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
The Test
Starting with the launch of the 7970 we will be using our new GPU testbed, replacing both our hardware and most of our benchmarks. On the hardware side we’re using an Intel Core i7 3960X overclocked to 4.3GHz on an EVGA X79 SLI motherboard, giving us access to PCIe 3.0 while keeping most CPU bottlenecks at bay. While we’re only looking at a single card today, based on some informal surveys for multi-GPU testing we will continue to test our cards adjacent to each other to represent the worst case scenario, as it turns out there are a number of users out there who do use that arrangement even if they’re not in the majority.
On the software side we’ve refreshed most of our benchmarks; the suite is tilted towards DX11, but there are still enough DX9/10 tests to get a good idea of how new cards compare to pre-DX11 cards. On that note I know we have a lot of Skyrim fans out there, and while we wanted to include Skyrim benchmark we’re having trouble coming up with any good test cases (that don’t involve INI hacking) that aren’t incredibly CPU limited. If you have any suggestions, please drop me a line.
For drivers on AMD’s cards we’re using AMD’s beta 8.921.2-111215a drivers, which identify themselves as Catalyst 11.12 but are otherwise indistinguishable from the Catalyst 12.1 preview released last week. On that note, for those of you who have been asking about support for D3D11 Driver Command Lists – an optional D3D11 feature that helps with multithreaded rendering and is NVIDIA’s secret sauce for Civilization V – AMD has still not implemented support for it as of this driver.
For NVIDIA’s cards we’re using NVIDIA’s latest beta driver, 290.36.
Finally, as we’ve only had a limited amount of time with the 7970, we’ve narrowed our suite of cards just slightly in order to make the deadline. For those of you curious about how middle-tier cards such as the GTX 560 series and the Radeon HD 6800 series or various multi-card SLI and CrossFire setups compare, we’ll be adding new results to Bench throughout the rest of the month, and Eyefinity soon after that. For the time being since we only have a single card, we’re focusing on single card results with a single monitor.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.3GHz |
| Motherboard: | EVGA X79 SLI |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.2.3.1022 |
| Power Supply: | Antec True Power Quattro 1200 |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung 470 (240GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1867 4 x 4GB (8-10-9-26) |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 7970 AMD Radeon HD 6990 AMD Radeon HD 6970 AMD Radeon HD 6950 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 5850 AMD Radeon HD 4870 AMD Radeon HD 3870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 290.36 Beta AMD Catalyst Beta 8.921.2-111215a |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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Esbornia - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Fan boy much?CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
Finally, piroroadkill, Esbornia - the gentleman ericore merely stated what all the articles here have done as analysis while the radeonite fans repeated it ad infinitum screaming nvidia's giant core count doesn't give the percentage increase it should considering transistor increase.Now, when it's amd's turn, we get ericore under 3 attacks in a row...---
So you three all take it back concerning fermi ?
maverickuw - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
I want to know when the 7950 will come out and hopefully it'll come out at $400duploxxx - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Only the fact that ATI is able to bring a new architecture on a new process and result in such a performance increase for that power consumption is a clear winner.looking at the past with Fermy 1st launch and even Cayman VLIW4 they had much more issues to start with.
nice job, while probably nv680 will be more performing it will take them at least a while to release that product and it will need to be also huge in size.
ecuador - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Nice review, although I really think testing 1680x1050 for a $550 is a big waste of time, which could have to perhaps multi-monitor testing etc.Esbornia - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Its Anand you should expect this kind of shiet.Ryan Smith - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
In this case the purpose of 1680 is to allow us to draw comparisons to low-end cards and older cards, which is something we consider to be important. The 8800GT and 3870 in particular do not offer meaningful performance at 1920.poohbear - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Why do you bencmark @ 1920x1200 resolution? according to the Steam December survey only 8% of gamers have that resolution, whereas 24% have 1920x1080 and 18% use 1680x1050 (the 2 most popular). Also, minimum FPS would be nice to know in your benchmarks, that is really useful for us! just a heads up for next time u benchmark a video card! Otherwise nice review! lotsa good info at the beginning!:)Galcobar - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Page 4, comments section.Esbornia - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
They dont want to show the improvements on min FPS cause they hate AMD, you should know that already.