. not for cheap tho its a rare beast!
Back in the day, i would have probably chosen the Nvidia. But now, as i am older and "wiser", the AMD one would have been the smarter long term choice.
Huh. I've never bought new AMD card for my personal rigs before VEGA64, agreed
@@nexus_tech I had more Nvidia cards than ATi/AMD. But not by much, i say about 60% Nvidia cards and 40% ATi/AMD cards. My first ever was a ATi Mach64 2MB and my first "graphics accelerator" was Riva 128ZX 8MB.
Comment for the Algorithm
I owned the GTX 680, it aged horribly and became obsolete very quickly.
8:38: Why test RE2 in DX12? It's slower across the board than DX11. You're doing all GPUs a disservice.
Even more so after the recent DX12 patches for RE7, RE2R and RE3R absolutely destroyed performance in DX12 vs DX11 even more than before.
Hey, Thanks for heads up, was not aware of this, seems like up to 15% performance loss! For the testing purposes, both cards were used same settings, results are valid
@@nexus_tech DX12 vs DX11 BEFORE the patch was a 15% performance loss. Now it's 30-50% performance loss.
You need the Beta Branch for RE7-RE2R-RE3R to undo the disastrous DX12 update for these games and test DX11 then.
Good luck.
And yet this HD 7970 is not even the GHz edition
Why aren't you testing AMD GPUs with NimeZ drivers, man? Come on.
Simple as, for current series, I've decided to stick with official AMD drivers that are available to download. Future single GPU content with will cover benefits of using custom drivers on GCN 1.0 +
@@nexus_tech Thank you very much for giving NimeZ drivers a try.
You'll be seeing more improvements in newer games than older games tho, so keep that in mind.
😀
I remember when DOOM 2016 came out the 680 couldn't even launch the game because of VRAM and they had top release a patch for the game to start on the nvidia card.