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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SlyNine - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
Are you nuts, the 5870 was nearly 2x as fast in DX 10/9 stuff, not to mention DX11 was way ahead of DX10. Sure the 6970 isn't a great upgrade from a 5870, but neither is the 7970.Questionable Premise
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
That happened at the end of 2006 with the G80 Roald. That means AMD and their ATI Radeon aquisition crew are five years plus late to the party.FIVE YEARS LATE.
It's nice to know that what Nvidia did years ago and recently as well is now supported by more people as amd copycats the true leader.
Good deal.
Hauk - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
A stunningly comprehensive analysis of this new architecture. This is what sets Anandtech apart from its competition. Kudos Ryan, this is one of your best..eastyy - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
its funny though when it comes to new hardware you read these complicated technical jargon and lots of detailed specs about how cards do things different how much more technically complicated and in the end for me all it means is...+15fps and thats about itas soon as a card comes out for say 150 and the games i play become slow and jerky on my 460 then i will upgrade
Mockingbird - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
I'd like to see some benchmarks on FX-8150 based system (990fx)piroroadkill - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
Haha, the irony is that AMD is putting out graphics cards that would be bottlenecked HARDCORE by ANY of their CPUs, overclocked as much as you like.It's kind of tragic...
Pantsu - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
The performance increase was as expected, at least for me, certainly not for all those who thought this would double performance. Considering AMD had a 389mm^2 chip with Cayman, they weren't going to double the transistor count again. That would've meant the next gen after this would be Nvidia class huge ass chip. So 64% more transistors on a 365mm^2 chip. Looks like transistor density increase took a bit of a hit on 28nm, perhaps because of 384-bit bus? Still I think AMD is doing better than Nvidia when it comes to density.As far as the chip size is concerned, the performance is OK, but I really question whether 32 ROPs is enough on this design. Fermi has 48 ROPs and about a billion transistors less. I think AMD is losing AA performance due to such a skimpy ROP count.
Overall the card is good regardless, but the pricing is indeed steep. I'm sure people will buy it nonetheless, but as a 365mm^2 chip with 3GB GDDR5 I feel like it should be 100$ cheaper than what it is now. I blame lack of competition. It's Nvidia's time to drop the prices. GTX 580 is simply not worth that much compared to what 6950/560Ti are going for these days. And in turn that should drop 7970/50 price.
nadavvadan - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
Am I really tired, or is:" 3.79TFLOPs, while its FP64 performance is ¼ that at 947MFLOPs"
supposed to be:
" 3.79TFLOPs, while its FP64 performance is ¼ that at 947-G-FLOPs"?
Enjoyed the review as always.
Death666Angel - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
Now that you have changed the benchmark, would it be possible to publish a .pdf with the relevant settings of each game? I would be very interested to replicate some of the tests with my home system to better compare some results. If it is not too much work that is (and others are interested in this as well). :Dmarc1000 - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
What about juniper? Could it make it's way to the 7000 series as a 7670 card? Of course, upgraded to GCN, but with same specs as current cards. I guess that at 28nm it would be possible to abandon the pci-e power requirement, making it the go-to card for oem's and low power/noise systems.I would not buy it because I own one now, but I'm looking forward to 7770 or 7870 and their nvidia equivalent. It looks like next year will be a great time to upgrade for who is in the middle cards market.