AMD Radeon HD 7970 Review: 28nm And Graphics Core Next, Together As One
by Ryan Smith on December 22, 2011 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- ATI
- Radeon HD 7000
Metro: 2033
Paired with Crysis as our second behemoth FPS is Metro: 2033. Metro gives up Crysis’ lush tropics and frozen wastelands for an underground experience, but even underground it can be quite brutal on GPUs, which is why it’s also our new benchmark of choice for looking at power/temperature/noise during a game. If its sequel due this year is anywhere near as GPU intensive then a single GPU may not be enough to run the game with every quality feature turned up.
As often as we concern ourselves with Crysis and 60fps, with Metro it’s a struggle just to break 30fps. The 7970 becomes the first video card that can accomplish this at 2560 though it’s going to need quite a bit more performance to run Metro fluidly from start to end.
Compared to the GTX 580 the 7970’s lead in Metro is similar, but the scaling with resolution is even more pronounced. At 2560 it’s ahead by 30%, while at 1920 this drops to 21%, and finally at 1680 it’s only 16%. Meanwhile compared to the 6970 the response is much flatter; 33% at 2560, 28% at 1920, and 27% at 1680. From this data it’s becoming increasingly evident that the value proposition of the 7970 is going to hinge on not only what you consider its competitors to be, but what resolutions you would use it at.
While we’re on the subject of Metro, this is a good time to bring up the performance of the 5870, the forerunner of the DX11 generation. The performance of the 7970 may only be 20-30% higher than its immediate predecessors, but that’s not to say that performance hasn’t increased a great deal more over the full 2 year period of the 40nm cycle. The 7970 leads the 5870 by 50-60% here and in a number of other games, and while this isn’t as great as some past leaps it’s clear that there’s still plenty of growth in GPU performance occurring.
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Esbornia - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Fan boy much?CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
Finally, piroroadkill, Esbornia - the gentleman ericore merely stated what all the articles here have done as analysis while the radeonite fans repeated it ad infinitum screaming nvidia's giant core count doesn't give the percentage increase it should considering transistor increase.Now, when it's amd's turn, we get ericore under 3 attacks in a row...---
So you three all take it back concerning fermi ?
maverickuw - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
I want to know when the 7950 will come out and hopefully it'll come out at $400duploxxx - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Only the fact that ATI is able to bring a new architecture on a new process and result in such a performance increase for that power consumption is a clear winner.looking at the past with Fermy 1st launch and even Cayman VLIW4 they had much more issues to start with.
nice job, while probably nv680 will be more performing it will take them at least a while to release that product and it will need to be also huge in size.
ecuador - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Nice review, although I really think testing 1680x1050 for a $550 is a big waste of time, which could have to perhaps multi-monitor testing etc.Esbornia - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Its Anand you should expect this kind of shiet.Ryan Smith - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
In this case the purpose of 1680 is to allow us to draw comparisons to low-end cards and older cards, which is something we consider to be important. The 8800GT and 3870 in particular do not offer meaningful performance at 1920.poohbear - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Why do you bencmark @ 1920x1200 resolution? according to the Steam December survey only 8% of gamers have that resolution, whereas 24% have 1920x1080 and 18% use 1680x1050 (the 2 most popular). Also, minimum FPS would be nice to know in your benchmarks, that is really useful for us! just a heads up for next time u benchmark a video card! Otherwise nice review! lotsa good info at the beginning!:)Galcobar - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Page 4, comments section.Esbornia - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
They dont want to show the improvements on min FPS cause they hate AMD, you should know that already.