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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
292 Comments
View All Comments
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
Well, since you brought that up it reminded me of the PRAISE this or the 7870 article gave amd for "getting rid of all it's own competing cards" and zeroing their distribution so that there was only one choice and it wasn't competing with itself.I didn't hear a single Nvidia basher cry foul, that amd was playing with the market just to slam dunk some dollars on a new release...
I do wonder why when amd pulls the dirtiest of dirty, they are praised...
MrSpadge - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
They'd loose the entire market of Milkyway@Home crunchers if it was just 1/4.RussianSensation - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
FP32 = 3.79 TFlopsFP64 = 0.948 Tflops, which is about 40% faster than HD6970.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
The keyword there was "up to". GCN actually supports 3 different FP64 configurations: 1/2, 1/4, and 1/16. 1/4 may be an artificial limitation on the 7970 or it may be the native speed Tahiti was designed for; it's not clear yet which of those is the case.WhoBeDaPlaya - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Ryan, any chance you could try running a Bitcoin client on the card to see what kind of hash rates we'd get?Esbornia - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Man this site is so biased against AMD it hurts, here we have a new architecture thats beats GTX580 in everything and sometimes GTX590 with almost half the power comsumption and they say the only thing 7970 does right is compute? That it is not a great product but only mediocre? Come on AnandTech we know intel owns you but this is getting ridiculous, see the other neutral sites reviews you will clearly see what AnandTech does if you are even a little smart.SlyNine - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
And a product that is 2 years removed from the 5870 and only performing about 40-60% better... and on a new 28nm chip to boot.It's just not that great.
RussianSensation - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
For almost $200 more as well....MrSpadge - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Reading the entire review (apart from the conclusion) I came to the conclusion that GCN is really cool. Give it some more software support (=time), a cool BOINC project and the HD7950 and I may have found my next card. Can't say AT talked me off of it.MrS
WhoBeDaPlaya - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
WWYBYWB?