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
Total War: Shogun 2
One of our goals with this iteration of our benchmark suite was to throw in some additional non-FPS games, so we’re broadening our horizons a bit by adding in Total War: Shogun 2. Shogun 2 is the latest installment of the long-running Total War series of turn based strategy games, and alongside Civilization V is notable for just how many units it can put on a screen at once. As it also turns out, it’s the single most punishing game in our benchmark suite.
When deciding on what settings to use with Shogun, it required a bit more creativity on our part. 2560 is a true moonshot; everything is turned on, and it takes a minimum of 1.5GB of VRAM to run the game at this resolution. Accordingly performance is rather dismal, though as this is a TBS 30fps isn’t quite as critical as it is in other games. In any case the 7970 comes the closest to hitting 30fps, coming in just shy at 28.2fps, which is 29% ahead of the GTX 580 and 48% ahead of the 6970.
Meanwhile for 1920 we turned Shogun’s settings down to Very High, and yet we still had to disable MSAA to make it work with 1GB cards (did we mention that Shogun loves VRAM?). At these lower settings performance rockets up, and at the same time so does the 7970’s lead over the GTX 580. Here it’s 36% ahead of the GTX 580, which will be the greatest lead among all of our gaming benchmarks. As for the 7970 compared to the 6970, it’s still 48% of the 6970 showing us just how similar these video cards are at times.
Finally at 1680 the overall performance goes up yet again, but the 7970’s lead remains. It’s ahead of the GTX 580 by 30%, and 48% ahead of the 6970.
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Zingam - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
I think this card is a kinda fail. Well, maybe it is a driver issue and they'll up the performance 20-25% in the future but it is still not fast enough for such huge jump - 2 nodes down!!!It smell like a graphics Bulldozer for AMD. Good ideas on paper but in practice something doesn't work quite right. Raw performance is all that counts (of course raw performance/$).
If NVIDIA does better than usual this time. AMD might be in trouble. Well, will wait and see.
Hopefully they'll be able to release improved CPUs and GPUs soon because this generation does not seem to be very impressive.
I've expected at least triple performance over the previous generation. Maybe the drivers are not that well optimized yet. After all it is a huge architecture change.
I don't really care that much about that GPU generation but I'm worried that they won't be able to put something impressively new in the next generation of consoles. I really hope that we are not stuck with obsolete CPU/GPU combination for the next 7-8 years again.
Anyway: massively parallel computing sounds tasty!
B3an - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
You dont seem to understand that all them extra transistors are mostly there for computing. Thats mostly what this was designed for. Not specifically for gaming performance. Computing is where this card will offer massive increases over the previous AMD generation.Look at Nvidia's Fermi, that had way more transistors than the previous generation but wasn't that much faster than AMD's cards at the time. Because again all the extra transistors were mainly for computing.
And come on LOL, expecting over triple the performance?? That has never happened once with any GPU release.
SlyNine - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
The 9700pro was up to 4x faster then the 4600 in certian situations. So yes it has happened.tzhu07 - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
LOL, triple the performance?Do you also have a standard of dating only Victoria's Secret models?
eanazag - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
I have a 3870 which I got in early 2007. It still does well for the main games I play: Dawn of War 2 and Starcraft 2 (25 fps has been fine for me here with settings mostly maxed). I have eyeing a new card. I like the power usage and thermals here. I am not spending $500+ though. I am thinking they are using that price to compensate for the mediocre yields they getting on 28nm, but either way the numbers look justified. I will be look for the best card between $150-$250, maybe $300. I am counting on this cards price coming down, but I doubt it will hit under $400-350 next year.No matter what this looks like a successful soft launch of a video card. For me, anything smokes what I have in performance but not so much on power usage. I'd really not mind the extra noise as the heat is better than my 3870.
I'm in the single card strategy camp.
Monitor is a single 42" 1920x1200 60 Hz.
Intel Core i5 760 at stock clocks. My first Intel since the P3 days.
Great article.
Death666Angel - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Can someone explain the different heights in the die-size comparison picture? Does that reflect processing-changes? I'm lost. :D Otherwise, good review. I don't see the HD7970 in Bench, am I blind or is it just missing.Ryan Smith - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
The Y axis is the die size. The higher a GPU the bigger it is (relative to the other GPUs from that company).Death666Angel - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
Thanks! I thought the actual sizes were the sizes and the y-axis meant something else. Makes sense though how you did it! :-)MonkeyPaw - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
As a former owner of the 3870, mine had the short-lived GDDR4. That old card has a place in my nerd heart, as it played Bioshock wonderfully.Peichen - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
The improvement is simply not as impressive as I was led to believed. Rumor has it that a single 7970 would have the power of a 6990. In fact, if you crunch the numbers, it would be at least 50% faster than 6970 which should put it close to 6990. (63.25% increase in transistors, 40.37% in TFLOP and 50% increase in memory bandwidth.)What we got is a Fermi 1st gen with the price to match. Remember, this is not a half-node improvement in manufacturing process, it is a full-node and we waited two years for this.
In any case, I am just ranting because I am waiting for something to replace my current card before GTA 5 came out. Nvidia's GK104 in Q1 2012 should be interesting. Rumored to be slightly faster than GTX 580 (slower than 7970) but much cheaper. We'll see.