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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nitro912gr - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
I was planning a switch from AMD (4850) to a(n) nVidia GPU for my next upgrade, because they perform well both in computing and in gaming, and I need both fields to be filled here.But now I'm not sure about that, I will wait a bit to see how the software will welcome the new architecture first.
I hope they work as well so I can just pick the cheapest GPU.
Chloiber - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
The thing I still don't like about the new AMD cards is their massive problems with anisotropic filtering. AMD promised twice (with Cayman and Tahiti) that the "AF-Bug" is gone. But it's still mediocre to NV and worse than older cards (pre-R600).The bad thing about this is, that it's easily detectable in games and not just a theoretical flaw. It got better than Cayman, but it's still worse than NVs AF.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
Yes, thank you for that. We are supposed to ignore all amd radeon issues and failures and less thans, though, so we can extoll the greatness....Then when they "finally catch up to nvidia years later with some fix", the reviewers can tell us and admit openly that amd radeon has a years long problem of inferiority to nvidia that they "finally solved" and then we can get a gigantic zipped up download to show what "was for years amd fail hidden and not spoken of" is gone !
Hurrah !
Wow it's so much fun seeing it happen, again.
KoVaR - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Awesome job on power consumption and noise levels. If only AMD did so well in the CPU realm...alpha754293 - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Can you play a game while running a compute job?There's word that even for the nVidia Tesla compute accelerators (based on Fermi) that it stutters when you try to play a game or video while it is actively computing/working on something else.
Is that the case here too?
SlyNine - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
I'm sure it does, Context switching still occures a huge penalty.MrSpadge - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
GCN won't be able to help this on its own. The software needs to catch up. It's a major concern for true GP-GPU and heterogenous computing, though! And not even just launching a game, trying to use your desktop is enough of a problem already..MrS
shin0bi272 - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Id really like to see is when you guys bench with an nvidia physx game... run the bench with physx on (maxed out if there's an option) once and off once.I know everyone is going to claim that physx is a gimmick but a good portion of that reason is because when a game supports it NO ONE BENCHMARKS IT WITH IT ON! That's like buying a big screen tv and covering half of it with duct tape. And lets not forget AMD opted to not use the tech when nvidia offered it to them... so AMD's loss is Nvidia's gain and no one uses it in their reviews because its not hardware neutral. That's partial favoritism IMHO.
Also why wasnt the gtx590 or the 6990 tested @ 16x10 dx10 HQ 16xaf on Metro2033? The 580 was tested and the 6970 were but not the dual chip cards. Whats up with that?
Finally - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Spoken like a true Nvidia viral marketing shillshin0bi272 - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
So because I prefer the extra eye candy physx offers I cant ask a question about a testing methodology? Sounds like someone has physx envy.