AMD Radeon HD 7950 Review Feat. Sapphire & XFX: Sewing Up The High-End Market
by Ryan Smith on January 31, 2012 9:02 AM ESTGetting the Most Out of GCN: Driver Improvements
With the launch of any new architecture there’s still a lot of room for improvement on the part of driver developers, and GCN is no exception. On January 20th AMD released the first driver update for the 7000 Series, which brought with it an interesting mix of bug fixes, new features, and performance improvements. On the feature side AMD enabled support for Analytical Anti-Aliasing and Super Sample Anti-Aliasing for DX10+ games, an overdue feature that we’re very happy to see finally make it to AMD cards. Meanwhile on the performance side the new drivers improved the performance of the 7000 series in several games. Game performance typically rises slowly over time, but as this is one of the first post-launch driver releases, the gains are larger than what we’re used to seeing farther down the line.
To get an idea of where performance has improved and by how much, we reran our entire benchmark suite on the 7970.
As to be expected, at this point in time AMD is mostly focusing on improving performance on a game-by-game basis to deal with games that didn’t immediately adapt to the GCN architecture well, while the fact that they seem to be targeting common benchmarks first is likely intentional. Crysis: Warhead is the biggest winner here as minimum framerates in particular are greatly improved; we’re seeing a 22% improvement at 1920, while at 2560 there’s still an 11% improvement. Metro:2033 and DiRT 3 also picked up 10% or more in performance versus the release drivers, while Battlefield 3 has seen a much smaller 2%-3% improvement. Everything else in our suite is virtually unchanged, as it looks like AMD has not targeted any of those games at this time.
As one would expect, a result of these improvements the performance lead of the 7970 versus the GTX 580 has widened. The average lead for the 7970 is now 19% at 1920 and 26% at 2560, with the lead approaching 40% in games like Metro that specifically benefited from this update. At this point the only game the 7970 still seems to have trouble pulling well ahead of the GTX 580 is Battlefield 3, where the lead is only 8%.
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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.