3D Performance

When looking at the various 3Dmark results we must remember that only a single HD7970 is compared to two mid performance but powerful NVIDIA GPU in SLI. Although the pricing and overall performance is comparable, the power consumption, size and processing capabilities are not comparable.

Both AMD and NVIDIA position their flagship single GPU graphics cards to be competitive against other single GPU graphics cards at the same price point and infrequency are comparisons made with different products.

The NVIDIA GTX460 GPUs have 7 processors (336 cores) out of 15 processors (480 cores)enabled, when combined, assuming assume that the two GPUS linked together using SLI technology offers 2x boost or scaling provides a very potent and powerful gaming solution.
Unfortunately SLI technology for multiple GPUs means that we do not increase the total amount of video memory, critical for high detail and high resolution gaming.

We are stuck with the 'low' 768MB video memory for the pair of NVIDIA cards.

In the 3DMark benchmark, the Radeon HD7970 starts to stretch its legs once the newer graphics technologies such as DirectX 10 and 11 (in 3D Mark Vantage and 3D Mark 11) are utilised. AMD offer a much superior performance per watt (efficiency) over the pair of older cards.