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
Drivers & ISV Relations
As we noted last week with the release of the Catalyst 12.1 preview, AMD has a lot of technical and reputational debt to dig themselves out of when it comes to their Catalyst drivers. AMD dropped the ball this fall a number of times, failing to deliver on appropriate drivers for Rage, Battlefield 3, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in a timely manner. This isn’t something AMD is shying away from either – they know they screwed up and they’ll admit as much – but the question remains of how they intend to improve from there. Now that they once again have the leading single-GPU video card they need to have the leading drivers to run it.
Part of this redemption will come from the addition of new features, if only to reach parity with NVIDIA. Catalyst 12.1 introduced custom application profiles, while as we discussed with Eyefinity, Catalyst 12.2 will add to AMD’s suite of Eyefinity features with custom resolutions and the ability to relocate the Windows task bar. Furthermore AMD has features in the development pipeline for their Catalyst drivers for introduction later this year, but at this point it’s too early to talk about them.
But new features alone can’t fix every single thing that has ailed AMD in the past year, so the question remains: how does AMD intend to fix their poor delivery of optimized drivers for new games? It’s a question AMD cannot (or will not) completely answer in detail, but it’s a question for which there’s at least part of an answer.
The fundamental answer is more. More developers, more quality assurance, and above all more money. By all accounts NVIDIA sinks a lot of money into driver development and ISV and it usually shows. AMD is going to spend more resources on driver development at home and this is going to help a great deal, but at the same time it would seem that they’ve finally come to realize that great ISV relationships require that AMD be more proactive than how they’ve been in the past.
ISV relations covers a large umbrella of activities. Not only does this mean providing support to developers who request it, but it means providing cross-promotion marketing, encouraging developers to make use of your features (if only to help spur the creation of the killer app), and actively seeking out important development houses so that AMD’s interests and concerns are represented and represented early. It’s been said that the most important thing NVIDIA ever did with ISV relations was to send out their own engineers to development houses on their own dime to provide free support – essentially investing at least a small amount of money into a major game. The payoff of this was that NVIDIA was literally there to represent their interests, and conversely they had a chance to evaluate the game early and get to work on optimizations and SLI support well before it shipped. Snark about TWIMTBP aside, that’s where NVIDIA has raised the bar with ISV relations. That’s what AMD needs to follow.
To that extent AMD has reorganized the budget process for their ISV relations department. Neal Robison, the director of ISV relations, now directly controls a much larger ISV relations budget, whereas previously the ISV relations budget was apparently controlled by several parties. Having more funding for ISV relations won’t solve AMD’s issues on its own – It’s all about how that money is spent – but clearly AMD is on the right path by being able to afford to be more proactive about their ISV relationships.
Whether these changes will pay off as AMD is expecting them to remains to be seen, but from our discussions it’s apparent that AMD is trying harder than ever before. A great product requires good hardware and good software; AMD has the former in Tahiti, now it’s time to see if they can deliver on the latter.
Closing out the subject of drivers, AMD is also using the Southern Islands launch to outline their plans for Windows 8. AMD is promising that they will deliver drivers for Windows 8 on the same schedule as they have for Windows 7 and Windows Vista – new drivers will be available for the Windows 8 Beta, RC, and RTM releases. Furthermore as Microsoft has continually iterated on the WDDM driver stack since Vista, AMD will continue to be able to offer a single unified driver that covers all of the WDDM OSes (Vista, 7, and 8).
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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.