Hardware Canucks - Is graphics card X more or less powerful than graphics card Y

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Is graphics card X more or less powerful than graphics card Y

This is a question from Chrisguitar95:

Quote:

Hey,

First off Linus is the best and always makes me laugh!

Your products are great and I have purchased off your website plenty of times :)

Now on to my question: I would like to know would two MSI GTX 560Ti's OC in SLI be more powerful than a GTX 570, 580 & 590? Like which would they be more powerful then?

Thanks :)

This is one question that will probably get stickied at some point because a LOT of people ask me this.

The answer is to read reviews for the parts in question, look at the general relative performance in the graphs, then find the best deal you can on the card that performs the way you like.

Larger hardware review sites like Hardware Canucks, Anandtech, or Tom's Hardware will usually update their charts with new titles when the next video card release rolls around, but if that's not available, you can always search for "Battlefield 3 video card performance guide" in Google and see what comes up. This applies for any new game that comes out since the review sites are always fighting hard for your readership, and there are usually 2-3 performance guides for any hot game.

Generally speaking, a pair of 560Ti's will out perform a 580, but not a 590 which is on par with 570 SLI.
That's said, of course the main issue (with endless threads about it) is game support for multi GPU solutions. Traditionally you pay extra "premium" for top-end cards, but while in bang per buck dual card setup will be superior, personally I would prefer to go with a single powerful card and sacrifice a bit of FPS in favor of stability/reliability/consistency in performance.
Choice is all yours :)