Benchmarks for 2012

Lost Planet 2
Stalker: Call of Pripyat

Both have standalone benchmark tools.

Also for mid-range, low-end card Resident Evil 5 & Street Fighter IV. These two also come with standalone tool.

Oh, before I forget Metro 2033 (can be used to replace SCOP). But you need the full game.

Don't use Starcraft 2. It is highly CPU oriented.

Stick with Crysis: Warhead. Crysis 2 is biased - crippling performance on AMD cards via *excessive* tessellation, on purpose. Crysis 2 tessellation: too much of a good thing? - The Tech Report - Page 1

Battlefield 3. Metro 2033. Dirt 3. Civilization V. --> my suggestions.

Yeah BF3 should be included.

Metro 2033 definitely is a game to run benches in.
I think Metro Last light will also be something to look out for to run a few benches. Crisis 2? No from my side.


Dirt 3 too I think is good. Battlefield 3 too should be in there

Crysis Warhead would be better than C2.I think Crysis 2 depends too much on GPU than CPU. Ran perfect
On gamer settings on my Celeron + 9500Gt rig giving 35 frames easily at gamer settings(yea it was at low resolution)
Crysis Warhead is still able to tax my Phenom II x4 840 + 9500Gt now. Hardly got 10 frames at 1024x768 with enthusiast settings. Yes I know my GPU is culprit here bit still wanted to make my point

ico said:

Don't use Starcraft 2. It is highly CPU oriented.

Stick with Crysis: Warhead. Crysis 2 is biased - crippling performance on AMD cards via *excessive* tessellation, on purpose. Crysis 2 tessellation: too much of a good thing? - The Tech Report - Page 1

Battlefield 3. Metro 2033. Dirt 3. Civilization V. --> my suggestions.

Click to expand...

The article is informative yes, but it only indicates that AMD's cards are not as capable of handling extreme levels of tesselation and that flaw will be apparent across all games, not just Crysis 2, as mentioned here...

Unnecessary geometric detail slows down all GPUs, of course, but it just so happens to have a much larger effect on DX11-capable AMD Radeons than it does on DX11-capable Nvidia GeForces. The Fermi architecture underlying all DX11-class GeForce GPUs dedicates more attention (and transistors) to achieving high geometry processing throughput than the competing Radeon GPU architectures. We've seen the effect quite clearly in synthetic tessellation benchmarks. Few games have shown a similar effect, simply because they don't push enough polygons to strain the Radeons' geometry processing rates.

Now, how do we deal with this? Do we ignore the fact that AMD's architecture is deficient at handling extreme tesselation and recommend it anyway? Especially considering that tesselation is a factor when purchasing high-end cards?

Would you buy a 7990 when you know that it won't handle a Crysis 2 or HAWX 2 as well as, say, a 690 at the same price? It is a theoretical situation, but what do you guys think?

Regarding the other games,
Battlefield 3: Forgot about that. Yep, should be included. I don't think it has an in-built benchmark but we'll see what can be done.
Metro 2033: Our testing with this game showed very erratic performance, I don't think this should be included but let us see what more of you guys have to say.
Dirt 3: F1 2011 is already included, as it uses the same engine, benchmarking Dirt 3 seems kind of redundant.

Crysis Warhead: The problem with this game is that the scores just stagnated after a certain point and there wasn't much appreciable difference across cards, the game was obviously hitting a CPU limited wall. It is alright for low to mid-range cards though.

@thetechfreak: I actually don't get your point, you're comparing 2 different settings on 2 different setups. Also, how did you benchmark it?

What I meant to say is that Crysis 2 is not good enough for benches for now. It I think scales the GPU too much than CPU. so Crysis warhead is to go for benches. Regarding how I benchmarked it? No I didn't run the benches for Crysis 2. Just played through the game. Posting on that experience

r4gs said:

The article is informative yes, but it only indicates that AMD's cards are not as capable of handling extreme levels of tesselation and that flaw will be apparent across all games, not just Crysis 2, as mentioned here...

Unnecessary geometric detail slows down all GPUs, of course, but it just so happens to have a much larger effect on DX11-capable AMD Radeons than it does on DX11-capable Nvidia GeForces. The Fermi architecture underlying all DX11-class GeForce GPUs dedicates more attention (and transistors) to achieving high geometry processing throughput than the competing Radeon GPU architectures. We've seen the effect quite clearly in synthetic tessellation benchmarks. Few games have shown a similar effect, simply because they don't push enough polygons to strain the Radeons' geometry processing rates.

Now, how do we deal with this? Do we ignore the fact that AMD's architecture is deficient at handling extreme tesselation and recommend it anyway? Especially considering that tesselation is a factor when purchasing high-end cards?

Would you buy a 7990 when you know that it won't handle a Crysis 2 or HAWX 2 as well as, say, a 690 at the same price? It is a theoretical situation, but what do you guys think?

Click to expand...

You've missed the point. It's more like - pre-HD 7000 series AMD cards are not capable of handling *insane* level of tessellation.

Fact is, Crysis 2's *insane* level of tessellation adds nothing to visual quality as one would expect. Normal level of tessellation would have been fine. I don't see any point in heavily tessellating an already flat slab and running a tessellated water mesh below the ground for NOT particular reason. Tessellation here was used to cripple performance on competitor's GPU.

Let's take Battlefield 3 for example. Obviously involves tessellation, but as much as it should be. This game gives you the right pecking order.

HD 7970 > HD 7950/GTX 580 > HD 6970/GTX570 > HD 6950/GTX 560 Ti > GTX 560/HD 6870.

thetechfreak said:

What I meant to say is that Crysis 2 is not good enough for benches for now. It I think scales the GPU too much than CPU. so Crysis warhead is to go for benches. Regarding how I benchmarked it? No I didn't run the benches for Crysis 2. Just played through the game. Posting on that experience

Click to expand...

Ummm.... Ok, but that isn't necessarily a reliable benchmark. From what I can make out, you claim the game was playable on gamer settings on your celeron and unplayable at enthusiast on your phenom. Also, how did you get the scores of 35 and 10? Fraps? Was that the average score across a certain playthrough or was it just you glancing at the overlay FPS on and off while playing?

My main problem with your post is just this, what makes you say that it "scales the GPU too much than CPU"?

If you remember the graphics card benchmark we conducted last year, we found that the game scaled very well across all cards (40 GPUs I think) and posted very consistent and usable results. At that time we didn't apply the DirectX11 or high-res texture patch though.

thetechfreak said:

What I meant to say is that Crysis 2 is not good enough for benches for now. It I think scales the GPU too much than CPU. so Crysis warhead is to go for benches. Regarding how I benchmarked it? No I didn't run the benches for Crysis 2. Just played through the game. Posting on that experience

Click to expand...

didn't get you.

I haven't seen whats included, but:

For GPU:

Crysis 2
Crysis 1
Battlefield 3
Batman: Arkham City (physx disabled)
Serious Sam 3: BFE
Metro 2033

CPU/Mobo/RAM:

COD (MW2 onwards)
Red Faction: Armageddon
Battlefield 3
Starcraft II
Civilization V
Crysis Warhead
StarCraft II

Synthetic:

3D Mark 11
3D Mark Vantage (Physx Disabled)
PC Mark 7
Cinebench
Unigine Heaven 2.5
Stone Giant
LinPack tests
WPrime

How is Crysis warhead not scaling well for you guys? As long as the right CPU-GPU combination is chosen, scaling should always cross 90% in multi-GPU scenarios. Besides, I thought it was common knowledge that Crysis enjoyed a beefy CPU more than a beefy GPU( in the sense that the fastest of GPUs will stutter if your CPU is a C2D): it does better Physics than any physx game of today off the CPU lol. With the SB-E chip you guys should have no problems testing GPU performance: My i7 960 at stock could handle the game with two 580s at a comparatively lower resolution (1680x1050), where things become more CPU-bound, especially in FPSes.

I would like to suggest a few changes to the test bench if possible:

A 2560x1600 monitor should be on your list apart from testing with 3 1080p monitors in surround if it is not already there. The 1080p monitors dont have to be identical- in benches you want the framerates and quality settings rather than "viewing pleasure", so it should be a plug and play process with monitor reuse.
The mobo, if possible should be changed. The board has less power phases than even cheaper X58 boards.
I do not find it surprising that literally all of your 3-ch RAM kits failed. DDR3 kits and controllers have always been very sensitive to even slight voltage changes in my experience- much more than DDR2 has ever been. On the upside, you guys can get 4 -ch kits to tread X79 "right" lol.


To those who oppose crysis 2:

Before crying about "excessive tess" in Crysis 2, dont forget that both Nvidia and AMD face the same runtime environments in the game. Fact is that Nvidia has a better tess engine in the GF100/110 line vs Northern Islands. Besides, DX9 mode is still meaty.

The fact that Crysis 2 implements tessellation in that manner is not completely Crytek's fault. Microsoft designed the API to treat whole objects rather than just portions. This was intended to ensure that the polygon reduction or increase scaled well with viewport movement. The DX11 API can behave so erratically, it even calls for the road to be tessellated when the floor is tessellated (causing ridge formation on the white paint on the road).
While a lot of hidden portions of water faces tessellation, that is a limitation of the editor/engine. Water is one entity in the game. Every bit of water in a level is a part of its "ocean," be it a fountain, a waterfall or a river (which is more often than not a visible portion of the ocean itself).
You're concerned because this is tessellation. Many games actually do this to standard geometry and objects.
The Sandbox Editor does not follow the traditional "quake" approach of building maps. When you call for a new map to be created in the editor, the first thing you see is a vast ocean . On top of that you add an island and then you model that island a bit like clay. You do not follow traditional approaches in the first few steps. The engine cannot understand which parts of the water hidden by the island will visible to the player, so it cannot choose to purposely not render some portions (that is beyond the logic of the code).
You do realize that sequel engines are most often not built from scratch? Assuming they could have "fixed" this if they'd built from the beginning, you would have to wait for at least another 3 years for Crysis 2, and the devs would have gone broke by then (at the very least EA, being EA, would have stopped funding Crysis 2 and the franchise would be terminated; between Crysis Warhead and Crysis 2, a significant amount of time had passed).

All this is not to say the devs were not half-lazy: the PC version released as a console port (albeit well optimized) with a Day 0 update, and they should have chosen not to tessellate the jersey barrier. When you deal with EA, this is what happens to you: you sink in the world of corporate suits who care about the bottom line more than their customers. Crysis 2 is a bad example of a Cryengine 3 game. The engine itself is awesome.

Extreme Gamer said:

While a lot of hidden portions of water faces tessellation, that is a limitation of the editor/engine. Water is one entity in the game. Every bit of water in a level is a part of its "ocean," be it a fountain, a waterfall or a river (which is more often than not a visible portion of the ocean itself).

Click to expand...

Vindicates my reason to avoid this game.

Heavily tessellated water everywhere (for no reason) and you can't even see? What's the point? Done on purpose to "cripple"?

*img405.imageshack.us/img405/5954/img0032910.jpg

*img31.imageshack.us/img31/6109/img0032911.jpg

yea...crysis 2 is not neutral. crysis/warhead is...better looking game as well imo and that's what should be there.

TheTechReport's analysis said:

Crytek's decision to deploy gratuitous amounts of tessellation in places where it doesn't make sense is frustrating, because they're essentially wasting GPU power—and they're doing so in a high-profile game that we'd hoped would be a killer showcase for the benefits of DirectX 11. Now, don't get me wrong. Crysis 2 still looks great and, in some ways at least, is still something of a showcase for both DX11 and the capabilities of today's high-end PCs. Some parts of the DX11 upgrade, such as higher-res textures and those displacement-mapped brick walls, appreciably improve the game's visuals. But the strange inefficiencies create problems. Why are largely flat surfaces, such as that Jersey barrier, subdivided into so many thousands of polygons, with no apparent visual benefit? Why does tessellated water roil constantly beneath the dry streets of the city, invisible to all?

Click to expand...

ico said:

Vindicates my reason to avoid this game.

Heavily tessellated water everywhere (for no reason) and you can't even see? What's the point? Done on purpose to "cripple"?

*img405.imageshack.us/img405/5954/img0032910.jpg

*img31.imageshack.us/img31/6109/img0032911.jpg

Click to expand...

Did you read what I posted? The engine treats all the water as one entity. You cant cut off segments. This is not a quake engine deriviative.

another no here for crysis 2. but u can use unigine heaven "normal" and "extreme" tess if u want.

infact hd 7000 (the ones u are likely to review now) series has better tess than gtx 500 series. but benchmark set should be neutral.

Extreme Gamer said:

Did you read what I posted? The engine treats all the water as one entity.

Click to expand...

stupid thing to do. whole point is about heaving a neutral benchmark set.

well, I had suggested Civilization V in my suggestions. That game also involves heavy tessellation and nVidia cards perform better in that game if you take HD 7000 series out of consideration. Point is, that game isn't shady in its implementation like Crysis 2 is. Crysis 2 cripples for no visual benefit. Not the case in Civilization V.

Very interesting. I didn't know that about Crysis 2. The water bit I mean, will have to look into it further. Ok then, since so many of you guys are opposed to it, Crysis 2 will be dropped from the benchmarks. We shall still keep it for reference but not consider it for performance scores.

Considering that we are first going to kick off our benchmarking with an ASUS 7970, we will run all possible benchmarks just to be on the safe-side.

Sorry, can't change the board, it is the only one we could get for long-term use and also, the RAM modules went "kaput" before we got the X79 mobo.

@Extreme gamer:

3x1080p monitors? It isn't really feasible and to what effect? I don't know if even 1% of our readers have such setups.

Isn't Arkham City supposed to have problems with AMD cards? Something to do with tesselation again if I remember correctly.

r4gs said:

Isn't Arkham City supposed to have problems with AMD cards? Something to do with tesselation again if I remember correctly.

Click to expand...

Nothing related to tessellation this time. Arkham City is fine. It's just that it's a buggy game, but still it's fine.

dont forget to submit some results at ThinkDigit Forum @ hwbot. Link in my sig.

r4gs said:

Very interesting. I didn't know that about Crysis 2. The water bit I mean, will have to look into it further. Ok then, since so many of you guys are opposed to it, Crysis 2 will be dropped from the benchmarks. We shall still keep it for reference but not consider it for performance scores.

Considering that we are first going to kick off our benchmarking with an ASUS 7970, we will run all possible benchmarks just to be on the safe-side.

Sorry, can't change the board, it is the only one we could get for long-term use and also, the RAM modules went "kaput" before we got the X79 mobo.

@Extreme gamer:

3x1080p monitors? It isn't really feasible and to what effect? I don't know if even 1% of our readers have such setups.

Isn't Arkham City supposed to have problems with AMD cards? Something to do with tesselation again if I remember correctly.

Click to expand...

3x1080p because then you are not bottlenecked by CPUs while benchmarking. If a card can average 30fps @medium settings in most games in that resolution, it is worth buying across all setups.

I never said that the RAM died because of X79 (because my experience is with X58 and P55 in DDR3)
Now you guys can get a few quad channel RipjawsZ 16GB kits from G.Skill (1600Mhz kits are decently priced).

Arkham City had issues across the board when it was launched with DX11. The issue is now fixed.

@Joker: The engine reuses code from CE2 for reasons I stated before. It works in a manner that is not very different to CE2 (where the water was rendered under the soil(only, it had not been tessellated). No, it is not stupid. It saves you a lot of effort when making maps, as can be exemplified by Crysis 1.
In Cryengine 3, it is not the dev's intention to crush systems, it performs better than Crysis across the board even in DX9 while maintaining visual fidelity. The fact that the water cannot be clipped is a coding byeproduct and to fix this they would probably have to rewrite whole sections.

From a financial standpoint it was better for the devs to not do that: another two years fixing this could cause heavy losses. Crytek did not have a game out for 3 years after Warhead.
Other games too show such behavior (excessive rendering). only when it is tessellation, people get angry.

____
You guys should note that Unigine Heaven 2.5, based on your logic, should not be included: it does 3x more tessellation work than CE3. Literally everything is tessellated. Does that not make the benchmark biased (based on your logic)?

Not bottlenecked at 3x1080p? Good point but it really isn't practical. Especially since most nVidia cards come with only 2xDVI outputs and we don't normally benchmark SLI set-ups. As I pointed out earlier, the benchmarks are for all cards, from the humble 520 to the 7970 and beyond.

Also, if you're going to get a 100fps at 1080p you can rest assured the card is quite capable.

Regarding the X79 and RAM, I never meant it that way. Sorry. What I wanted to say was that we got our brand new X79 and ASUS HD7970, excitedly set up the whole rig, and then realised that all our 2133MHz, triple channel kits had 1 dead module.

We are getting replacements and will inform you guys what we get when we get it. I actually do want to check out for myself if single channel, dual channel and so on makes any appreciable difference in performance. A story for another time.

Unigene is a synthetic benchmark, it is meant to stress all aspects of the system. The fact that AMD cannot handle extreme levels of tessellation is a short-coming on their part. Its not like physx or something which is nVidia specific. That said, we do run 2 tests with Unigene, one maxxed out and one at 720p and no tessellation, with more weightage being given to the 720p score as it is run across all cards.

Anyway, that is what we normally do and this is a new year, so, new tests.

To get this sorted, what would you guys suggest, we ignore the fact that AMD hasn't handled tessellation as well as nVidia, in an extreme situation no doubt, but one that matters for high-end gaming, and completely leave anything more than moderate tesselation out of all our tests? In fact, do you think it is alright to leave Crysis 2 as long as there is no tesselation?

What we do normally is run a standard set of tests across all graphics cards, at medium settings, for reference. Then, we run some tests at low settings for the low to lower-mid range cards and then some higher-resolution tests for higher-mid range cards onwards. Should we include extreme tessellation in these tests or not and why?

Add:
Civilization 5(advanced DX11 features still not implemented in any other games).
Metro 2033(still a game that can't run well on even a 7970, scales absolutely well with multigpu, all the way up to trisli or trifire)
Switch F1 with Dirt 3, more people play Dirt 3 than F1(hell boring game), same engine, but won't hurt to choose Dirt 3
Arkham City(don't test Physx, whole code is bugged as hell)
BF3, because its there
Also: Fluid simulation sample in the DirectX SDK: To test compute, this gen of GPUs are all about compute.
Also Texture decompression in Rage, to test compute.

Do keep Crysis 2, it doesn't matter whether it tesselates the whole map or not, its a standard feature, if nVidia does well on it, that does not disqualify it as a benchmark, you could gladly include any game that does well on AMD due to any standard feature set.

In the end, Crysis 2 is the best looking game in 2011, and prety much competes head to head with Metro 2033/Crysis. And also most well known sites use Crysis 2.

Rage to test OpenGL implementation.

r4gs said:

Unigene is a synthetic benchmark, it is meant to stress all aspects of the system. The fact that AMD cannot handle extreme levels of tessellation is a short-coming on their part. Its not like physx or something which is nVidia specific. That said, we do run 2 tests with Unigene, one maxxed out and one at 720p and no tessellation, with more weightage being given to the 720p score as it is run across all cards.

Anyway, that is what we normally do and this is a new year, so, new tests.

To get this sorted, what would you guys suggest, we ignore the fact that AMD hasn't handled tessellation as well as nVidia, in an extreme situation no doubt, but one that matters for high-end gaming, and completely leave anything more than moderate tesselation out of all our tests? In fact, do you think it is alright to leave Crysis 2 as long as there is no tesselation?

Click to expand...

well, if you pick up HD 7900 series card now....it handles extreme tesselation better than GTX 580 as well. Shall easily win in each Unigine Heaven, Civilization V and Crysis 2 with Extreme Tesselation enabled.
My only gripe with Crysis 2 was, yes - they are using extreme tesselation....but not to make things look better. Rather to waste GPU power.

In Unigine Heaven and Civilization V (I have the game), at least I can see the effect of "extreme."

Extreme Gamer said:

You guys should note that Unigine Heaven 2.5, based on your logic, should not be included: it does 3x more tessellation work than CE3. Literally everything is tessellated. Does that not make the benchmark biased (based on your logic)?

Click to expand...

No, not at all. I can see what's happening at least. Stones and buldings start to look better in Unigine Heaven. Civilization V starts to look aesthetically better.

tkin said:

Also Texture decompression in Rage, to test compute.

Click to expand...

Civilization V's texture decompression would be better.

ico said:

well, if you pick up HD 7900 series card now....it handles extreme tesselation better than GTX 580 as well. Shall easily win in each Unigine Heaven, Civilization V and Crysis 2 with Extreme Tesselation enabled.
My only gripe with Crysis 2 was, yes - they are using extreme tesselation....but not to make things look better. Rather to waste GPU power.

In Unigine Heaven and Civilization V (I have the game), at least I can see the effect of "extreme."


No, not at all. I can see what's happening at least. Stones and buldings start to look better in Unigine Heaven. Civilization V starts to look aesthetically better.


Civilization V's texture decompression would be better.

Click to expand...

I already said Civ 5, I just love Rage, that's why

Plus Rage is OpenGL, so one more reason to see which devs support openGL better.

I agree with tkin. ico, you're missing the point completely. just because it is a coding limitation where AMD gets rear-ended pre-7 series, it does not make the game biased. while you can say that you are not seeing any benefit, you should blame microsoft.

did crytek have knowledge of how DX11 will turn out when they made CE2 (its rhetoric, so dont answer)? how could they have planned to avert programming shortcomings before the technology got released to them?

besides, why would TD/9.9 media do too many 6-series tests any way? Now that 7 series cards are out, they would be testing 7 series cards rather than the oldies?

To get this sorted, what would you guys suggest, we ignore the fact that AMD hasn't handled tessellation as well as nVidia, in an extreme situation no doubt, but one that matters for high-end gaming, and completely leave anything more than moderate tesselation out of all our tests? In fact, do you think it is alright to leave Crysis 2 as long as there is no tesselation?

Click to expand...

IMO this would be favouring AMD. especially now that the 7 series are out.
believe me, such a step can also affect reviewer credibility in the opinions of some people. I do not like many HardOCP reviews for this reason: the settings across all platforms are not even for comparision, and more often than not, they dont use standardized bench tools. they choose to run around the map as the character (this changes the scenario in every runtime).

Regarding the X79 and RAM, I never meant it that way. Sorry. What I wanted to say was that we got our brand new X79 and ASUS HD7970, excitedly set up the whole rig, and then realised that all our 2133MHz, triple channel kits had 1 dead module.

Click to expand...

now this is voodoo (3dfx pun not intended).

Unigene is a synthetic benchmark, it is meant to stress all aspects of the system. The fact that AMD cannot handle extreme levels of tessellation is a short-coming on their part. Its not like physx or something which is nVidia specific. That said, we do run 2 tests with Unigene, one maxxed out and one at 720p and no tessellation, with more weightage being given to the 720p score as it is run across all cards.

Click to expand...

This is why I wanted Crysis 2 to be included.

what I am going to suggest is not exactly gaming cards are built to do.. but all students use this for learning and even many individual professionals do too.. So could you benchmark it..

cards best work with Max and Maya

old version use it in just view port but now it can used for rendering too so check that too..

even Adobe photohsop and after effects as Adobe directly supports this gaming cards for use in it softwares.

extreme gamers point on cyteks engine system seems right.he aint arguing over whether crysis 2 should be kickked out of benchmark set or not but rather his excuse defends the crysis 2 tess system in independent context. am i right @extremegamer??

keep crysis 2 .

i am supporting the inclusion of Crysis 2 and defending the game from unjustified attacks.

Hmm....
What I'll do tomorrow is, I'll set up the ASUS 7970 and then spend the whole day throwing every possible benchmark at it. We can sit and analyze the results at our leisure and see if there are any abnormal results, CPU bottlenecks and stuff like that.

That would be a good idea.

You can also use MSI afterburner for recording: it makes FRAPS redundant.

any update yet R4?

Sorry for the delay. Should have replied sooner, but it is getting to issue closing and things are getting a bit hectic.

Quick update: Ran a lot of benchmarks, switched F1 2011 with Dirt 3, couldn't run Metro 2033 since we don't have a copy of the game but we are trying to arrange one. Also, since our test rig has changed, we're running some benchmarks again with the 6990 for reference. Will update once that is complete. Will take a while and again, apologies for the delay.

You should buy the game. Pretty cheap now lol.

I'm sure Digit has a steam account for game reviews?

Good luck with Dirt 3, the game had issues with my G110, could never play it.

Just a small update, as you guys must have already noticed, we also got our hands on the gtx680 courtesy of Zotac.

^^Seriously???
I am sure then Tests/Scores will be published in next Month Digit??

^^ZOTAC GeForce GTX 680 Review - Online Best Latest Price Reviews | Features in India

From where they are getting the ASUS 7970 at 38k, its much cheaper I think.

If I can actually use the word "cheap".

Skud said:

From where they are getting the ASUS 7970 at 38k, its much cheaper I think.

If I can actually use the word "cheap".

Click to expand...

No, asus 7970 is 38k, asus cards always cost more, msi/sapphire goes for 34-36k.

ASUS 7970 is 35.5k in PrimeABGB. Street price might be slightly lesser.