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
Battlefield 3
Its popularity aside, Battlefield 3 may be the most interesting game in our benchmark suite for a single reason: it’s the first AAA DX10+ game. It’s been 5 years since the launch of the first DX10 GPUs, and 3 whole process node shrinks later we’re finally to the point where games are using DX10’s functionality as a baseline rather than an addition. Not surprisingly BF3 is one of the best looking games in our suite, but as with past Battlefield games that beauty comes with a high performance cost
How to benchmark BF3 is a point of great contention. Our preference is to always stick to the scientific method, which means our tests need to be perfectly repeatable or very, very close. For that reason we’re using an on-rails section of the single player game, Thunder Run, to do our testing. This isn’t the most strenuous part of Battlefield 3 – multiplayer can get much worse – but it’s the most consistent part of the game. In general we’ve found that minimum framerates in multiplayer are about half of the average framerate in Thunder Run, so it’s important to frame your expectations accordingly.
With that out of the way, Battlefield 3 ends up being one of the worst games for the 7970 from a competitive standpoint. It always maintains a lead over the GTX 580, but the greatest lead is only 13% at 2560 without any MSAA, and everywhere else it’s 3-5%. Of course it goes without saying that realistically BF3 is only playable at 1920 (no MSAA) and below on any of the single-GPU cards in this lineup, so unfortunately for AMD it’s the 5% number that’s the most relevant.
Meanwhile compared to the 6970, the 7970’s performance gains are also a bit below average. 2560 and 1920 with MSAA are quite good at 30% and 34% respectively, but at 1920 without MSAA that’s only a 25% gain, which is one of the smaller gaps between the two cards throughout our entire test suite.
The big question of course is why are we only seeing such a limited lead from the 7970 here? BF3 implements a wide array of technologies so it’s hard to say for sure, but there is one thing we know they implement in the engine that only NVIDIA can use: Driver Command Lists, the same “secret sauce” that boosted NVIDIA’s Civilization V performance by so much last year. So it may be that NVIDIA’s DCL support is helping their performance here in BF3, much like it was in Civ V.
But in any case, this is probably the only benchmark that’s really under delivered for the 7970. 5% is still a performance improvement (and we’ll take it any day of the week), but this silences any reasonable hope of being able to use 1920 at Ultra settings with MSAA on a single-GPU card for the time being.
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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.