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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mczak - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Oh yes _for this test_ certainly 32 ROPs are sufficient (FWIW it uses FP16 render target with alpha blend). But these things have caches (which they'll never hit in the vantage fill test, but certainly not everything will have zero cache hits), and even more important than color output are the z tests ROPs are doing (which also consume bandwidth, but z buffers are highly compressed these days).You can't really say if 32 ROPs are sufficient, nor if they are somehow more efficient judged by this vantage test (as just about ANY card from nvidia or amd hits bandwidth constraints in that particular test long before hitting ROP limits).
Typically it would make sense to scale ROPs along with memory bandwidth, since even while it doesn't need to be as bad as in the color fill test they are indeed a major bandwidth eater. But apparently AMD disagreed and felt 32 ROPs are enough (well for compute that's certainly true...)
cactusdog - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
The card looks great, undisputed win for AMD. Fan noise is the only negative, I was hoping for better performance out the new gen cooler but theres always non-reference models for silent gaming.Temps are good too so theres probably room to turn the fan speed down a little.
rimscrimley - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Terrific review. Very excited about the new test. I'm happy this card pushes the envelope, but doesn't make me regret my recent 580 purchase. As long as AMD is producing competitive cards -- and when the price settles on this to parity with the 580, this will be the market winner -- the technology benefits. Cheers!nerfed08 - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Good read. By the way there is a typo in final words.faster and cooler al at once
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Fixed, thank you :)Take care,
Anand
hechacker1 - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
I think most telling is the minimum FPS results. The 7970 is 30-45% ahead of the previous generation; in a "worse case" situation were the GPU can't keep up or the program is poorly coded.Of course they are catching up with Nvidia's already pretty good minimum FPS, but I am glad to see the improvement, because nothing is worse than stuttering during a fasted pace FPS. I can live with 60fps, or even 30fps, as long as it's consistent.
So I bet the micro-stutter problem will also be improved in SLI with this architecture.
jgarcows - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
While I know the bitcoin craze has died down, I would be interested to see it included in the compute benchmarks. In the past, AMD has consistently outperformed nVidia in bitcoin work, it would also be interesting to see Anandtech's take as to why, and to see if the new architecture changes that.dcollins - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
This architecture will most likely be a step backwards in terms of bitcoin mining performance. In the GCN architecture article, Anand mentioned that buteforce hashing was one area where a VLIW style architecture had an advantage over a SIMD based chip. Bitcoin mining is based on algorithms mathematically equivalent to password hashing. With GCN, AMD is changing the very thing that made their card better miners than Nvidia's chips.The old architecture is superior for "pure," mathematically well defined code while GCN is targeted at "messy," more practical and thus widely applicable code.
wifiwolf - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
a bit less than expected, but not really an issue:http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/radeon-hd-7970-bench...
dcollins - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
You're looking at a 5% increase in performance for a whole new generation with 35% more compute hardware, increased clock speed and increased power consumption: that's not an improvement, it's a regression. I don't fault AMD for this because Bitcoin mining is a very niche use case, but Crossfire 68x0 cards offer much better performance/watt and performance/$.