New Video Card Recommendations for Battlefield 3

Personally I opted for the cheaper method for a new video card for Battlefield 3: Bought a 2nd video card for Crossfire, got 2x6870s now, both from XFX. That should be plenty good for Battlefield 3, and for games for the next several years.

A 560 is recommended by the makers themselves... but I'm sure a 580 would make things really look amazing and fly. I recently upgraded to a 460 and I was a bit anxious at first it's so QUIET (I thought it was broken)!!!! Hope you get a great card.

pparks1 said:

I'm almost positive I am going for the reference design. I have 0 intention of overclocking this at all. I managed to get BF3 up and running on my 9800GTX+ with settings at low. It's fine by me, but it has a hard time going to full screen without crashing the beta 285.38 nvidia driver. So, i'm pretty darn sure I will be 100% satisfied with a GTX570 at stock clocks, full screen, with settings around Med-High.

Edit: eVGA GTX570 reference design card ordered. $329 and a free copy of Batman Arkham game.
Newegg.com - EVGA 012-P3-1570-AR GeForce GTX 570 (Fermi) 1280MB 320-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

Parks: I'm having the same issue/situation! Exact same thing. Glad I'm not in the boat alone lol

What's the price difference from the 560 Ti vs GTX570?

Edit: $230 vs $330

I'd rather save the $100.. :/

Not sure if this will help you but i bin playing the beta several days now and this games runs smooth on my rig looks great but dose have my gpu temps running a little higher then BC2 dose on a 24'' LCD and 2X 19'' LCD but have not bin able to get the beta of this game on all 3 of my monitors yet
PC specks are.
gforce gtx470
AMD Phenom II Black Edition 965 3.4Mhz (co to 3.8)
8gigs of OCZ 1333 ram
2WD 800gig 32meg 7200rpm drives in raid 0

pparks1 said:

Probably not a bad idea. I don't upgrade my video cards all that often. My current card, 9800GTX+ is now over 3 years old.

I went with the 570 simply for more power during video editing. My software can take advantage of the CUDA cores. So, since I edit a fair amount of stuff that I shoot with my camcorder, I figured it would be worth the extra $100 for more horsepower.

Plus, I liked the reference design of the 570...versus the 560TI's that use the aftermarket coolers and can blow the hot air right into your case.

What about ATi/AMD cards??

pparks1 said:

The software that I use for video rendering (Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD 10) only utilizes Nvidia Cuda...and not ATI Stream. So, I didn't even consider ATI.

Second, historically, I've had better luck with the Nvidia Forceware driver sets versus ATI Catalyst...so I preferred to stay nvidia.

Finally, since my old card was Nvidia and so in the new one, I don't have to change anything on my machine when I install the new card. Just change cards, existing drivers and software will work with new card.

Oh gotcha. I was just curious. Some friends were recommending the ATi Radeon HD6870 to me.

Too many choices! ahhh