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
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Bethesda's epic sword & magic game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is our RPG of choice for benchmarking. It's altogether a good CPU benchmark thanks to its complex scripting and AI, but it also can end up pushing a large number of fairly complex models and effects at once, especially with the addition of the high resolution texture pack.
For the longest time AMD has had various problems with Skyrim, ranging from negative Crossfire scaling to mediocre performance. We haven’t had a chance to test the former, but with Catalyst 12.7 they’ve definitely fixed the latter. At 2560 the performance of the 7970 has improved to the point where it’s solidly CPU limited just like its NVIDIA competition, though for some reason NVIDIA continues to handle this situation slightly better than AMD.
In any case because the 7970 is now CPU limited at 2560 the 7970GE doesn’t have any room to grow. This isn’t a hardware fault, this is just a reflection of how RPGs tend to be CPU limited before they’re GPU limited. We may have to look at running extra graphics effects (e.g. TrSSAA/AAA) to thin the herd in the future.
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AnnihilatorX - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
"All the same AMD has also boosted their memory clocks from 5.5GHz to 6GHz, which will give the card 9% more memory bandwidth with it needs it."=>
"when it needs it"
raghu78 - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
RyanAs you mentioned Dirt Showdown will take the place of Dirt 3 in your test suite I would like to make a suggestion that a few more games be changed. Max Payne 3 and Alan Wake are good changes. Maybe Crysis Warhead could be replaced by Alan Wake and Portal 2 by Max Payne 3. Another very demanding game which could find a place is Witcher 2 Enhanced edition. Focusing on games released in the last 12 months in your test suite helps prospective buyers / gamers decide based on performance on recent titles which they will most probably be playing.
HighTech4US - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
You are showing the OCed version of the 7970e in comparison to the stock GTX680.For fairness the stock GTX680 should be Overclocked also.
kyuu - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
There's nothing fair or unfair about overclocking. Why do people bring this up every time there's one of these articles...CeriseCogburn - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
Good to hear it this time, as all the prior moaning has been amd fans wailing that the 680 core is already overclocked out of the box !L M H O
I just want to see the 470, 480, 570, and 580 at the equivalent radeon clocks for those series, and see amd get SPANKED even more in those series.... to be fair, of course....
Yes, thanks so much for saying "you guys always say it" - no - it's not "you guys" - it's the amd fan boys !
This time they didn't moan and complain about fairness, because amd got beat anyway, and they wouldn't if it won, which it did not, I must point out, feeling the overwhelming need to state, again, and again.
This sums it up well: AMD loses, as usual
seapeople - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
They're also comparing the OCed version of the 7970e to the stock 7970e. That seems unfair to me. To be fair, you should only compare the OCed 7970e to itself, the OCed 7970e.Arbie - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
It's probably too late now, but there were at least three more places where you could have used "performance crown" in the opening paragraphs.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
Amd LIED, with their false advertising about this card - their hot loud slow housefire...Amd is an evil corporate monster who lies to the little children they sell their products to (and to soccer Mommies who actually pay the card price to keep the lies going - granted they pay less than Abu Dhabi oil sheiks)
Wreckage - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
Another successful paperlaunchI'm not sure why they could not wait until they had actual product available.
behrouz - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition = $499AMD Radeon HD 7970 = $549 ? or $449 ?