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
Display Tech, Cont: Fast HDMI
Moving on from multi-monitor applications, AMD has not only been working on technologies for multi-monitor users. Southern Islands will also include some video and movie technologies that will be relevant for single and multi-monitor uses alike.
With the 6000 series AMD upgraded their DisplayPort capabilities from DP 1.1 to DP 1.2. With Southern Islands AMD will be upgrading their HDMI capabilities. Currently AMD supports a subset of the complete HDMI 1.4a specification; they can drive S3D displays (the killer feature of 1.4a), but that’s the only thing out of 1.4a they support. HDMI also introduced support for 4K x 2K displays, but both displays and devices that can drive them have been rare. As displays start to become available so too does support for them with AMD’s products.
As per the relevant specifications, both DP 1.2 and HDMI 1.4a can drive 4K x 2K displays, but with the 6000 series the hardware could only handle such a display over DP 1.2. With HDMI it was an issue of bandwidth, as HDMI is based on DVI and uses the same TMDS signaling technology. At normal speed HDMI only has as much bandwidth as single-link HDMI (~4Gbps) which is not enough to drive such a large display. DVI solved this with dual-link DVI, whereas as of HDMI 1.3 the HDMI consortium solved this by tightening their cable specifications to allow for higher clocked transmissions, from 165MHz up to 340MHz.
It’s this higher transmission speed that AMD is adding support for in Southern Islands. AMD calls this Fast HDMI technology, which as near as we can tell is not any kind of HDMI trademark but simply AMD’s branding for high speed HDMI. With Fast HDMI AMD will be able to drive 4K x 2K displays over HDMI – which looks like it will be the common connector for TVs at those high resolutions – along with being able to support 1080P S3D at higher framerates with next-generation TVs. Currently AMD’s cards and TVs alike can only handle 1080P frame packed S3D at up to 48fps (24Hz/eye), or with a bit of hacking up to 60fps (30Hz/eye), which is fine for 24fps movies but much too low for gaming. As next-generation TVs add support for 1080P frame packed S3D at 120fps (60Hz/eye) Southern Islands products will be the first AMD products able to drive them over HDMI through the use of Fast HDMI.
The only remaining questions at this point are just how high does AMD’s Fast HDMI clock (they don’t necessary have to hit 340MHz), and if AMD will add support for any other features that higher bandwidths enable. AMD says that Southern Islands supports “3GHz HDMI”, which appears to be a misnomer similar to how we commonly refer to GDDR5 by its “effective clockspeed” in GHz, even though that’s not actually how it operates. In which case with Fast HDMI AMD may be referring to the maximum throughput per channel, which at 300MHz would be 3Gbps. 300Mhz would still be enough to implement features such as Deep Color (48bpp) over most current resolutions.
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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.