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
Display Tech: HD3D Eyefinity, MST Hubs, & DDM Audio
With the launch of the HD 5000 series back in 2009 AMD managed to get the drop on everyone, press and NVIDIA alike. Eyefinity, AMD’s Single Large Surface technology, came out of virtually nowhere thanks to a carefully orchestrated development plan that ensured very few people even within AMD knew about it. As a result of everything that was leaked ahead of time Eyefinity was not, making it AMD’s big eye catcher for the 5000 series.
As what was to be the first piece of the much dreamed about holodeck, AMD has been steadily working on it since 2009 in order to improve the experience even within their existing hardware by adding support for such features as bezel compensation and combining CrossFire with Eyefinity. For AMD it’s a feature of great importance even if end user adoption is still limited.
For the Southern Islands family AMD isn’t going to be pulling quite the rabbit out of their hat this time when it comes to displays. Southern Islands’ new display feature will be Discrete Digital Multi-Point Audio (which we’ll get to in a moment), but this doesn’t mean that AMD hasn’t continued to work on Eyefinity. Since October AMD has been engaged in an initiative they’re calling “Eyefinity Technology 2.0”, which is going to be pushed as a big part of the Southern Islands launch even though these are software improvements that will benefit all cards.
So what is Eyefinity Technology 2.0 composed of? We’ve already seen several new features starting with Catalyst 11.10, such as 5x1 portrait and landscape support and flexible bezel compensation support. The next step is going to be integrating Stereo 3D (or as AMD likes to call it, HD3D) into the mix, similar to how NVIDIA has 3D Vision Surround. Catalyst 11.12 introduced the ability to use HD3D with an Eyefinity display setup, and Catalyst 12.1 (preview out now) added support to do that in a CrossFire configuration. The final step is going to be with Catalyst 12.2 in February, which will add support for custom resolutions and the ability to relocate the Windows task bar to an arbitrary screen, two features that users have been asking about for quite some time. Again, all of these improvements are driver side, but they are a major component of AMD’s marketing for Southern Islands.
Speaking about Eyefinity, one issue that comes up time and time again is Multi Stream Transport (MST) hubs. We were introduced to MST hubs back with the launch of the 6800 series, which allowed a single DP 1.2 port to drive up to 4 monitors by taking advantage of the high bandwidth of DP1.2 and embedding transport streams for several monitors into the signal. 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.
But as many of you have asked me about, several deadlines for MST hubs have come and gone, including the latest deadline which was supposed to be by the end of this year. As with active DP adaptors this is largely out of AMD’s hands since they don’t produce the hardware, but they have been continuing to prod their partners on the issue. The latest deadline from AMD isn’t rosy – summer of 2012 – but they seem more confident of this deadline than deadlines in the past. Not that another half-year wait will be of any comfort for users who have been looking for MST hubs for the better part of the year, but at least it provides some idea on when to expect them.
Last, but certainly not least on the display technologies front is AMD’s new feature for Southern Islands, Discrete Digital Multi-Point Audio (DDMA). It’s a mouthful of a name but the concept is rather simple: it’s the next step in audio output from a video card. Video cards have been able to output audio for a few years now via HDMI, and more recently DisplayPort gained the ability. However GPUs have been limited to streaming audio to a single device, be it a monitor, TV, or receiver. With DDMA GPUs can send audio to multiple devices, and AMD is looking at how to put that ability to work.
The most basic use for being able to send audio to multiple devices is to individually address the speakers of each device, which is the cornerstone of AMD’s proposed use cases. Fundamentally AMD is looking at applications that involve matching audio streams to the monitor the relevant application is on – move a video player from your center monitor to your left monitor, and the audio from that video player should also move from the speakers on the middle monitor to the speakers on the left monitor. What can you do with speakers that are mapped to monitors? That’s what AMD wants to find out.
Being realistic for a moment, the 7970 isn’t going to be the card that sells this feature, as it’s a $550 gamer video card. Gamers are using dedicated 2.1/5.1/7.1 audio systems or headphones for surround sound, and while AMD does have a proposed multi-tasking use case for this it’s not very convincing. DDMA will become much more important on future lower end cards as those are the cards that go into family desktops, workstations, and the like. Thus the killer app for this feature (and certainly AMD’s best prepared scenario) is for video conferencing where each attendee is mapped to a monitor, and with DDMA a set of speakers on that monitor. AMD’s partner Oovoo is working on just such a system though it’s still early in development.
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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.