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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Esbornia - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Fan boy much?CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
Finally, piroroadkill, Esbornia - the gentleman ericore merely stated what all the articles here have done as analysis while the radeonite fans repeated it ad infinitum screaming nvidia's giant core count doesn't give the percentage increase it should considering transistor increase.Now, when it's amd's turn, we get ericore under 3 attacks in a row...---
So you three all take it back concerning fermi ?
maverickuw - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
I want to know when the 7950 will come out and hopefully it'll come out at $400duploxxx - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Only the fact that ATI is able to bring a new architecture on a new process and result in such a performance increase for that power consumption is a clear winner.looking at the past with Fermy 1st launch and even Cayman VLIW4 they had much more issues to start with.
nice job, while probably nv680 will be more performing it will take them at least a while to release that product and it will need to be also huge in size.
ecuador - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Nice review, although I really think testing 1680x1050 for a $550 is a big waste of time, which could have to perhaps multi-monitor testing etc.Esbornia - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Its Anand you should expect this kind of shiet.Ryan Smith - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
In this case the purpose of 1680 is to allow us to draw comparisons to low-end cards and older cards, which is something we consider to be important. The 8800GT and 3870 in particular do not offer meaningful performance at 1920.poohbear - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Why do you bencmark @ 1920x1200 resolution? according to the Steam December survey only 8% of gamers have that resolution, whereas 24% have 1920x1080 and 18% use 1680x1050 (the 2 most popular). Also, minimum FPS would be nice to know in your benchmarks, that is really useful for us! just a heads up for next time u benchmark a video card! Otherwise nice review! lotsa good info at the beginning!:)Galcobar - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Page 4, comments section.Esbornia - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
They dont want to show the improvements on min FPS cause they hate AMD, you should know that already.