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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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.