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
DiRT 3
For racing games our racer of choice continues to be DiRT, which is now in its 3rd iteration. Codemasters uses the same EGO engine between its DiRT, F1, and GRID series, so the performance of EGO is has been relevant for a number of number of racing games over the years.
With DiRT 2 NVIDIA often held a slight edge in performance, and due to the reuse of the EGO engine this hasn’t really changed in DiRT 3. As a result the 7970 is still faster than the GTX 580, but not by as much as in other games. At 2560 this manifests itself as a 19% lead, while at 1920 it’s down to 6%, and embarrassingly enough at 1680 the 7970 actually falls behind the GTX 580 by just a hair. DiRT 3 is not particularly shader heavy so that may be part of the reason that the 7970 can’t easily clear the GTX 580 here, but that doesn’t fully explain what we’re seeing. At the end of the day this is all academic since everything north of the GTX 570 can clear 60fps even at 2560, but it would be nice to eventually figure out why NVIDIA does better than average here.
Meanwhile compared to the 6970 the 7970 enjoys one of its bigger leads. Here the 7970 leads by about 45% at 2560 and 1920, and finally falls slightly to 37% at 1680.
We’ve had a number of requests for more minimum framerates throughout the years, so we’re also going to include the minimum framerates for DiRT 3 as the minimums have proven to be reliably consistent in our benchmarks.
Given that the 7970 was already seeing a smaller than typical lead over the GTX 580, it’s not wholly surprising to see that it fares a bit worse when it comes to minimums. At 2560 its minimum framerate of 64.2fps means that the 7970 will deliver smooth performance every last moment, but at the same time this is only 11% better than the GTX 580. At 1920 this becomes a dead heat between the two cards. Meanwhile compared to the 6970 the 7970 is always about 45% ahead.
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Scali - Monday, December 26, 2011 - link
Lol, how's that, when I'm the one saying that AMD's cards are the best performers in Crysis 2?I'm neutral, a concept that is obviously alien to you. Idiots...
Scali - Monday, December 26, 2011 - link
Heck, I'm also the guy who made Endless City run on non-nVidia cards. How does that make me an nVidia fanboy?CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
That's sad when an nvidia fanboy has to help all the amd fannies with software coding so they can run a benchmark, then after all that work to help the underprivileged, nothing but attacks after the facts... finally silence them.It's really sad when the truth is so far from the pop culture mind that actually speaking it is nearly forbidden.
Thank you for helping them with the benchmark. Continue to be kind in such ways to the sour whining and disgruntled, as it only helped prove how pathetic amd dx11 was...
james007 - Friday, December 30, 2011 - link
This sounded like such an awesome card and I was psyched to get it the moment it comes out -- until reading the part about dropping the 2nd DVI port. A DisplayPort-to-SLDVI doesn't do it, for me, because my desktop has to drive two 30" displays. In fact, I would love to be able to drive a third display so I can have a touch-screen also. My current (previous-generation) VDC does drive both displays just fine.This does not seem like such an infrequent requirement, especially for high-end users. Why would they drop the ability to drive the 2nd display? !!!
Argh!
The_Countess666 - Saturday, December 31, 2011 - link
not trying to sell you anything but, HDMI to dual-link dvi does exist (see link, or google yourself for other shops).http://sewelldirect.com/hdmi-to-dvi-dual-link-cabl...
and these cards do have 1 HDMI-out so that should work for you.
Penti - Wednesday, January 4, 2012 - link
It's the IHV that makes those decisions any way, just because it's not on a reference card doesn't mean they won't show up or that you can't build a card with it. But the HDMI supports more then 1920x1200 finally on this card any how. I guess they could deliver a card with the old type of DVI>HDMI adapters. Obviously opting for HDMI and multidisplaycapable displayport 1.2 makes more sense though. It's been around for years now.Penti - Wednesday, January 4, 2012 - link
Just make sure you actually has the number of connections you need when buying the card, many 7970 bords only appear to support single-link DVI on the DVI-connector.poordirtfarmer2 - Wednesday, January 4, 2012 - link
Enjoyed the article.So this new 79XX architecture is about a GPU architecture that’s also good for “compute work”. The reference to NVIDIA ‘s professional video cards (Quadro ; Telsa), implies to me that this might mean video cards viable for use both in gaming and in engineering / video work stations.
I’m not a pro, but do a lot of video editing, rendering and encoding. I’ve avoided dedicating a machine with an expensive special purpose QUADRO video card. Am I reading the wrong thing into this review, or might the new 79XX and the right driver give folks like me the best of both worlds?
radojko - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link
UVD 3 in NextGen is a disappointing. Nvidia is two generation in front with PureVideo HD 5.psiboy - Monday, January 9, 2012 - link
Well Mr Ryan Smith I must ask why the omission of 1920 x 1080 in al lbenchmarks... given that almost every new monitor for quite some time has been natively 1920 x 1080... what is it with you guys and Tom's lately.. you both seem to have been ignoring the reality of what most of your readers are using!