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
Total War: Shogun 2
One of our goals with this iteration of our benchmark suite was to throw in some additional non-FPS games, so we’re broadening our horizons a bit by adding in Total War: Shogun 2. Shogun 2 is the latest installment of the long-running Total War series of turn based strategy games, and alongside Civilization V is notable for just how many units it can put on a screen at once. As it also turns out, it’s the single most punishing game in our benchmark suite.
When deciding on what settings to use with Shogun, it required a bit more creativity on our part. 2560 is a true moonshot; everything is turned on, and it takes a minimum of 1.5GB of VRAM to run the game at this resolution. Accordingly performance is rather dismal, though as this is a TBS 30fps isn’t quite as critical as it is in other games. In any case the 7970 comes the closest to hitting 30fps, coming in just shy at 28.2fps, which is 29% ahead of the GTX 580 and 48% ahead of the 6970.
Meanwhile for 1920 we turned Shogun’s settings down to Very High, and yet we still had to disable MSAA to make it work with 1GB cards (did we mention that Shogun loves VRAM?). At these lower settings performance rockets up, and at the same time so does the 7970’s lead over the GTX 580. Here it’s 36% ahead of the GTX 580, which will be the greatest lead among all of our gaming benchmarks. As for the 7970 compared to the 6970, it’s still 48% of the 6970 showing us just how similar these video cards are at times.
Finally at 1680 the overall performance goes up yet again, but the 7970’s lead remains. It’s ahead of the GTX 580 by 30%, and 48% ahead of the 6970.
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RussianSensation - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
I think his comment still stands. In terms of a performance leap, at 925mhz speeds at least, this is the worst improvement from 1 major generation to the next since X1950XTX -->2900XT. Going from 5870 to 6970 is not a full generation, but a refresh. So for someone with an HD5870 who wants 2x the speed increase, this card isn't it yet.jalexoid - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
How's OpenCL on Linux/*BSD? Because I fail to see real high performance use in Windows environments for any GPGPU.For GPGPU the biggest target should be still Linux/*BSD because they are the dominating platforms there....
R3MF - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
"Among the features added to Graphics Core Next that were explicitly for gaming, the final feature was Partially Resident Textures, which many of you are probably more familiar with in concept as Carmack’s MegaTexture technology."Is this feature exclusive to gaming, or is it an extension of a visualised GPU memory feature?
i.e. if running Blender on the GPU via the cycles renderer will i be able to load scenes larger than local graphics memory?
Ryan Smith - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
It's exclusive to graphics. Virtualized GPU memory is a completely different mechanism (even if some of the cache concepts are the same).With that said I see no reason it couldn't benefit Blender, but the benefits would be situational. Blender would only benefit in situations where it can't hold the full scene, but can somehow hold the visibly parts of the scene by using tiles.
R3MF - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
cheers RyanFinally - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
...the 2nd generation HD8870 feat. GCN, 3W idle consumption and hopefully less load consumption than my current HD6870. Just let a company like Sapphire add a silent cooler and I'm happy.poohbear - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Btw why didnt Anandtech overclock this card? it overclocks like a beast according to all the other review sites!Esbornia - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Cause they want you to think this card sucks come on guys everybody in the internet knows this site sucks for reviews that are not from Intel products.SlyNine - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
lol troll. This site has prefered who ever had the advantage in what ever area. They will do a follow up of its OCing and when they first show a card they show it at stock only.I do not OC my videocards, whats the point in adding 5% more gain in games that are running maxed anyways.
RussianSensation - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Is this comment supposed to be taken seriously? Go troll somewhere else.