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
Batman: Arkham City
After a rocky launch last month, Rocksteady finally got their DirectX 11 problems sorted out for Batman: Arkham City earlier this month. Batman: Arkham City is loosely based on Unreal Engine 3, while the DirectX 11 functionality was apparently developed in-house. With the addition of these features Batman is far more a GPU demanding game than its predecessor was, particularly with tessellation cranked up to high.
At Extreme settings Batman is quite daunting for our entire GPU lineup at 2560. Nothing except the GTX 590 can crack 60fps, though the 7970 begins to come close at 52fps. Relative to NVIDIA’s lineup Batman ends up being one of the weaker games for the 7970, with the 7970 only taking an 18% lead over the GTX 580 at 2560. As for the 6970, the 7970 has another very strong showing opposite AMD’s previous generation, beating the 6970 by 44%.
At 1920 we’re still using Extreme settings and the story is much the same, though the 7970’s lead drops a bit more. Against the GTX 580 it’s now only 14% faster, and against the 6970 it’s 35% faster. Things do eventually pick up at 1680 when we back off to Very High settings and stop using MSAA, at which point the 7970 takes a surprising 32% lead over the GTX 580 while the lead over the 6970 jumps back up to 47%.
Looking at all of our cards it’s really the 5870 that tells the whole story. Tessellation plays a large factor in Batman’s performance, and as a result the partially tessellation-constrained 5870 absolutely struggles even at 1920. Consequently this is further proof that AMD was able to get a great deal of additional performance out of their geometry engines even with the 2 tringle/clock limit.
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CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
The gentleman should get one of the high end cards, and run on the common 19x0 x 1xxx monitors that poor people have several of nowadays, then crank up a decent 3d game and get back to us.These cards are not as powerful as the naysayers think - there's a lot of SUCK left in them even in cheap setups, let alone high end everything X2 or X4.
Ph0b0s - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
This was one of the most interesting parts of the article. So the only thing that requires new hardware is "Target Independent Rasterization". What does that do, so we know how much we are missing out on from only having Directx 11 hardware.SlyNine - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Second that.Sgt. Stinger - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
I would like to call attention to that the reviewer at www.sweclockers.com noticed a full 10° C temperature drop on full load after removing and re-mounting the cards cooler with a quality thermal paste. This is quite significant, and the card should be more quiet after doing this.Chloiber - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Computerbase noticed the exact same thing. They said, that AMD even told them, that there was a problem with the thermal paste (that's why they tested it specifically).It's still as loud as a GTX590 with new thermal paste though... :>
Sgt. Stinger - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Well, yes, unless you can use custom fan profiles. I hope it is possible at least via third party software.If not, the cheapest way to get a reference cooler quiet is to remove the shroud and original fan, and strap on a couple of 120mm fans :D
Ryan Smith - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
This is the first I've heard of this. I've pinged AMD, but if they believed it was a problem for us I expect we would have heard about it by now.Sgt. Stinger - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
Well, maybe, but your load temps seem to correspond to sweclockers load temps as they were before re-mounting the cooler. (here's their temp graph, before: http://www.sweclockers.com/image/diagram/2621?k=3f... ) and after remounting they got 66° C instead.SlyNine - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
Honestly I'd rather have these benchmarks now than have the benchmarks cut any shorter becuase he had to remount the fan.Worth looking in to moving forward though.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
Oh, so another amd defect in released cards problem... so did we ever get the same treatment for the 480 or the 470 or the 580 or the 570 ?NO !
Of course not silly rabbit, screw nvidia and excuse amd and blame anything and anyone but.....
Thank you this is hilarious...