AMD Radeon HD 7950 Review Feat. Sapphire & XFX: Sewing Up The High-End Market
by Ryan Smith on January 31, 2012 9:02 AM ESTDiRT 3
For racing games our racer of choice continues to be DiRT, which is now in its 3rd iteration. Codemasters uses the same EGO engine between its DiRT, F1, and GRID series, so the performance of EGO is has been relevant for a number of racing games over the years.
With DiRT 3 AMD’s strong start finally starts to wobble. Even with their first round of driver optimizations the 7950 can only outrun the GTX 580 at 2560, while at 1920 the two cards are effectively tied. DiRT games have traditionally done better on NVIDIA’s cards so this is not unexpected, but it’s also a sign that the 7950 won’t have a clearcut lead over the GTX 580 like the 7970 did. Meanwhile the factory overclocked cards can keep the 7950 clear of the GTX 580, picking up about 8% over the 7950, but of course the tradeoff is going to be their higher cost.
The story of DiRT 3’s minimum framerates closely mirrors the average framerates. The 7950 has a 5% lead at 2560, but trails the GTX 580 by 2% at 1920.
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Ryan Smith - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Thanks. It looks like the culprit is the ShareThis widget we use. I'll have our developers look at it in the morning.Ananke - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
This is a wonderful but too expensive product for the targeted market niche...It will not gain user base by April to attract software developers away from Kepler...Unless NVidia really executes bad /which they will not-internal source/, AMD will be positioned worthlessly by price/performance. Anyway, I admire AMD and I use their products, just their strategy has been lost recently.gnorgel - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
It seems quite pointless to me to benchmark an OC 7950 vs a stock clocked 7970.Anyone who OCs a 7950 would OC his 7970 too. The interesting question is how these 2 OCed Cards perform against each other - this decides whether the the price difference is worth it or not.
kmmatney - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
The best way to get performance per dollar is at this website:http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php
and sort by "Video Card Value". Using this chart, I bought an HD6850 today, to replace my HD4890 (which is also near the top of the chart). It has enogh performance for me. The performance per dollar is dominated by AMD at the moment.
kmmatney - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
My comment was supposed to be a response to another comment...LuxZg - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 - link
Now all that I wish for is direct comparison between Sapphire card and PowerColor PCS+ version.. Based on techPowerUp's review PowerColor could actually have even better cooling solution (noise/heat) which would really be amazing since Sapphire is already awesome. Make my wish come true Anand! :)And thanks for great review guys and showing off what a nice job AMD & Sapphire did with their new products...
ChosenOne - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 - link
Here is the link for the comparison chart between PowerColor and Sapphire.ChosenOne - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 - link
forgot the linkLuxZg - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
Thanks a lot! Seems that Sapphire has the upper hand after all, in both temperatures and noise..Th-z - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 - link
What GCN is able to do in the future is yet to been seen. They need a software ecosystem to support it, like what CUDA is having. In terms of gaming, aside from lower power consumption, the price isn't very attractive. I can see 7970 command a hefty premium, but the price of 7950 would fail AMD to capture some market share. The price they're trying to undercut is a single-GPU flagship part, which also carries a premium over 570, yet 7950 isn't a flagship part.In terms of gaming performance, 7950 is close to 580, which is close to 6970, yet it costs so much higher than 6970. It would be interesting to see how AMD is going to price their VLIW4 7800 and lower parts, because from the specs, they aren't much faster than 6000 series. This time, we probably won't see good performance jump with similar price points even after a major die shrink (remember they even skipped 32 nm). And I think the unnamed NVIDIA source said they was expecting more from 7970, which I think isn't a bluff, considered their Fermi debacle.