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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Ananke - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
"The 7970 leads the 5870 by 50-60% here and in a number of other games"...and as I see it also carries 500-600% of price premium over the 5870.Meh, this is so so priced for a FireGL card, but very badly placed for a consumer market. Regardless, CUDA is getting more open meanwhile. AMD is still several generations/years behind in the HPC market and marketing a product above the NVidia price targets will not help AMD to make it popular.
Having say so, I am using ATI cards for gaming for several years already, and I am very pleased with their IQ and performance. I have always pre-purchased my ATI cards... What I am missing though is teh promised and never materialized consumer level software that can utilize its calculation ability, aka CyberLink and other video transcoders. If it was not for the naughty Nvidia power draw in the 5th series, I would've gone green to have CUDA. Hence, considering SO MUCH MONEY, I am waiting at least 6 months from now to see what the prices will be for the both new contenders in next GPU architectures :).
Dangerous_Dave - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Seems like AMD can't do anything right these days. Bulldozer was designed for a world that doesn't exist, and now we have this new GPU stinking up the place. I'm sorry but @28nm you have double the transistors per area compared with @40nm, yet the performance is only 30% better for a chip that is virtually the same size! It should be at least twice as far ahead of the 6970 as that, even on immature drivers. As it stands, AMD @ 28nm is only just ahead of Nvidia @ 40nm as far as minimums go (the only thing that matters).I shudder to think how badly AMD is going to get destroyed when Nvidia release their 28nm GPU.
Finally - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
I shudder to think how badly one Nvidia fanboy's ego is going to get scratched if team red released a better GPU and his favourite team has nothing to offer.Oh... they did?
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
We have to let amd "go first" now since they have been so on the brink of bankruptcy collapse for so long that they've had to sell off most of their assets... and refinance by AbuDhabi oil money...I think it's nice our laws and global economy puts pressure on the big winners to not utterly crush the underdogs...
Really, if amd makes another fail it might be the last one before collapse and "restructuring" and frankly not many of us want to see that...
They already made the "last move" a dying company does and slashed with the ax at their people...
If the amd fans didn't constantly demand they be given a few dollars off all the time, amd might not be failing - I mean think about it - a near constant loss, because the excessive demand for price vs perf vs the enemy is all the radeon fans claim to care about.
It would be better for us all if the radeon fans dropped the constant $ complaints and just manned up and supported AMD as real fans, with their pocketbooks... instead of driving their favorite toward bankruptcy and cooked books filled with red ink...
Dangerous_Dave - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
On reflection this card is even worse than my initial analysis. For 3.4billion transistors AMD could have done no research at all and simply integrated two 6870s onto a single die (a la 5870 vs 4870) and ramped up the clock speed to somewhere over 1Ghz (since 28nm would have easily allowed that). This would have produced performance similar to a 6990, and far in excess of the 7970.Instead we've done a lot of research and spent 4.1billion transistors creating a card that is far worse than a 6990!
That's the value of AMD's creative thinking.
cknobman - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
The sad part is your likely too stupid to realize just how idiotic your post sounds.They introduced a new architecture that facilitates much better compute performance as well as giving more gaming performance.
Did you read the article and look at the compute benchmarks or did you just flip through the game benchmark pages and look at numbers without reading?
Zingam - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Or maybe you just don't realize that they've added another 2 billion transistors for minimal graphics performance increase over the previous generation.That's almost as if you buy a new generation BMW that has instead 300 hp, 600hp but is not able to drag a bigger trailer.
The only benefit for you would be that you can brag that you've just got the most expensive and useless car available.
Finally - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
Rule 1A:The frequency of a car pseudoanalogy to explain a technical concept increases with thread length. This will make many people chuckle, as computer people are rarely knowledgeable about vehicular mechanics.
cknobman - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
Holy sh!t are you not reading and understanding the article and posts here??????????The extra transistors and new architecture were to increase COMPUTE PERFORMANCE as well as graphics.
Think bigger picture here dude not just games. Think of fusion and how general computing and graphics computing will merge into one.
This architecture is much bigger than just being a graphics card for games.
This is AMD's fermi except they did it about 100x better than Nvidia keeping power in check and still having amazing performance.
Plus your looking at probably beta drivers (heck maybe alpha) so there could very will be another 10+% increase in performance once this thing hit retail shelves and gets some driver improvements.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
I see. So when nvidia did it, it was abandoning gamers for 6 months of ripping away and gnawing plus... but now, since it's amd, amd has done it 100X better... and no abandonment...Wow.
I love hypocrisy in it's full raw and massive form - it's an absolute wonder to behold.