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 |
292 Comments
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GTVic - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
The first Fermi version they demo'd was a mock-up held together with wood screws. That is not a good launch...RussianSensation - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
And the real launch version produced Tessellation performance that took HD7970 to pass, had compute performance that HD7970 can barely best today, had Mega Texture support that HD7970 just added now 2 years later, had scalar SIMD architecture that took AMD 2 years to release.Scali - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
HD7970 doesn't actually surpass Fermi's tessellation, apart from tessellation factors 10 and below:http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,860536/Test-Rade...
From factor 11 to 64, Fermi still reigns supreme.
(This is with AMD's SubD11 sample from the DirectX 11 SDK).
Scali - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
Uhhh no. They demo'ed a real Fermi obviously.It was just a development board, which didn't exactly look pretty, and was not in any way representative of the card that would be available to end-users.
So they made a mock-up to show what a retail Fermi WOULD look like, once it hits the stores.
Which is common practice anyway in the industry.
fllib19554 - Thursday, January 12, 2012 - link
off yourself cretin.futurepastnow - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
You misspelled "impressive."slayernine - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
What Wreckage really meant to say was that it was disappointing for nVidia to get pummelled so thoroughly.unaligned - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
A year old card pummeled by the newest technology? I would hope so.MagickMan - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Go shoot yourself in the face, troll.rs2 - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Yes, yes. 4+ billion transistors on a single chip is not impressive at all. Why, it's not even one transistor for every person on the planet yet.