GTX780m vs 8970m vs GTX 680m vs 7970m and GTA IV optimization issues

Found some comparisons

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M - NotebookCheck.net Tech

In Review: Nvidia GeForce GTX 780M, GTX 770M & GTX 765M - NotebookCheck.net Reviews

AMD Radeon HD 8970M - NotebookCheck.net Tech

AnandTech | AMD Launches Radeon HD 8970M

http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...rds/718028-8970m-may-not-rebrand-7970m-3.html

So, the GTX780m seems to be around 30% faster than the gtx680m / 7970m. And the 8970m is about 10% faster than the 7970m/gtx680m. Most of this speed can be made up with a simple overclock - from the 4th link

So there obviously seems like there's no reason to upgrade to the 8970m, and what's the best way to overclock, and the safest clock speed? I'd rather it not burn out and melt. I pretty much only play GTA IV, and both the gtx680m and 7970m have poor utilization issues, which means only about 50% of the gpu is used the majority of the time. This therefore forces me to play with an average of 45fps, with lower draw + viewing distances. Pity much

What are your guys thoughts? I'm just a Gta fan, will just be playing Gta V indefinitely. Sadly this means I'll have to play on the PS3 for a few months since Rockstar take a while releasing the PC version (Gta IV took 6-7 months). Has anybody managed to get high utilization somehow with a 7970m? My specs are in my signature.

There is no pricing announced yet for either cards. But I'm guessing the gtx780m will be more than double the price of the 8970m. The 8970m being irrelevant since it's basically just a rebrand of the 7970m with a software overclock.

 

I probably shouldn't know, but I do.... as of yesterday,

the 8970m version of the Clevo P150SM, is the exact same price as the GTX 780m version and they're both cheap....

I don't know why, & it makes no sense to me. I think its a combination of the 780m being cheaper than the 680m, and the 8970m being more expensive than the 7970m.

It seems AMD have decided they are back at the top of the game for now..... maybe the 780m performance will force the price down?

I'm going to really string some rubbish here BUT.......
Maybe the GTX 780m, is NOT what we think, I noticed the 675mx was missing from the refresh line up, maybe the 775m is a 675mx & the 780m is a rebadged 680m, and what we think is the 780m, is a 680mx badged as TitanM or GTX 785/790 ???

likely just a rubbish theory but when I found out the 8970m and 780m are the same price (£200 more than a 770m so not very expensive imo), and then tied that to the missing 675mx, my little brain started speculating wildly lol - maybe I just have bum information, but I trust my source...... for now lol

 

You're claiming that even though the 780m is 20% faster than the 8970m, it's cheaper?

Huh?

 

Don't mean to sound curt but this thread and the response after is just ridiculous on so many levels. I will just address the OP. I don't know why people are so defensive about their purchases. The 780M is looking to be around 30% faster than the 680M. While people haven't gotten the vBios issue cracked yet; they will. There is no real reason to think that these cards will not overclock. Also, it's not just about overclocking the GPU to compensate for the performance difference. there are many other factors that may allow the 780m to provide a much smoother experience in some games that even a crazy overclocked 680m cannot handle due to the difference in specs.

Is the 780m a giant leap forward? No. It's not Maxwell. However, I will say it's performance looks VERY PROMISING and much greater than what I anticipated. Combine that with the Haswell CPU (GTA games are highly CPU dependent) and you may have a winner. Maxwell isn't coming out until well into 2014 from what I understand. If there are games out right now that have the 680m SLI have a little trouble, I see no reason why some people won't upgrade to the newest latest and greatest. Many people on this site are enthusiasts and that means upgrading for a variety of reasons. I am not a rich man, but I do love my gaming. I may choose to upgrade based on the 30% increase from the 680m as I still have the 580m SLI. While it runs any game at very high visual fidelity; I am not running Crysis 3 at the highest settings and have not even bothered with the new Metro. Do I wait a year to play at the settings I like or do I upgrade and enjoy it NOW? I could buy an R2 as they are being heavily discounted now, but with the 780m right around the corner, I would gladly pay the extra for my personal preferences.

So, in short, 30% increase is nothing to scoff at and there are plenty of reasons to upgrade. Who really knows what the OC potential is on these beasts. If they OC well and end up being about 40-50% faster then I would say that is worth it. At the end of the day, the majority of SOCIETY thinks we are retarded for even buying laptops with powerful GPUs anyway. The ones who will upgrade likely are the ones who are the biggest enthusiasts of gaming notebooks...or just plain filthy rich. I can't fault either one for their choices.

Fin.

 

And what difference in specs is there? It's the same as 680m. It's same process, same die, difference is that it has more shaders, Boost 2.0, and voltage is slightly lower. Otherwise it's the same as the 680m. There's nothing that will differentiate a 780m from a 680m for a "much smoother experience" other than drivers.

I don't fault users for "upgrading" but all this pomp and circumstance is driving me nuts. The 680m when overclocked to 1000/2400 has already been shown to match or exceed performance of a 780m even with a slight overclock. That being said, we'll have to see how well the 780m can overclock. It may be a beast, it may be a mouse. Likely will depend entirely on cooling and if PSU's provide enough juice.

 

Just my input about GTA IV: as was said earlier, the game is highly CPU dependent and therefore will generally restrict the amount of GPU power applied. It's an issue with the game coding and honestly, you will probably notice more of an increase in performance with a Haswell upgrade next year than anything else.

 

Oh I'm definitely going for the 770M now. I was gonna go for the 7970M, but screw that. The 770M may be a bit slower, but that 75w TDP is delicious. :3

 

I see, well I guess it depends on whether or not GTA V is more dependent on the cpu or gpu when it's released on the PC, which will be the deciding factor of what I need to upgrade.

Thanks for your input though.

 

daveh98, I did honestly doubt my own information and I made it clear that I was likely spinning rubbish twice in post but thanks for confirming the "ridiculousness" although I was hoping for a more factual based persuasive response - I'm just opening a door to share some wild theorys I found amusing in my own head. I'm just sharing what I know, and sort of saying "why not?"

I was addressing the OP's last para to inject some (possibly bogus) price information I had, which if it comes true (I can't really see this being true?), will mean his original question/statement or arguments will be irrelevant, the 8970m will be expensive in comparison to the 7970m, and I will be getting my hands on a 780m loaded P150SM..... if the prices are nonsense, I suspect it will be that the price I have for the 780m is to low and I'll be putting up with some thing smaller (might as well go with the 770m (fast enough for my eyes), benefit from some 75w peace and quiet! & save £200 towards a 2nd hand upgrade later, might snap up a 680m cheap in the next 12months who knows!)

 

A stock GTX 780M @ 850Mhz, which happens to be the GPU Boost clock, match a max overclocked GTX 680M. Which means the users don`t have to do anything to match whatever max potential the 680M have. Right off the bat.

We have seen that a 1000MHz GTX 780M beat a 1000MHz GTX 680M with everything from 12-22%. That is with a GTX 780M that throttles vs a GTX 680M which does not throttle. Once the modders get a vbios that removes the throttle, that performance difference will most likely further increase. With a GTX 680M you can`t go any higher than about 1200MHz with the VRAM. Which means you are bottlenecked by memory bandwidth. With GTX 780M you can go 1500MHz+ on the VRAM, giving you a huge lead in memory bandwidth vs 680M.

Once game benchmarks on OCed 780M/680M comes in, I`m certain we will see a pretty big difference between the two.

There is a reason why Nvidia have clocked the GTX 680 (desktop) VRAM to 1500Mhz. GTX 680 runs at 1000MHz. It needs that bandwidth. Which is what reborn got his GPU to run at. Imagine a GTX 680 (780M) vs a GTX 680M @ 1000MHz. I bet you right now that it will be more than a measely 10% between those two.

 

That MSI will have a significant advantage with the 1500MHz vRAM. I think cooling and power supply will just be too limiting in many cases to get any significant overclock unfortunately. But we will see. With Meaker getting an MSI soon, we should know soon enough. I just hope he uses a larger PSU than dealing with any of that battery NOS nonsense.

 

You get more bandwidth in the 780 which WILL be huge for SLI. Once drivers are out and the Vbios is modded; it will be very clear to you. I don't get why you think having a super OC'ed 680m matching a 780m shows it's an unworthy upgrade. MOST users don't overclock. Those that do, likely are the users that will buy these cards as Maxwell is a good year away. 30% is a nice performance bump. I thought the difference between 680m and 780m was going to be ore like the 6970 to 6990. More bandwidth and better drivers once this gets released....is a nice upgrade for any enthusiast gamer.

 

But we don't all overclock and if the 780M is 30% faster than a 680M (both out of the box) you will get 30% better performance and that could be enough to convince someone to upgrade.

 

Just with regards to the OPs post about GTA. GTA4 is a pretty dodgy port. It negatively scales with CF so I run it off 1 GPU (7970m). Drop the Shadows to high (very high gives extremely diminishimg returns here) and the Visability distance and Detail distance down to around 40%. It's actually pretty CPU heavy so at 4.0 ghz I can get around 55 FPS with those settings. Your 3610qm will probably get similar results anyway.
Thing is nothing makes this game go to a higher frame rate than that... Even if I OC CPU and GPU another 10%.
The only thing we can do is hope they do a better job for PC for GTA5. Fingers crossed because I don't want to play it at 25 FPS at 720 on a console.

 

Guys, I have a GTX 680M. I recently installed GTA4 and every time I play the game stucks. Until now I was able to play games in the maximum possible setting but here I'm quite surprised.
I tried reducing the graphics settings for optimal performance but still no solution. It looks more like 1 FPS.
Any suggestions guys>?

 

What's your cpu? Should I over clock my cpu and how would I go about doing this just for gaming?

I'm over clocking my gpu today. To about 930/1375mhz

I have many car mods + some graphics mods such as visual iv, and new textures. I have to make the draw and view distance 30, I get around 45-75, 120 near water where it seems to use full gpu utilisation.

I'm sure gta v will be better, and whatever happens when it comes out for pc, the 7970m will run it better than a cruddy console.

Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk 2

 

i dont think you can OC your cpu if not a XM series..

 

Oh yes, I remember now sorry. Hopefully GTA V for the pc won't be too CPU dependant.

Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk 2

 

what about that ?
M18X M17x NVIDIA Geforce GTX 780M Laptop Video Card 780M 4GB w/Driver | eBay

is it a promo version? whats the price msi sells this as an upgrade option? will it work on our alienwares? (r2 - r3)

 

If you are an overclocked GTX680M owner and score P8250 in 3DMark11 like I do then never ever think to upgrade, just wait another one year for 800 series (if necessary) to see the real performance difference, enjoy gaming on GTX680M because it still wild bad beast.
Last but not least, It's funny how some people here say that a lot of gamers don't overclock, okay then I say "No" for more 30% of performance I'd rather to overclock than pay +$800.