Tom's Hardware has published a second article on the 680 and one page in particular is interesting. So as you guys can see, if you overclock both cards so they run at similar speeds, they perform about equal in triple screen resolution. I would even say that the 7970 performs a little better. The 680 seemed to be overclocked to the max and 7970 could be pushed a little further (they couldn't get passed the CCC overclock limits, not even with Afterburner, big fail imo). Since the 7970 is a little more expensive as well, it seems very hard to crown a clear winner.
This is true, not the first instance I have seen it mentioned either.
If I recall correct the Nvidia GPU has something called GPU Boost or similar and its like an auto overclock feature. So while you have have stock clocks set in your control panel the gpu is raising those clocks in game on its own for a boost.
AMD however is keeping it's stock clocks all the way though.
So when you pit them against each other and you manually overclock you start to close the gap between the two. I do not know the full details on how the Nvidia GPU handles an overclock if it raises the boost limit or only the boost base and if that could/will lead to issues for stability on max overclock as well similar to how a cpu overclock would with intel turbo boost.
The price difference may end up being more of a determine factor than I originally though and while Nvidia is leading AMD is known to always be willing to have the cheaper product and with public eye seeing the GTX680 as the better GPU I feel that is even more incentive for them to not only meet but beat the GTX680 in price.
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