Announced late last month and shipping 3 weeks ago, AMD kicked off the 28nm generation with a bang with their Radeon HD 7970. Combining TSMC’s new 28nm HKMG process with AMD’s equally new Graphics Core Next Architecture, AMD finally took back the single-GPU performance crown for the first time since 2010 with an all-around impressive flagship video card.

Of course AMD has always produced multiple video cards from their high-end GPUs, and with Tahiti this was no different. The second Tahiti card has been waiting in the wings for its own launch, and that launch has finally come. Today AMD is launching the Radeon HD 7950, the cooler, quieter, and cheaper sibling of the Radeon HD 7970. Aimed right at NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 580, AMD is looking to sew up the high-end market, and as we’ll see the Radeon HD 7950 is exactly the card to accomplish that.

With the release of AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 it’s clear that AMD has once again regained the single-GPU performance crown. But while the 7970’s place in the current GPU hierarchy is well established, we’re still trying to better understand the ins and outs of AMD’s new Graphics Core Next Architecture. What does it perform well at and what is it weak at? How might GCN scale with future GPUs? Etc.

Next week we’ll be taking a look at CrossFire performance and the performance of AMD’s first driver update. But in the meantime we wanted to examine a few other facets of the 7970: the impact of PCIe bandwidth on performance, overclocking our reference 7970 (and the performance impact thereof), and what AMD is doing for anti-aliasing with the surprise addition of SSAA for DX10+ along with an interesting technical demo implementing MSAA and complex lighting side-by-side. So let’s get started.

Traditionally the launch of a next-generation high-end video card has been a staggered process. In the name of getting cards out as soon as possible the first cards are almost always reference cards coming preassembled straight from AMD or NVIDIA, which are then touched up in the livery of their partners before being boxed and sold. Only later on – particularly when there’s a solid supply of GPUs – can partners acquire individual parts and put together their custom designs.

But as it’s turning out the Radeon HD 7970 isn’t going to be a traditional launch. In a rare move AMD has loosened the leash on their partners just a bit, and as a result we’re seeing semi-custom cards planned for launch earlier than usual. XFX looks to be the first partner to take advantage of this more liberal policy, as alongside the reference cards being launched today they’re launching their first semi-custom 7970s

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We've been running our public performance database tool, Bench, for a few years now. Bench allows you to have direct access to the performance data we use in our reviews, segmented according to product category. Today we have five major product categories in Bench: CPU, GPU, Smartphone, Mobile and SSDs.

CPU Bench is the longest running without significant changes. You can actually compare Intel's most recently released Sandy Bridge E CPU to an old Core 2 Duo E6550 from four years ago in a number of tests using the tool. 

GPU Bench has always posed a more significant challenge. Drivers and test platforms change very frequently, which often precludes us from keeping a running tally of benchmarks similar to what we do on the CPU side. We used our Radeon HD 7970 review as the kicking off point for our brand new PCIe 3.0 testbed for GPUs going forward - a platform we hope to keep in place for at least the next 12 months. While all of this data is already in the 7970 review, if you want to do any head to head comparisons between GPUs you can now do so using our updated GPU Bench 2012 database. The previous version of the database (GPU Bench 2011) is still available.

Similarly, we've finally updated our Smartphone Bench database. Smartphone Bench 2011 features all of the tests and test data we've been using in our most recent smartphone reviews (e.g. Droid RAZR). We opted against calling it Smartphone Bench 2012 because we plan on updating some of the benchmarks in the new year (e.g. you may have seen one of our new battery life tests in our Eee Pad Transformer Prime Follow-up).

We are in the preliminary stages of planning AnandTech's site refresh for 2012, including updates to Bench. If you have any suggestions you'd like to see implemented, please feel free to leave them as comments here. We already have a number of ideas of things we're trying to implement, but your opinions are the most important here so I'm always eager to listen if you're willing to share.

At AMD’s Fusion Developer Summit 2011 AMD announced Graphics Core Next, their next-generation GPU architecture. GCN would be AMD’s Fermi moment, where AMD got serious about GPU computing and finally built an architecture that would serve as both a graphics workhorse and a computing workhorse. With the ever increasing costs of high-end GPU development it’s not enough to merely develop graphics GPUs, GPU developers must expand into GPU computing in order to capture the market share they need to live well into the future.

At the same time, by canceling their 32nm process TSMC has directed a lot of hype about future GPU development onto the 28nm process, where the next generation of GPUs would be developed. In an industry accustomed to rapid change and even more rapid improvement never before have GPU developers and their buyers had to wait a full 2 years for a new fabrication process to come online.

All of this has lead to a perfect storm of anticipation for what has become the Radeon HD 7970: not only is it the first video card based on a 28nm GPU, but it’s the first member of the Southern Islands and by extension the first video card to implement GCN. As a result the Radeon HD 7970 has a tough job to fill, as a gaming card it not only needs to deliver the next-generation performance gamers expect, but as the first GCN part it needs to prove that AMD’s GCN architecture is going to make them a competitor in the GPU computing space. Can the 7970 do all of these things and live up to the anticipation? Let’s find out…

Update: This article was originally posted on June 17, 2011. We are pushing it back up to the top as a quick refresher before upcoming articles...

We’ve just returned from sunny Bellevue, Washington, where AMD held their first Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS). As with other technical conferences of this nature such as NVIDIA’s GTC and Intel’s IDF, AFDS is a chance for AMD to reach out to developers to prepare them for future products and to receive feedback in turn. While AMD can make powerful hardware it’s ultimately the software that runs on it that drives sales, so it’s important for them to reach out to developers to ensure that such software is being made.

While AFDS serves many purposes, the final purpose – and what is going to be most interesting to most outside observers – was to prepare developers for what’s coming down the pipe. AMD has big plans for the future and it’s important to get developers involved as soon as is reasonably possible so that they’re ready to use AMD’s future technologies when they launch. Over the next few days we’ll talk about a couple of different things AMD is working on, and today we’ll start with the first and most exciting project: AMD Graphics Core Next, AMD's next generation GPU architecture.