AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Review: Battling For The Performance Crown
by Ryan Smith on June 22, 2012 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- GCN
- Radeon HD 7000
Starcraft II
Our next game is Starcraft II, Blizzard’s 2010 RTS megahit. Much like Portal 2 it’s a DX9 game designed to run on a wide range of hardware so performance is quite peppy with most high-end cards, but it can still challenge a GPU when it needs to.
Starcraft II has traditionally favored NVIDIA and neither driver improvements nor higher clockspeeds can change that. The 7970GE closes the gap, but it still leaves the GTX 680 ahead by 3% at 2560. This is however a solid improvement over the 7970, with the 7970GE having increased its performance by 9% over its predecessor. With the next edition of Starcraft II still technically due this year it will be interesting to see if performance shifts at all or whether NVIDIA maintains their lead.
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piroroadkill - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
There will be custom designs with nice quiet coolers flooding the market in no time..raghu78 - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7970..."There’s a silver lining on this one, though. Ahead of this review, I let AMD know about our acoustic concerns and the company claims that most partner boards will employ third-party cooling, not its reference configuration."
So noise is not an issue at all. Cards like sapphire with dual x , gigabyte with windforce, powercolor with PCS+ have good cooler designs. Power will be more. But the Radeon HD 7970 Ghz edition frankly more than makes up for that with its performance at 1600p and multi monitor setups.
If you are on a 1080p monitor and want perf/watt , price perf and a cooler setup go for custom GTX 670. For the rest who have 1600p or multi monitor frankly there is only one option - a custom Radeon HD 7970 card or a custom Radeon HD 7970 Ghz edition.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
Hogwash, the GTX 680's and GTX 670's are still SMOOTHER, and more enjoyable at high rez and multi monitor.Check the hundreds of reviews.
Tuvok86 - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
AMD should have released a balanced 7970 in the first place, somewhere halfway in performance between the 7970 and GE. Now they have an overconservative card and an powerhungry monsterReikon - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
On page 3:"For AMD the 7970GE will be launching with the Catalyst 10.7 beta, while NVIDIA has released the 304.48 betas for the entire lineup."
I think you mean 12.7
Ryan Smith - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
Whoops. Thanks.fausto412 - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
Will these new Power Tune and overclocking advancements trickle down 6900 series cards to unleash more performance safely?What would prevent AMD from affective the 6990 with these new advancements?
kyuu - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
These features would require a new BIOS. As far as I'm aware, AMD does not support flashing their cards with new BIOS. Anyway, there's nothing there that you can't acheive via normal overclocking anyway (asides from the slightly better chip binning).silverblue - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
...Another Mention (of) Deterministic, it seems.gonchuki - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
Did you try reaching AMD to comment on the rather low performance ceiling on Skyrim? looks as if their drivers are way more CPU hungry than Nvidia's and that's why they are getting capped at a lower rate.Maybe that's what usually hinders performance in other CPU limited titles like WoW?