PowerColor PCS+ HD7970 (Vortex 2) vs Gainward GTX 680 Phantom

Over the past month or two the market has been flooded with new revisions of the Radeon HD 7970 and GeForce GTX 680. That mixed with some price cuts and more than a couple of recent driver revisions means that the comparison between the two cards has changed significantly since we last looked at them. So today we update the battle by taking two of the most impressive models, both custom factory overclocked, and put them head to head in real world gameplay which includes Battlefield 3, Mass Effect 3 and Skyrim as well as media playback and GPU computing... enter the PowerColor HD 7970 PCS+ (Vortex 2) and Gainward GTX 680 Phantom.