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
Battlefield 3
Its popularity aside, Battlefield 3 may be the most interesting game in our benchmark suite for a single reason: it’s the first AAA DX10+ game. It’s been 5 years since the launch of the first DX10 GPUs, and 3 whole process node shrinks later we’re finally to the point where games are using DX10’s functionality as a baseline rather than an addition. Not surprisingly BF3 is one of the best looking games in our suite, but as with past Battlefield games that beauty comes with a high performance cost
How to benchmark BF3 is a point of great contention. Our preference is to always stick to the scientific method, which means our tests need to be perfectly repeatable or very, very close. For that reason we’re using an on-rails section of the single player game, Thunder Run, to do our testing. This isn’t the most strenuous part of Battlefield 3 – multiplayer can get much worse – but it’s the most consistent part of the game. In general we’ve found that minimum framerates in multiplayer are about half of the average framerate in Thunder Run, so it’s important to frame your expectations accordingly.
With that out of the way, Battlefield 3 ends up being one of the worst games for the 7970 from a competitive standpoint. It always maintains a lead over the GTX 580, but the greatest lead is only 13% at 2560 without any MSAA, and everywhere else it’s 3-5%. Of course it goes without saying that realistically BF3 is only playable at 1920 (no MSAA) and below on any of the single-GPU cards in this lineup, so unfortunately for AMD it’s the 5% number that’s the most relevant.
Meanwhile compared to the 6970, the 7970’s performance gains are also a bit below average. 2560 and 1920 with MSAA are quite good at 30% and 34% respectively, but at 1920 without MSAA that’s only a 25% gain, which is one of the smaller gaps between the two cards throughout our entire test suite.
The big question of course is why are we only seeing such a limited lead from the 7970 here? BF3 implements a wide array of technologies so it’s hard to say for sure, but there is one thing we know they implement in the engine that only NVIDIA can use: Driver Command Lists, the same “secret sauce” that boosted NVIDIA’s Civilization V performance by so much last year. So it may be that NVIDIA’s DCL support is helping their performance here in BF3, much like it was in Civ V.
But in any case, this is probably the only benchmark that’s really under delivered for the 7970. 5% is still a performance improvement (and we’ll take it any day of the week), but this silences any reasonable hope of being able to use 1920 at Ultra settings with MSAA on a single-GPU card for the time being.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
292 Comments
View All Comments
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.