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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B3an - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Anyone with half a brain should have worked out that being as this was going to be AMD's Fermi that it would not of had a massive increase for gaming, simply because many of those extra transistors are there for computing purposes. NOT for gaming. Just as with Fermi.The performance of this card is pretty much exactly as i expected.
Peichen - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
AMD has been saying for ages that GPU computing is useless and CPU is the only way to go. I guess they just have a better PR department than Nvidia.BTW, before suggesting I have suffered brain trauma, remember that Nvidia delivered on Fermi 2 and GK100 will be twice as powerful as GF110
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
Well it was nice to see the amd fans with half a heart admit amd has accomplished something huge by abandoned gaming, as they couldn't get enough of screaming it against nvidia... even as the 580 smoked up the top line stretch so many times...It's so entertaining...
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
AMD is the dumb company. Their dumb gpu shaders. Their x86 copying of intel. Now after a few years they've done enough stealing and corporate espionage to "clone" Nvidia architecture and come out with this 7k compute.If they're lucky Nvidia will continue doing all software groundbreaking and carry the massive load by a factor of ten or forty to one working with game developers, porting open gl and open cl to workable programs and as amd fans have demanded giving them PhysX ported out to open source "for free", at which point it will suddenly be something no gamer should live without.
"Years behind" is the real story that should be told about amd and it's graphics - and it's cpu's as well.
Instead we are fed worthless half truths and lies... a "tesselator" in the HD2900 (while pathetic dx11 perf is still the amd norm)... the ddr5 "groundbreaker" ( never mentioned was the sorry bit width that made cheap 128 and 256 the reason for ddr5 needs)...
Etc.
When you don't see the promised improvement, the radeonites see a red rocket shooting to the outer depths of the galaxy and beyond...
Just get ready to pay some more taxes for the amd bailout coming.
durinbug - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
I was intrigued by the comment about driver command lists, somehow I missed all of that when it happened. I went searching and finally found this forum post from Ryan:http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=3152067...
It would be nice to link to that from the mention of DCL for those of us not familiar with it...
digitalzombie - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
I know I'm a minority, but I use Linux to crunch data and GPU would help a lot...I was wondering if you guys can try to use these cards on Debian/Ubuntu or Fedora? And maybe report if 3d acceleration actually works? My current amd card have bad driver for Linux, shearing and glitches, which sucks when I try to number crunch and map stuff out graphically in 3d. Hell I try compiling the driver's source code and it doesn't work.
Thank you!
WaltC - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Somebody pinch me and tell me I didn't just read a review of a brand-new, high-end ATi card that apparently *forgot* Eyefinity is a feature the stock nVidia 580--the card the author singles out for direct comparison with the 7970--doesn't offer in any form. Please tell me it's my eyesight that is failing, because I missed the benchmark bar charts detailing the performance of the Eyefinity 6-monitor support in the 7970 (but I do recall seeing esoteric bar-chart benchmarks for *PCIe 3.0* performance comparisons, however. I tend to think that multi-monitor support, or the lack of it, is far more an important distinction than PCIe 3.0 support benchmarks at present.)Oh, wait--nVidia's stock 580 doesn't do nVidia's "NV Surround triple display" and so there was no point in mentioning that "trivial fact" anywhere in the article? Why compare two cards so closely but fail to mention a major feature one of them supports that the other doesn't? Eh? Is it the author's opinion that multi-monitor gaming is not worth having on either gpu platform? If so, it would be nice to know that by way of the author's admission. Personally, I think that knowing whether a product will support multi monitors and *playable* resolutions up to 5760x1200 ROOB is *somewhat* important in a product review. (sarcasm/massive understatement)
Aside from that glaring oversight, I thought this review was just fair, honestly--and if the author had been less interested in apologizing for nVidia--we might even have seen a better one. Reading his hastily written apologies was kind of funny and amusing, though. But leaving out Eyefinity performance comparisons by pretending the feature isn't relative to the 7970, or that it isn't a feature worth commenting on relative to nVidia's stock 580? Very odd. The author also states: "The purpose of MST hubs was so that users could use several monitors with a regular Radeon card, rather than needing an exotic all-DisplayPort “Eyefinity edition” card as they need now," as if this is an industry-standard component that only ATi customers are "asking for," when it sure seems like nVidia customers could benefit from MST even more at present.
I seem to recall reading the following statement more than once in this review but please pardon me if it was only stated once: "... but it’s NVIDIA that makes all the money." Sorry but even a dunce can see that nVidia doesn't now and never has "made all the money." Heh...;) If nVidia "made all the money," and AMD hadn't made any money at all (which would have to be the case if nVidia "made all the money") then we wouldn't see a 7970 at all, would we? It's possible, and likely, that the author meant "nVidia made more money," which is an independent declaration I'm not inclined to check, either way. But it's for certain that in saying "nVidia made all the money" the author was--obviously--wrong.
The 7970 is all the more impressive considering how much longer nVidia's had to shape up and polish its 580-ish driver sets. But I gather that simple observation was also too far fetched for the author to have seriously considered as pertinent. The 7970 is impressive, AFAIC, but this review is somewhat disappointing. Looks like it was thrown together in a big hurry.
Finally - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
On AT you have to compensate for their over-steering while reading.Death666Angel - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
"Intel implemented Quick Sync as a CPU company, but does that mean hardware H.264 encoders are a CPU feature?" << Why is that even a question. I cannot use the feature unless I am using the iGPU or use the dGPU with Lucid Virtu. As such, it is not a feature of the CPU in my book.Roald - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
I don't agree with the conclusion. I think it's much more of a perspective thing. Comming from the 6970 to the 7970 it's not a great win in the gaming deparment. However the same can be said from the change from 4870 to 5870 to 6970. The only real benefit the 5870 had over the 4870 was DX11 support, which didn't mean so much for the games at the time.Now there is a new architechture that not only manages to increase FPS in current games, it also has growing potential and manages to excell in the compute field aswell at the same time.
The conclusion made in the Crysis warhead part of this review should therefore also have been highlighted as finals words.