AMD Radeon HD 7970 Review: 28nm And Graphics Core Next, Together As One
by Ryan Smith on December 22, 2011 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- ATI
- Radeon HD 7000
Total War: Shogun 2
One of our goals with this iteration of our benchmark suite was to throw in some additional non-FPS games, so we’re broadening our horizons a bit by adding in Total War: Shogun 2. Shogun 2 is the latest installment of the long-running Total War series of turn based strategy games, and alongside Civilization V is notable for just how many units it can put on a screen at once. As it also turns out, it’s the single most punishing game in our benchmark suite.
When deciding on what settings to use with Shogun, it required a bit more creativity on our part. 2560 is a true moonshot; everything is turned on, and it takes a minimum of 1.5GB of VRAM to run the game at this resolution. Accordingly performance is rather dismal, though as this is a TBS 30fps isn’t quite as critical as it is in other games. In any case the 7970 comes the closest to hitting 30fps, coming in just shy at 28.2fps, which is 29% ahead of the GTX 580 and 48% ahead of the 6970.
Meanwhile for 1920 we turned Shogun’s settings down to Very High, and yet we still had to disable MSAA to make it work with 1GB cards (did we mention that Shogun loves VRAM?). At these lower settings performance rockets up, and at the same time so does the 7970’s lead over the GTX 580. Here it’s 36% ahead of the GTX 580, which will be the greatest lead among all of our gaming benchmarks. As for the 7970 compared to the 6970, it’s still 48% of the 6970 showing us just how similar these video cards are at times.
Finally at 1680 the overall performance goes up yet again, but the 7970’s lead remains. It’s ahead of the GTX 580 by 30%, and 48% ahead of the 6970.
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CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
Well, since you brought that up it reminded me of the PRAISE this or the 7870 article gave amd for "getting rid of all it's own competing cards" and zeroing their distribution so that there was only one choice and it wasn't competing with itself.I didn't hear a single Nvidia basher cry foul, that amd was playing with the market just to slam dunk some dollars on a new release...
I do wonder why when amd pulls the dirtiest of dirty, they are praised...
MrSpadge - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
They'd loose the entire market of Milkyway@Home crunchers if it was just 1/4.RussianSensation - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
FP32 = 3.79 TFlopsFP64 = 0.948 Tflops, which is about 40% faster than HD6970.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
The keyword there was "up to". GCN actually supports 3 different FP64 configurations: 1/2, 1/4, and 1/16. 1/4 may be an artificial limitation on the 7970 or it may be the native speed Tahiti was designed for; it's not clear yet which of those is the case.WhoBeDaPlaya - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Ryan, any chance you could try running a Bitcoin client on the card to see what kind of hash rates we'd get?Esbornia - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Man this site is so biased against AMD it hurts, here we have a new architecture thats beats GTX580 in everything and sometimes GTX590 with almost half the power comsumption and they say the only thing 7970 does right is compute? That it is not a great product but only mediocre? Come on AnandTech we know intel owns you but this is getting ridiculous, see the other neutral sites reviews you will clearly see what AnandTech does if you are even a little smart.SlyNine - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
And a product that is 2 years removed from the 5870 and only performing about 40-60% better... and on a new 28nm chip to boot.It's just not that great.
RussianSensation - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
For almost $200 more as well....MrSpadge - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Reading the entire review (apart from the conclusion) I came to the conclusion that GCN is really cool. Give it some more software support (=time), a cool BOINC project and the HD7950 and I may have found my next card. Can't say AT talked me off of it.MrS
WhoBeDaPlaya - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
WWYBYWB?