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
Batman: Arkham City
After a rocky launch last month, Rocksteady finally got their DirectX 11 problems sorted out for Batman: Arkham City earlier this month. Batman: Arkham City is loosely based on Unreal Engine 3, while the DirectX 11 functionality was apparently developed in-house. With the addition of these features Batman is far more a GPU demanding game than its predecessor was, particularly with tessellation cranked up to high.
At Extreme settings Batman is quite daunting for our entire GPU lineup at 2560. Nothing except the GTX 590 can crack 60fps, though the 7970 begins to come close at 52fps. Relative to NVIDIA’s lineup Batman ends up being one of the weaker games for the 7970, with the 7970 only taking an 18% lead over the GTX 580 at 2560. As for the 6970, the 7970 has another very strong showing opposite AMD’s previous generation, beating the 6970 by 44%.
At 1920 we’re still using Extreme settings and the story is much the same, though the 7970’s lead drops a bit more. Against the GTX 580 it’s now only 14% faster, and against the 6970 it’s 35% faster. Things do eventually pick up at 1680 when we back off to Very High settings and stop using MSAA, at which point the 7970 takes a surprising 32% lead over the GTX 580 while the lead over the 6970 jumps back up to 47%.
Looking at all of our cards it’s really the 5870 that tells the whole story. Tessellation plays a large factor in Batman’s performance, and as a result the partially tessellation-constrained 5870 absolutely struggles even at 1920. Consequently this is further proof that AMD was able to get a great deal of additional performance out of their geometry engines even with the 2 tringle/clock limit.
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Iketh - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
As mentioned several times in the article and in the comments, time was an issue. You can rest assured that follow-up articles are in the works.Ryan Smith - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Indeed it is.Malih - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
dude, awesome in-depth (emphasizing on depth) review, thank you very much for the excellent work Ryan.Esbornia - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
After reading a half ass misinforming review full of errors and typos, I think you didn't read it to say something like that.Iketh - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
It is full of typos, but that has nothing to do with in-depth. It was certainly in-depth and a joy to read despite the typos.I'd like to know what you believe is misinformation though.
SlyNine - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
He probably couldn't understand alot of it and though they were all typo's.WhoBeDaPlaya - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Sod off you wanker. Go and read Walmart reviews for this cart - they're probably more at your level ;)Marburg U - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Does Eyefinity Technology 2.0 allow me to launch an application within Windows ON WHICH MONITOR I WANT?NikosD - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
It seems that nobody noticed but where is FP64 = 1/2 FP32 performance that AMD said back in June when they first introduced CGN architecture ?I copy from Ryan's June article:
"One thing that we do know is that FP64 performance has been radically improved: the GCN architecture is capable of FP64 performance up to ½ its FP32 performance. For home users this isn’t going to make a significant impact right away, but it’s going to help AMD get into professional markets where such precision is necessary."
The truth is that FP64 is 1/4 of FP32 eventually!
Big Loss in GPGPU community even if 7970 is capable of 3.79Tflops of FP32 compared to 2.7Tflops of 6970
R3MF - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
it says 1/2 in the architecture article, but 1/4 in the consumer product review, is this AMD taking a leaf from Nvidia's (shitty) book of using drivers to disable features in non-professional (price-tag) products?