AMD has a very good gaming + compute chip in the HD 7970. Even when the inital reviews were out most reviewers appreciated the overclocking headroom and scalability in performance. With the launch of GTX 680 Nvidia beat the HD 7970 in a stock configuration. Everybody who has a HD 7970 card which overclocked well (1125 at stock volts and 1200+ with extra voltage) knows that HD 7970 OC performance is faster than GTX 680 OC. At 1080p/1200p its a contest, higher up there is only one card which can be called the fastest card - HD 7970. the launch of HD 7970 Ghz edition is just to beat the GTX 680 in stock and win the marketing battle. Also the latest drivers also have played a part in that win with siginificant improvements in Dirt 3, Skyrim, Batman AC (MSAA). So its actually not just hardware which has titlted the scales, but a mix of hardware and software. If people don't acknowledge that basic fact they are just in denial.
Some of the most demanding games clearly run better on HD 7970 especially at max settings. BF3, Crysis 2, Witcher 2 / Witcher 2 EE, Anno 2070, Shogun 2, Batman AC, Alan Wake, Dirt Showdown, Metro 2033, Crysis Warhead . Radeon HD 7970 wins most of the games except Shogun 2. BF3 is pretty much equal on both cards. Even Batman AC runs faster at 8X MSAA on HD 7970, though on FXAA its clearly faster on GTX 680. The rest run faster on HD 7970. the gap gets wider at 1600p and multi monitor, which is where a USD 500 flagship card's performance really matters. Even these most demanding games run at 60+ fps at 1080p. So I don't see any merit in judging them by 1080p performance when playabililty differences are going to difficult to tell because all these cards are giving more than sufficient performance. The gap in games like Alan Wake (25%), Metro 2033(20%), Crysis Warhead (25%), Witcher 2 (20%) especially at higher resolutions is very significant. The most important point is none of these games hit 60 fps at 1600p. And frankly these are the games which truly tell us about these high end cards. Games which do 100+ fps at 1600p aren't going to give any idea of the true capabilites of their architectures and performance.
Also overclocking does not have guarantees and the responsibility lies on the user to extract max possible performance. There are chances of getting a chip which is a dud at overclocking. So assuming that every chip will overclock reliably is a big mistake. With the AMD Radeon HD 7970 Ghz edition the cards are guaranteed to run at those speeds. When the GTX 680 launched and HD 7970 users mentioned that a HD 7970 at similar clock speeds would beat the GTX 680 , lots of people said only stock configurations should be compared. Fair enough. Now that same theory should be applied.
