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
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.
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Ananke - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
"The 7970 leads the 5870 by 50-60% here and in a number of other games"...and as I see it also carries 500-600% of price premium over the 5870.Meh, this is so so priced for a FireGL card, but very badly placed for a consumer market. Regardless, CUDA is getting more open meanwhile. AMD is still several generations/years behind in the HPC market and marketing a product above the NVidia price targets will not help AMD to make it popular.
Having say so, I am using ATI cards for gaming for several years already, and I am very pleased with their IQ and performance. I have always pre-purchased my ATI cards... What I am missing though is teh promised and never materialized consumer level software that can utilize its calculation ability, aka CyberLink and other video transcoders. If it was not for the naughty Nvidia power draw in the 5th series, I would've gone green to have CUDA. Hence, considering SO MUCH MONEY, I am waiting at least 6 months from now to see what the prices will be for the both new contenders in next GPU architectures :).
Dangerous_Dave - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Seems like AMD can't do anything right these days. Bulldozer was designed for a world that doesn't exist, and now we have this new GPU stinking up the place. I'm sorry but @28nm you have double the transistors per area compared with @40nm, yet the performance is only 30% better for a chip that is virtually the same size! It should be at least twice as far ahead of the 6970 as that, even on immature drivers. As it stands, AMD @ 28nm is only just ahead of Nvidia @ 40nm as far as minimums go (the only thing that matters).I shudder to think how badly AMD is going to get destroyed when Nvidia release their 28nm GPU.
Finally - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
I shudder to think how badly one Nvidia fanboy's ego is going to get scratched if team red released a better GPU and his favourite team has nothing to offer.Oh... they did?
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
We have to let amd "go first" now since they have been so on the brink of bankruptcy collapse for so long that they've had to sell off most of their assets... and refinance by AbuDhabi oil money...I think it's nice our laws and global economy puts pressure on the big winners to not utterly crush the underdogs...
Really, if amd makes another fail it might be the last one before collapse and "restructuring" and frankly not many of us want to see that...
They already made the "last move" a dying company does and slashed with the ax at their people...
If the amd fans didn't constantly demand they be given a few dollars off all the time, amd might not be failing - I mean think about it - a near constant loss, because the excessive demand for price vs perf vs the enemy is all the radeon fans claim to care about.
It would be better for us all if the radeon fans dropped the constant $ complaints and just manned up and supported AMD as real fans, with their pocketbooks... instead of driving their favorite toward bankruptcy and cooked books filled with red ink...
Dangerous_Dave - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
On reflection this card is even worse than my initial analysis. For 3.4billion transistors AMD could have done no research at all and simply integrated two 6870s onto a single die (a la 5870 vs 4870) and ramped up the clock speed to somewhere over 1Ghz (since 28nm would have easily allowed that). This would have produced performance similar to a 6990, and far in excess of the 7970.Instead we've done a lot of research and spent 4.1billion transistors creating a card that is far worse than a 6990!
That's the value of AMD's creative thinking.
cknobman - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
The sad part is your likely too stupid to realize just how idiotic your post sounds.They introduced a new architecture that facilitates much better compute performance as well as giving more gaming performance.
Did you read the article and look at the compute benchmarks or did you just flip through the game benchmark pages and look at numbers without reading?
Zingam - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Or maybe you just don't realize that they've added another 2 billion transistors for minimal graphics performance increase over the previous generation.That's almost as if you buy a new generation BMW that has instead 300 hp, 600hp but is not able to drag a bigger trailer.
The only benefit for you would be that you can brag that you've just got the most expensive and useless car available.
Finally - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
Rule 1A:The frequency of a car pseudoanalogy to explain a technical concept increases with thread length. This will make many people chuckle, as computer people are rarely knowledgeable about vehicular mechanics.
cknobman - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
Holy sh!t are you not reading and understanding the article and posts here??????????The extra transistors and new architecture were to increase COMPUTE PERFORMANCE as well as graphics.
Think bigger picture here dude not just games. Think of fusion and how general computing and graphics computing will merge into one.
This architecture is much bigger than just being a graphics card for games.
This is AMD's fermi except they did it about 100x better than Nvidia keeping power in check and still having amazing performance.
Plus your looking at probably beta drivers (heck maybe alpha) so there could very will be another 10+% increase in performance once this thing hit retail shelves and gets some driver improvements.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
I see. So when nvidia did it, it was abandoning gamers for 6 months of ripping away and gnawing plus... but now, since it's amd, amd has done it 100X better... and no abandonment...Wow.
I love hypocrisy in it's full raw and massive form - it's an absolute wonder to behold.