AMD Radeon HD 7950 Review Feat. Sapphire & XFX: Sewing Up The High-End Market
by Ryan Smith on January 31, 2012 9:02 AM ESTFinal Words
When AMD launched the Radeon HD 7970 last month there was a great deal of speculation that the Radeon HD 7950 would be their direct GeForce GTX 580 competitor, and indeed this has proven to be the case. While the 7970 sails past the GTX 580—and AMD has priced it based on that—the 7950 and the GTX 580 are trading blows on a game-by-game basis, similar to what we saw last year in comparing the GTX 500 series and the Radeon HD 6900 series. But when the 7950 wins it wins big, while the same cannot be said of the GTX 580; the only real weakness for the 7950 right now is Battlefield 3, and while that’s an important game it’s but one of several.
Ultimately it’s not a fair fight, not that AMD ever intended it to be one. Outside of a few corner cases the 7950 renders the GTX 580 irrelevant, and while it’s not quite as immense as what the 5850 did to the GTX 285 2 years ago the outcome is much the same. With the 7950 AMD can deliver performance similar to if not better than the GTX 580 while consuming significantly less power and enjoying all the temperature & noise benefits that provides, making it a very attractive card.
On that note the cooling situation makes the launch of the 7950 one of the more unusual high-end product launches in recent history. With high-end cards typically sticking to reference designs for the first phase of their lives the 7950 lineup is going to be much more varied than normal, not only in gaming performance due to factory overclocks but in cooling performance too. While we can speak in absolutes about the gaming performance of the 7950 there is no common thread on cooling performance—it needs to be evaluated on a per-product basis, so it will be important to do your research.
Meanwhile the $450 price tag is unfortunately not very aggressive on AMD’s part, but with their lead in rolling out their new lineup this is to be expected. Given its performance the 7950 only needs to be as cheap as the cheapest GTX 580 and that’s exactly what AMD has done. There will ultimately be a massive price shakeup at the high-end due to 28nm, but this looks like it won’t happen until AMD has some competition at 28nm or 7900 sales slow down significantly.
Finally, what about our retail sample cards, the XFX R7950 Black Edition Double Dissipation and the Sapphire HD 7950 Overclock Edition? These two cards clearly embody the type of variety we’re going to see from AMD’s partners; they have fairly large factory overclocks and large open air coolers, and with these customizations AMD’s partners are hoping to set themselves apart from each other while justifying a higher MSRP in the process.
Overall the Sapphire HD 7950 Overclock Edition is the clear winner among the two cards. While I believe our specific sample is well above the average card due to its extremely low VID, in terms of design Sapphire has clearly done their homework and it shows with an excellent cooler that is ridiculously quiet and equally as cool. The factory overclock isn’t anything that shouldn’t be achievable on your own, but if you’re serious about overclocking the cooler alone would be enough to justify the extra $30.
On the other hand the XFX R7950 Black Edition Double Dissipation ends up being a bummer, particularly compared to its 7970 based sibling. For what an open air cooler can do it’s simply too hot and too loud; the numbers we’re seeing would be acceptable for a blower, but not for an open air cooler. The gaming performance is great thanks to its best in class factory overclock, but this isn’t enough to overlook the obvious cooling troubles.
Wrapping things up, so far we’ve looked at single card performance, but what about CrossFire? Later this week we’ll be looking at 7970 and 7950 CrossFire performance, and what the plethora of open air coolers means for 7950 users. So stay tuned.
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chizow - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 - link
Sorry, but this is incorrect. Nvidia and AMD are direct competitors when it comes to GPUs so relative performance directly influences price.This is why AMD cannot sell CPUs for more than $200. They don't have anything faster than Intel's 10th+ fastest processors (spread over 2-3 generations, its pretty sad actually), so they can't just price Bulldozer at $1000 by slapping an X on it and expect to sell any.
There is a ceiling on the prices they can charge however due to economic and external factors like price elasticity of demand, disposable income, GDP, competing products (consoles etc) so within that construct, AMD and Nvidia have to price their products to make them most attractive to prospective buyers.
They know exactly what % of the market will bite at each price and performance tier using their own gathered market research as well as independent firms like Peddie etc. $400+ is high-end enthusiast, in order to price here, you have to be the top dog, or the 2nd tier. The top dog sets the table for every other GPU, it doesn't matter who makes it.
Historically, this next-gen top dog has shifted the price and performance metric for all next-gen GPUs because the market expects and demands it. That's just progress. Tahiti brings nothing to the table in this regard, its performance is incremental but its pricing just maintains the status quo.
The problem is Tahiti's pricing indicates the GTX 580 was the target it was shooting for, the problem is, they should've been taking aim at Kepler.
JNo - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
chizow - the new pirks?TerdFerguson - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Chizow is right, you guys are wrong. Get over it.Consumer electronics are supposed to get cheaper AND faster at tremendous rates. In failing to improve their price/performance ratio over a couple of generations, AMD has failed. NVidia is failing pretty badly right now, too, but since this is an AMD release, AMD is getting the flack at the moment. If you apply AMD's pricing model to any other consumer electronics product, it becomes very evident that things are very broken. Would you pay $4k for a Ivy Bridge CPU, because IB > SB > Core2 > Core > P4 > P3 > P2 > Pentium > 486 > etc, and a better chip must always command a price premium? Doh, of course you wouldn't.
mdlam - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Pricing is determined and adjusted based on the law of efficient markets. the 580 is 500 dollars only because people are still willing to pay for it, not because of Chizow's ridiculous theory that companies conspire these fabulous schemes to trick people out of their money. So based on this existing market of people willing to pay 500 dollars for gtx580 performance benefits, AMD is going to TAKE those customers away by giving more for less, or more for more in a linear price/performance scale. It's just how markets work, prices don't revolve around these God-like rules of tier1, tier2, tier3. Guess what, AMD is right, because these cards right now are selling higher than the $550 retail price. They should have priced it at $650!mdlam - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
And there is no flawed pricing model to AMD that would end up with a slippery slope of $4k for an Ivy bridge. Prices = aggregate buying desire of the market. All markets usually hit a ceiling price for an item, no matter what it is. Some people have a high ceiling, some people have a low ceiling, its not anyone's fault, its just the fact of life. Any company, AMD or NVIDIA, or INTEL, will price to sell to people with higher ceilings, and when demand is met, lower price to increase adoption from folks with lower ceilings.chizow - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 - link
Sorry, not in this market.If you think this is OK, there would never be any progress in the semiconductor market. Its not like we're talking cars here where a new model year means a few minor upgrades.
With GPUs, CPUs and any other semiconductor, you expect FASTER performance at the SAME prices or CHEAPER prices. That's called progress.
The law of efficient markets would tell you if you bought a GTX 580 14 months ago, you made the right call. Buying today, you're setting yourself up for some heartache, but more probably, you're kicking yourself for waiting.
Arnir69 - Friday, February 3, 2012 - link
I'm really disappointed with 7950 too, it's a little bit better than 580 but not enough to justify a such a long wait, it's performance is well short of expectation in BF3.hyperdoggy - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
While I'm not in favor of the prices AMD has set for the new cards, you do realize that Nvidia has never prices their cards low right? A quick price check history will show you since the FX day Nvidia has priced their card to sell your kidney. It was the tnt days that Nvidia did a price favor vs their competitors. I bet you my right kidney(i sold my left one for a 8800gtx for $650 day 1 of lunch) that Kepler will be no different, regardless of what its performance will be.I never got the fanboy aspect of things, you see gamers that can calculate min-max fps better than most math majors yet somehow only see red or green when the numbers are laid out right in front of them. I'm shame to say i'm old enough to been around from the voodoo days, i went to Voodoo, Nvidia, Ati, Nvidia, Ati, Nvidia, and now name AMD for more than i can remember. Go for what's best at the time you need an upgrade. Stop making yourself colored hulk when your team doesn't have a product to be competitive.
SlyNine - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Yea and the 8800GTX kicked stomped the crap out of the competition. This is just a bump up, and kick stomp prices.Plus this is AMD not Nvidia. Where is the 5870, the 9700pro. This is closer to a 5800Ultra or a 2900XT. Of course those cards at least had some real competition in the form of a 8800GTX and 9700pro.
If the 8800GTX and 9700pro would have only increased performance as much as say the 6970 or 580GTX ( compared to their previous cards 5870/480) then the analogy would truly work and the 7970 would basicly be the 2900XT/5800Ultra of its day.
chizow - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Actually if you look at recent pricing history, you'd see Nvidia has kept their flagship pricing in-line and much lower than what we are seeing here with SI, despite the fact Nvidia had the leading part for that generation in both cases with the GTX 480 and GTX 580.Both of those parts launched at $500 and were faster than AMD's competing same-generation part. If Nvidia did the same as AMD, the 580 would've been priced at $550-600 for that 10-15% performance bump over the 480, but they kept their pricing constant while increasing performance. As I stated earlier, AMD definitely had a hand in this when they undercut the GTX 280 so badly in 2008, but Nvidia did learn their mistake and has not raised the pricing metric since.
Now Nvidia does have a decision to make. If they beat SI with Kepler as expected, they can go with AMD's pricing which will again, make no sense. Or they can stick to their historical price/performance model and make AMD look really bad just as AMD did to them 3 1/2 years ago.