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
Battlefield 3
Its popularity aside, Battlefield 3 may be the most interesting game in our benchmark suite for a single reason: it’s the first AAA DX10+ game. It’s been 5 years since the launch of the first DX10 GPUs, and 3 whole process node shrinks later we’re finally to the point where games are using DX10’s functionality as a baseline rather than an addition. Not surprisingly BF3 is one of the best looking games in our suite, but as with past Battlefield games that beauty comes with a high performance cost
How to benchmark BF3 is a point of great contention. Our preference is to always stick to the scientific method, which means our tests need to be perfectly repeatable or very, very close. For that reason we’re using an on-rails section of the single player game, Thunder Run, to do our testing. This isn’t the most strenuous part of Battlefield 3 – multiplayer can get much worse – but it’s the most consistent part of the game. In general we’ve found that minimum framerates in multiplayer are about half of the average framerate in Thunder Run, so it’s important to frame your expectations accordingly.
With that out of the way, Battlefield 3 ends up being one of the worst games for the 7970 from a competitive standpoint. It always maintains a lead over the GTX 580, but the greatest lead is only 13% at 2560 without any MSAA, and everywhere else it’s 3-5%. Of course it goes without saying that realistically BF3 is only playable at 1920 (no MSAA) and below on any of the single-GPU cards in this lineup, so unfortunately for AMD it’s the 5% number that’s the most relevant.
Meanwhile compared to the 6970, the 7970’s performance gains are also a bit below average. 2560 and 1920 with MSAA are quite good at 30% and 34% respectively, but at 1920 without MSAA that’s only a 25% gain, which is one of the smaller gaps between the two cards throughout our entire test suite.
The big question of course is why are we only seeing such a limited lead from the 7970 here? BF3 implements a wide array of technologies so it’s hard to say for sure, but there is one thing we know they implement in the engine that only NVIDIA can use: Driver Command Lists, the same “secret sauce” that boosted NVIDIA’s Civilization V performance by so much last year. So it may be that NVIDIA’s DCL support is helping their performance here in BF3, much like it was in Civ V.
But in any case, this is probably the only benchmark that’s really under delivered for the 7970. 5% is still a performance improvement (and we’ll take it any day of the week), but this silences any reasonable hope of being able to use 1920 at Ultra settings with MSAA on a single-GPU card for the time being.
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Zingam - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
I think this card is a kinda fail. Well, maybe it is a driver issue and they'll up the performance 20-25% in the future but it is still not fast enough for such huge jump - 2 nodes down!!!It smell like a graphics Bulldozer for AMD. Good ideas on paper but in practice something doesn't work quite right. Raw performance is all that counts (of course raw performance/$).
If NVIDIA does better than usual this time. AMD might be in trouble. Well, will wait and see.
Hopefully they'll be able to release improved CPUs and GPUs soon because this generation does not seem to be very impressive.
I've expected at least triple performance over the previous generation. Maybe the drivers are not that well optimized yet. After all it is a huge architecture change.
I don't really care that much about that GPU generation but I'm worried that they won't be able to put something impressively new in the next generation of consoles. I really hope that we are not stuck with obsolete CPU/GPU combination for the next 7-8 years again.
Anyway: massively parallel computing sounds tasty!
B3an - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
You dont seem to understand that all them extra transistors are mostly there for computing. Thats mostly what this was designed for. Not specifically for gaming performance. Computing is where this card will offer massive increases over the previous AMD generation.Look at Nvidia's Fermi, that had way more transistors than the previous generation but wasn't that much faster than AMD's cards at the time. Because again all the extra transistors were mainly for computing.
And come on LOL, expecting over triple the performance?? That has never happened once with any GPU release.
SlyNine - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
The 9700pro was up to 4x faster then the 4600 in certian situations. So yes it has happened.tzhu07 - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
LOL, triple the performance?Do you also have a standard of dating only Victoria's Secret models?
eanazag - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
I have a 3870 which I got in early 2007. It still does well for the main games I play: Dawn of War 2 and Starcraft 2 (25 fps has been fine for me here with settings mostly maxed). I have eyeing a new card. I like the power usage and thermals here. I am not spending $500+ though. I am thinking they are using that price to compensate for the mediocre yields they getting on 28nm, but either way the numbers look justified. I will be look for the best card between $150-$250, maybe $300. I am counting on this cards price coming down, but I doubt it will hit under $400-350 next year.No matter what this looks like a successful soft launch of a video card. For me, anything smokes what I have in performance but not so much on power usage. I'd really not mind the extra noise as the heat is better than my 3870.
I'm in the single card strategy camp.
Monitor is a single 42" 1920x1200 60 Hz.
Intel Core i5 760 at stock clocks. My first Intel since the P3 days.
Great article.
Death666Angel - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Can someone explain the different heights in the die-size comparison picture? Does that reflect processing-changes? I'm lost. :D Otherwise, good review. I don't see the HD7970 in Bench, am I blind or is it just missing.Ryan Smith - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
The Y axis is the die size. The higher a GPU the bigger it is (relative to the other GPUs from that company).Death666Angel - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
Thanks! I thought the actual sizes were the sizes and the y-axis meant something else. Makes sense though how you did it! :-)MonkeyPaw - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
As a former owner of the 3870, mine had the short-lived GDDR4. That old card has a place in my nerd heart, as it played Bioshock wonderfully.Peichen - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
The improvement is simply not as impressive as I was led to believed. Rumor has it that a single 7970 would have the power of a 6990. In fact, if you crunch the numbers, it would be at least 50% faster than 6970 which should put it close to 6990. (63.25% increase in transistors, 40.37% in TFLOP and 50% increase in memory bandwidth.)What we got is a Fermi 1st gen with the price to match. Remember, this is not a half-node improvement in manufacturing process, it is a full-node and we waited two years for this.
In any case, I am just ranting because I am waiting for something to replace my current card before GTA 5 came out. Nvidia's GK104 in Q1 2012 should be interesting. Rumored to be slightly faster than GTX 580 (slower than 7970) but much cheaper. We'll see.