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
Final Words
The launch of the Radeon HD 7970 has presented us with a great deal of data and even more subjects to consider, so it’s difficult in the best of times to try to whittle this down to a single conclusion. Nevertheless, based on our testing I believe there are two distinct conclusions to be drawn: the case for gaming, and the case for computing.
Gaming
At the end of the day the 7970 is specifically targeted as a gaming workhorse. Regardless of any architecture changes, what’s important is how fast the card is, how much it costs, whether it works correctly, and what its physical attributes are like. With respect to all of these aspects AMD has made an acceptable card, but this is not a groundbreaking product like we’ve seen in the past.
The fact of the matter is that since 2008 we’ve become spoiled by AMD’s aggressive pricing. More than anything else the low prices of the Radeon HD 4870 and Radeon HD 5870 made those products superstars thanks to their performance for the price and their undercutting of NVIDIA’s competing cards. The Radeon HD 5870 was definitely fast, but at $379 it was a steal, which is part of the reason prices for it never stabilized at that low a level.
At the same time the 7970 is not the 5870. The 5870 relative to both NVIDIA and AMD’s previous generation video cards was faster on a percentage basis. It was more clearly a next-generation card, and DX11 only helped to seal the deal. Meanwhile if you look at straight averages the 7970 is only around 15-25% faster than the GTX 580 in our tests, with its advantage being highly game dependent. It always wins at 2560 and 1920, but there are some cases where it’s not much of a win. The 7970’s domination of the 6970 is more absolute, but then again the 6970 is a good $200 cheaper at this point in time.
Meanwhile the presence of previous generation dual-GPU cards will continue to muddle the picture a bit further. We remain as sheepish as ever on multi-GPU cards and believe a high performance single GPU card is still a better investment in most situations, but there’s no denying that the GTX 590 and Radeon HD 6990 are quite capable cards today if you can put up with the noise and the inherent issues with alternate frame rendering.
Ultimately the past few years have seen AMD make great technical progress, but on the business side of things it’s NVIDIA that has made all the money. GCN will help AMD here by improving their professional product line, but the other part of that equation is for AMD to stop selling their cards for so little when they don’t have to. And this is what we’re seeing with the Radeon HD 7970. AMD has chosen to price the 7970 like a current generation card – it’s priced relative to a 3GB GTX 580 – and that’s a fair metric. What it isn’t is groundbreaking in any sense.
So at the end of the day AMD has once again retaken the performance crown for single-GPU cards, bringing them back to a position they last held nearly 2 years ago with the 5870. To that AMD deserves kudos, and if you’re in the market for a $500+ video card the 7970 is clearly the card to get – it’s a bit more expensive than the GTX 580, but it’s reasonably faster and cooler all at once. However if you’ve been waiting for 28nm GPUs to bring about another rapid decrease in video card prices as we saw with the 5870, you’re going to be waiting a bit longer.
Compute
The Radeon HD 7970 may be a gaming product, but today was just as much a launch for AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture as it was for their new single-GPU king. GCN is the biggest architecture overhaul for AMD since R600 in 2007, and it shows. AMD has laid out a clear plan to seriously break into the GPU computing market and GCN is the architecture that will take them there. This is their Fermi moment.
At this point I’m not comfortable speaking about the compute performance of GCN in absolutes, but based on our limited testing with the 7970 it’s clear the potential is there. At times it’s competitive with the Fermi-based GTX 580 and at other times it’s quite a bit faster. In the hands of experienced developers and given enough time to learn the quirks of GCN, I believe GCN will prove itself. It’s much too early to tell if it will be able to withstand the eventual arrival of NVIDIA’s Kepler, but certainly this is the best shot AMD has ever had.
Performance aside, it’s clear that AMD’s SIMD architecture will make GPU compute development for GCN much easier; of that there is no question. This is important as GCN isn’t just about HPC computing, it’s about fully embracing Fusion. AMD’s CPU plans are built upon GCN just as much as they’re built upon Bulldozer, and for GCN to deliver on its half of the heterogeneous computing aspect of Fusion it will need to be easy to program and it will need to perform well. It would appear AMD has the hardware to make the former happen, now time will tell if GCN Fusion can deliver on the latter.
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Ryan Smith - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Since 1920x1200 has already been commented on elsewhere I'm just going to jump right to your comment on minimum FPS.I completely agree, and we're trying to add it where it makes sense. A lot of benchmarks are wildly inconsistent about their minimum FPS, largely thanks to the fact that minimum FPS is an instantaneous data point. When your values vary by 20%+ per run (as minimums often do), even averaging repeated trials isn't nearly accurate enough to present meaningful results.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
HardOCP shows long in game fps per second charts that show dips and bottom outs are more than one momentary lapse and often are extended time periods of lowest frame rate runs, so I have to respectfully disagree.Perhaps the fault is fraps can show you a single instance of lowest frame rate number, and hence it's the analysis that utterly fails - given the time constraints that were made obvious, it is also clear that the extra work it would take for an easily reasoned and reasonable result that is actually of worthy accuracy is not in the cards here.
thunderising - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Okay. This card has left me thrilled, but wanting for more. Why?Well, for example, every reviewer has hit the CCC Core and Memory Max Limits, which turns into a healthy 10-12% performance boost, all for 10W.
What, legit reviews got it to 1165MHz core and 6550Mhz memory for a 21-24% increase in performance. Now that's HUGE!
I think AMD could have gone for something like this with the final clocks, to squeeze out every last bit of performance from this amazing card:
Core - 1050 MHz
Memory - 1500 MHz (6000MHz QDR)
This was not only easily achievable, but would have placed this card at a 8-10% increase in performance all for a mere <10W rise in Load Power.
Hoping for AIBs like Sapphire to show their magic! HD7970 Toxic, MmmmmmM...
Otherwise, fantastic card I say.
Death666Angel - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
Maybe they'll do a 4870/4890 thing again? Launch the HD7970 and HD7970X2 and then launch a HD7990 with higher clocks later to counter nVidia.... Who knows. :-)Mishera - Sunday, December 25, 2011 - link
They've been doing it for quite some time now. Their plan has been to release a chip balancing die size, performance, and cost. Then later to compete on high end release a dual-chip card. Anand wrote on this a while ago with the rv770 story (http://www.anandtech.com/show/2679).Even looking at the picture of chip sizes, the 7970 is still a reasonable size. And this really was a brilliant move as though Nvidia has half the marketshare and does make a lot of money from their cards, their design philosophy has been hurting them a lot from a business standpoint.
On a side note, Amd really made a great choice by choosing to wait until now to push for general computing. Though that probably means more people to support development and drivers, which means more hiring which is the opposite way Amd has been going. It will be interesting to see how this dichotomy will develop in the future. But right now kudos to Amd.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
Does that mean amd is abandoning gamers as we heard the scream whilst Nvidia was doing thus ?I don't quite get it - now what nvidia did that hurt them, is praise worthy since amd did it, finally.
Forgive me as I scoff at the immense dichotomy...
"Perfect ripeness at the perfect time" - sorry not buying it....
privatosan - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
PRT is a nice feature, but there is an failure in the article:'For AMD’s technology each tile will be 64KB, which for an uncompressed 32bit texture would be enough room for a 4K x 4K chunk.'
The tile would be 128 x 128 texels; 4K x 4K would be quite big for a tile.
futrtrubl - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
I was going to comment on that too. A 4k x 4k x 32bit (4byte) texture chunk would be around 67MB uncompressed. For a 32bit texture you could only fit a 128x128 array in a 64KB chunk. An 8bit/pixel texture could be 4k*4kStonedofmoo - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Thanks for the review. A request though...To the hardware sites doing these reviews, many of us in this day and age run dual monitor or more. It always frustrates in me in these reviews that we get a long write up on the power saving techniques the new cards use, and never any mention of it helps those of us running more than one display.
For those not in the know, if you run more than one display on all the current generations the cards do NOT downclock the GPU and memory nearly as much as they do on single montor configurations. This burns quite a lot more power and obviously kicks out more heat. No site ever mentions this which is odd considering so many of us have more than one display these days.
I would happily buy the card that finally overcomes this and actually finds a way of knocking back the clocks with multi-monitor setups. Is the new Radeon 7xxx series that card?
Galcobar - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
It's in the article, on the page entitled "Meet the Radeon 7970."Ryan also replied to a similar comment by quoting the paragraph addressing multi-monitor setups and power consumption at the top of page of the comments.
That's two mentions, and the answer to your question.