GTX 660 or HD 7870?

I'm looking to upgrade one of these to make the game run better.

The reason why i'm asking is I have an intel CPU, and I've heard that Nvidia cards (gtx) run better with intel CPUs, and that the same goes for ATI and AMD. Normally I'd call BS but, I heard this from fairly techsavvy friends.

My specs atm:
CPU: intel i5-750
RAM: 4GB
GPU: HD 5570
win7

Currently I can run the game fairly high with quite a few features turned off at 1920x1080, but it constantly dips between 20-30 fps, which is unenjoyable imo.

So any tips? I'm leaning towards the 7870 because it seems like a better price-quality ratio.

I personally have a 7850 that I got on sale with 2 games (Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider). But then, I also use an AMD processor. The last few Nvidia cards I've used I never had any luck with but that might have been the manufacturer of the card in question. That's why I went with an ATI with my last purchase. The game runs quite well for me with an average 45-60 FPS.

Also, concerning the rumor with ATI working well with AMD and such, it's likely because AMD develops both the gfx cards as well as the processors so they would more than likely want them to work well together. I've used AMD processors for my last few builds in the last 10 years, simply because they're more cost effective for what you need them to do.

In the past it was true that AMD/ATI ran better together and Nvidia/Intel played better together.

Now days that difference is pretty miniscule to almost non-existent.

Overall Nvidia makes much better cards, AMD recently hit with a new high end line of cards but they are having a lot of issues and the Nvidia 780 is still outperforming them.

For FF14 It really wont matter a whole lot, but as a general rule I tend to buy Nvidia over AMD. Nvidia tends to have better drivers and their cards give more performance than AMD's do, but AMD's are generally cheaper so, there ya go.

That all being said, the 7870 outperforms the 660 in MOST situations. The only time that the 660 tends to pull ahead is games that are heavy in PhysX which MMO's generally don't have (Though future MMO's may, looking at you EQ:Next!).

I would say the 7870 is probably going to be your safer bet.

thanks for the replies sofar!

I forgot that Nvidia offers the ShadowPlay feature, which I find really neat, as I love recording gameplay videos too.

If anyone has any experience with ShadowPlay, I'd love to hear their input too :)

http://www.hwcompare.com/13302/gefor...adeon-hd-7870/ hardware comparison.
http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-HD-78...eForce-GTX-660 benchmark comparison.
Both videocards will easily run 50-60 fps at max settings, but there is a stuttering issue (not often, but happens in certain areas). I solved it by reducing game fps to 30 (25% gpu load lol), others solve it by reducing the number of enabled cpu cores. Also game does not have any kind of antialiasing, so getting a high performance hardware is pointless.
Compressing video using a gpu is a great feature. Intel, AMD and Nvidia support hardware compression, but i believe Nvidia variant is the simplest one to use. Hardware compressing results in a much lesser video quality when uploaded on youtube (double lossy compression), so you may be interested in lossless lagarith codec, which is hardware independent (but much bigger video size).

7870 is a better card performance-wise, but it costs a bit more. Specs-wise, its a better card in terms of fps and graphical quality. BUT, you have to consider the fact that AMD cards don't have PhysX or Ambient Occlucion, whereas Nvidia cards do (AMD cards does have a physics system, but some games operate specifically only on Physx for some reason). If you're planning to only get the card for games that don't use those features, then you should get the AMD card. Overclocking on AMD cards are also much easier if I recall correctly.