AMD Radeon HD 7790 Review Feat. Sapphire: The First Desktop Sea Islands
by Ryan Smith on March 22, 2013 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Sapphire
- GCN
- Radeon HD 7000
Synthetics
As always we’ll also take a quick look at synthetic performance to get a better look at our video cards' underpinnings. These tests are mostly for comparing cards from within a manufacturer, as opposed to directly comparing AMD and NVIDIA cards.
We’ll start with 3DMark Vantage’s Pixel Fill test, a mix of a ROP test and a bandwidth test to see if you have enough bandwidth to feed those ROPs.
Moving on, we have our 3DMark Vantage texture fillrate test, which does for texels and texture mapping units what the previous test does for ROPs.
Finally we’ll take a quick look at tessellation performance with TessMark. We have everything turned up to maximum here, which means we're looking at roughly 11 million polygons per frame.
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Spunjji - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
...forgive my stupidity. Actual figures of the 7790 here:http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/HD_779...
Depends on whether we focus on Peak / Max figures to decide whether you or I am closer to the truth. :)
Ryan Smith - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Typical Board Power, not Total. TBP is an average rather than a peak like TDP, which is why it's a lower number than TDP.dbcoopernz - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Any details on UVD module? Any changes?The Asus Direct Cu-II might make an interesting high power but quiet HTPC card. Any chance of a review?
Ryan Smith - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
There are no changes that we have been made aware of.haplo602 - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
somebody please make this a single slot card and I am sold ... otherwise I'll wait for the 8k radeons ...Shut up and drink - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Has it occurred to anyone else that this is in all probability an OEM release of the "semi-custom" silicon that will find its way into Sony's Playstation 4 in the fall?Word has it that Sony has some form of GPU switching tech integrated into the PS4.
- apologies for the link to something other than Anand but I don't think they ran anything on the story http://www.tomshardware.com/news/sony-ps4-patent-p...
Initially I presumed this to be some "Optimus"-esque dynamic context switching power saving routine. However, the patent explicitly states, "This architecture lets a user run one or more GPUs in parallel, but only for the purpose of increasing performance, not to reduce power consumption."
Which struck me as some kind of expansion on the nebulous "hybrid crossfire" tech that AMD has been playing w/since they birthed the 3000 series 780G igpu
Based off of AMD's previous endeavors in this area on the PC side I would be skeptical of the benefits/merit of pairing the comparatively anemic iGPU's of Kabini w/a presumably Bonaire derived GPU.
As an aside; since SLI/CFX work by issuing frames to the next GPU available, if one GPU is substantially faster than the other(s), frames get finished out-of-order and the IGP/slower-GPU's tardy frames simply get dropped which may make the final rendered video stuttery/choppy.
Pairing an IGP with a disproportionately powerful discrete GPU simply does not work for realtime rendering.
It is certainly possible that with the static nature of the console and perhaps especially the unified nature of the GDDR5 memory pool/bank that performance gains could be had
However, my digression on the merits of the tech thus far is
128 + 128 = 256 + 896 = Anand's own deduction of 1152sp's)
Shut up and drink - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
I pushed submit by mistake...damn...oh well...my last point of arithmetic was simply that 1 fully enabled 4 core Kabini's I'm suspecting would have a 128 shader count igpu. Factor in the much ballyhooed 8-core Cpu in the PS4 we would have two Kabini's (128+128=256) + a Bonaire derived 896sp GPU all on some kind of custom MCM style packaging "semi-custom APU" (rumor had it that the majority of Sony's R&D contributions were in the stacking/packaging dept.)
Anyone concur?
Shut up and drink - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
...which jives w/Anand's own piece that ran on the console's unveiling, "Sony claims the GPU features 18 compute units, which if this is GCN based we'd be looking at 1152 SPs and 72 texture units"http://www.anandtech.com/show/6770/sony-announces-...
A5 - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Yeah, once this came in at 14 CUs with minor architecture changes, it seemed like a likely scenario to me.Obviously it isn't going to give you PS4 performance on ports with only 1GB of memory, though.
crimson117 - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Good thought, but I sure hope Sony doesn't hamstring its PS4 with a 128-bit memory bus!