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.

Power, Temperature, & Noise
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  • chiddy - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link

    Ryan,

    Thanks for the great review. My only gripe - and I've been noticing this for a while - is the complete non-mention of drivers or driver releases for Linux/Unix and/or their problems.

    For example, Catalyst drivers exhibit graphical corruption when using the latest version (Version 3) of Gnome Desktop Environment since its release before April. This is a major bug which required most users of AMD/ATI GPUs to either switch desktop environments, switch to Nvidia or Intel GPUs, or use the open source drivers which lack many features. A partial fix appeared in Catalyst 11.9 making Gnome3 usable but there are still elements of screen corruption on occassion. (Details in the "non-official" AMD run bugzilla http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=99 ).

    AMD have numerous other issues with Linux Catalyst drivers including buggy openGL implementation, etc.

    Essentially, as a hardware review, a quick once over with non-Microsoft OSs would help alot, especially for products which are marketed as supporting such platforms.

    Regards,
  • kyuu - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link

    Why in the heck would they mention Linux drivers and their issues in an article covering the (paper) release and preliminary benchmarking of AMD's new graphics cards? It has nada to do with the subject at hand.

    Besides, hardly anyone cares, and those that do care already know.
  • chiddy - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link

    And I guess that AMD GPUs are sold as "Windows Only"?

    Thanks for your informative insight.
  • MrSpadge - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link

    There are no games for *nix and everything always depends on your distribution. The problems are so diverse and numerous.. it would take an entire article to briefly touch this field.
    Exagerating, but I really wouldn't be interested in endless *nix troubleshooting. Hell, I can't even get nVidia 2D acceleration in CentOS..
  • chiddy - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link

    You have a valid point on that front and I agree, nor would I expect such an article any time soon.

    However, on the other hand, one would at the very least expect a GPU using manufacturer released drivers to load a usable desktop. This is an issue that was distro agnostic and instantly noticeable, and only affected AMD hardware, as do most *nix GPU driver issues!

    If all that was done during a new GPU review was fire it up in any *nix distribution of choice for just a few minutes (even Ubuntu as I think its the most popular at the moment) to ensure that the basics work it would still be a great help.

    I will have to accept though that there is precious little interest!
  • Ryan Smith - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link

    Hi Chiddy;

    It's a fair request, so I'll give you a fair answer.

    The fact of the matter is that Linux drivers are not a top priority for either NVIDIA or AMD. Neither party makes Linux drivers available for our launch reviews, so I wouldn't be able to test new cards at launch. Not to speak for either company, but how many users are shelling out $550 to run Linux? Cards like the 7970 have a very specifically defined role: Windows gaming video card, and their actions reflect this.

    At best we'd be able to look at these issues at some point after the launch when AMD or NVIDIA have added support for the new product to their respective Linux drivers. But that far after the product's launch and for such a small category of users (there just aren't many desktop Linux users these days), I'm not sure it would be worth the effort on our part.
  • chiddy - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link

    Hi Ryan,

    Thanks very much for taking the time to respond. I fully appreciate your position, particularly as the posts above very much corroborate the lack of interest!

    Thanks again for the response, I very much appreciate the hard work yourself and the rest of the AT team are doing, and its quality speaks for itself in the steady increase in readers over the years.

    If you do however ever find the time to do a brief piece on *nix GPU support after launch of the next generation nVidia and AMD GPUs that would be wonderful - and even though one would definately not buy a top level GPU for *nix, it would very much help those of us who are dual booting (in my case Windows for gaming / Scientific Linux for work), and somewhat remove the guessing game during purchase time. If not though I fully understand :-).

    Regards,
    Ali
  • CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link

    Nvidia consistenly wins over and over again in this area, so it's "of no interest", like PhysX...
  • AmdInside - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link

    I won't be getting much sleep tonight since that article took a long time to read (can't imagine how long it must have taken to write up). Great article as usual. While it has some very nice features, all in all, it doesn't make me regret my purchase of a Geforce GTX 580 a couple of months ago. Especially since I mainly picked it up for Battlefield 3.
  • ET - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link

    The Cayman GPU's got quite a performance boost from drivers over time, gaining on NVIDIA's GPU since their launce. The difference in architecture between the 79x0 and 69x0 is higher than the 69x0 and 58x0, so I'm sure there's quite a bit of room for performance improvement in games.

    Have to say though that I really hope AMD stops increasing the card size each generation.

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