 This video is brought to you by our trusted partner Intel. For a limited time only with the purchase of any unlocked Core i5 or Core i7 Intel CPU, get a free Intel beanie with a chance to win an Intel snowboard. Valid for Canadian and US customers only, some restrictions apply. For complete details, visit IntelGamingPromo.com. Welcome to our Crysis 3 video card performance review. So, this is, we're breaking our rule a little bit, guys, so more on that in a moment. This is our evaluation of at about a hundred bucks, about two hundred bucks, about three hundred bucks, and higher than that. Four different price points. What is the best video card to buy? We're going head to head. Green team versus red team at a bunch of different price segments, so you guys will know exactly what you should buy to get the most out of Crysis 3. Now, why did we break our rule? The reason is because Crysis 3 is such a new game. No one has a Wickel release driver yet that's fully optimized for it. So, when we first did our tests with Titan, where we compared Crysis on the variety of platforms, Crysis 3 rather, on a variety of platforms, we saw that AMD had a huge advantage because their driver was optimized for it. Now, Nvidia just released their optimized driver, so now we have an opportunity to go optimized versus optimized head to head at those different price points. So, our test bench is a P9X79 Deluxe with 16 gigs of Mushkin Blackland memory, a 3960X at 4 gigahertz, so that's a 6-core Intel processor. We're using an Ntech 1000 watt power supply, a 128 gig SSD, and for our software, we are using Afterburner 2.3.1 to run all of our overclock settings. We overclock every card to within a reasonable level. So, we don't go absolute max because this should be something that you can obtain just by checking out our spreadsheet, which is going to be linked under the video and dialing those settings into your GPU. They're pretty much safe settings. And then we're using Beta 314.14 for Nvidia and Beta 13.2 for AMD. Now, here are our price ranges. So, head to head for round one is the GTX 650. So, that's this guy right here. Actually, that's not this guy right here. Yes, it is. The 650 power edition from MSI versus a Radeon 7770. So, these are 115 bucks and 120 bucks respectively. We also went for GTX 660, which is this guy right here, versus Radeon 7870, which is one of these two. I believe it's this guy right... No, I'm wrong. This guy right here. Yes, 7870. And then next was... So, those are 229 and 239 respectively. Next was 660Ti, which is this guy right here versus 7950 right here. So, these are 289 and 299. And finally, we have GTX 670 versus Radeon 7970. So, the 670 is the one that's actually still on the bench over there. And there's a very good reason for that because we got some very cryptic numbers from our GTX 670, which we think we can explain because we're using Beta drivers, which I really don't believe in using, but we had to do it for this game because it's so fresh. So, let's... Here we go. So, at our lowest priced tier, you can see this is pretty much a dead tie. Remember, guys, the GTX 650 is actually about 8% cheaper than the 7770. So, if you take these two cards, overclock them to the max, well, max-ish, and run Crysis 3, you're going to get pretty much exactly the same experience. Was it playable at very high spec with anti-aliasing off? Not really. You're probably going to have to turn this game down a little bit more, but for the sake of consistency between the different cards that we ran, we had to pick one setting and kind of go with it. Next up, we've got the $200 weight class of cards. And again, we see pretty much a dead tie. The GTX 660 does come ahead, and remember, it was also a little bit cheaper than the 7870, but this is sort of within the margin of error. When we rerun our Crysis 3 benchmark, which you guys can check out, it's also on the channel, our benchmarking procedure. When we rerun that over and over and over again, we get a variance of about a couple percent. So you can kind of take all the results and factor that into it as well. So moving on to our $300 weight class, we've got another tie, because remember again, the 660 Ti was a little bit cheaper than the 7950. Now pricing for the cards, we used the latest pricing on NCIX. We take the second lowest card. So the lowest one, we kind of throw it away and go, that might be some kind of crazy deal that people can't get, but the second lowest one should be pretty much obtainable. Now this is where things get weird when we get into our $400 weight class. The 7970 scaled beyond the 7950, which makes sense because it's a slightly more powerful card, but our GTX 670 actually didn't perform any better than our 660 Ti. So the 670 is the same architecture as the 660 Ti. It has more functional units. It's clocked higher. Even when we're overclocking both of them, where it's like it's clocked higher. So we can only chalk this up to a bit of driver weirdness in the beta that probably won't be observed once that beta driver makes its way to being a finished driver. So to me, it looks like this is going to end up being another dead tie once that optimization is done, but it just shows you sort of AMD is a little bit further ahead from Nvidia. But we knew this because their Crysis 3 optimized driver was released before Nvidia's when it comes to Crysis 3. Finally, here are all of the cards. So you can clearly see other than the 670 falling below where it's supposed to be, up next to the 7970, that each of those price segments clearly defines itself with a performance improvement. So you can also track on this spreadsheet. This is really cool. Where the best bang for the buck lies, because the GTX 660 and the 7870 literally offer you double the performance of the lower tier cards. Whereas when you move up to 660TIs and 7950s, you might get another 25%, but you're actually spending 50% more than the previous tier of cards. So when it comes to Crysis 3, if you want playable performance, okay, so average around 40 FPS, you want to spend a couple hundred bucks, you're going to get the best bang for your buck. So we can safely say that either the GTX 660, which is this guy right here, or the Radeon HD 7870, either of these would be fantastic options for a Crysis 3 gaming rig, because they're able to maintain average frame rates of around 40 FPS, which is very playable. This is at very high system specs running at 1080p, anti-aliasing is off, so if you want to start turning up those details, those higher end cards will start to pull away more. But for the basic gamer, HD gaming, these cards are a great value, so either of them is a fantastic choice. So I guess my usual recommendations also stand. If you're going to be gaming in surround, I do recommend iFINITY over Nvidia Surround. It is a little bit easier to configure, and the compatibility is very strong. And if you're going to be playing in stereoscopic 3D, I definitely recommend GeForce over Radeon, because the Nvidia 3D vision ecosystem is much more stable and much easier to use than the equivalent from the AMD side. So that pretty much wraps it up. Thank you guys for checking out our Crysis 3 video card roundup. I hope this has made your life a little bit easier if you're trying to buy a video card for Crysis 3. 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