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
DiRT 3
For racing games our racer of choice continues to be DiRT, which is now in its 3rd iteration. Codemasters uses the same EGO engine between its DiRT, F1, and GRID series, so the performance of EGO is has been relevant for a number of number of racing games over the years.
With DiRT 2 NVIDIA often held a slight edge in performance, and due to the reuse of the EGO engine this hasn’t really changed in DiRT 3. As a result the 7970 is still faster than the GTX 580, but not by as much as in other games. At 2560 this manifests itself as a 19% lead, while at 1920 it’s down to 6%, and embarrassingly enough at 1680 the 7970 actually falls behind the GTX 580 by just a hair. DiRT 3 is not particularly shader heavy so that may be part of the reason that the 7970 can’t easily clear the GTX 580 here, but that doesn’t fully explain what we’re seeing. At the end of the day this is all academic since everything north of the GTX 570 can clear 60fps even at 2560, but it would be nice to eventually figure out why NVIDIA does better than average here.
Meanwhile compared to the 6970 the 7970 enjoys one of its bigger leads. Here the 7970 leads by about 45% at 2560 and 1920, and finally falls slightly to 37% at 1680.
We’ve had a number of requests for more minimum framerates throughout the years, so we’re also going to include the minimum framerates for DiRT 3 as the minimums have proven to be reliably consistent in our benchmarks.
Given that the 7970 was already seeing a smaller than typical lead over the GTX 580, it’s not wholly surprising to see that it fares a bit worse when it comes to minimums. At 2560 its minimum framerate of 64.2fps means that the 7970 will deliver smooth performance every last moment, but at the same time this is only 11% better than the GTX 580. At 1920 this becomes a dead heat between the two cards. Meanwhile compared to the 6970 the 7970 is always about 45% ahead.
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Scali - Saturday, December 24, 2011 - link
I have never heard Jen-Hsun call the mock-up a working board.They DID however have working boards on which they demonstrated the tech-demos.
Stop trying to make something out of nothing.
Scali - Saturday, December 24, 2011 - link
Actually, since Crysis 2 does not 'tessellate the crap' out of things (unless your definition of that is: "Doesn't run on underperforming tessellation hardware"), the 7970 is actually the fastest card in Crysis 2.Did you even bother to read some other reviews? Many of them tested Crysis 2, you know. Tomshardware for example.
If you try to make smart fanboy remarks, at least make sure they're smart first.
Scali - Saturday, December 24, 2011 - link
But I know... being a fanboy must be really hard these days..One moment you have to spread nonsense about how Crysis 2's tessellation is totally over-the-top...
The next moment, AMD comes out with a card that has enough of a boost in performance that it comes out on top in Crysis 2 again... So you have to get all up to date with the latest nonsense again.
Now you know what the AMD PR department feels like... they went from "Tessellation good" to "Tessellation bad" as well, and have to move back again now...
That is, they would, if they weren't all fired by the new management.
formulav8 - Tuesday, February 21, 2012 - link
Your worse than anything he said. Grow upCeriseCogburn - Sunday, March 11, 2012 - link
He's exactly correct. I quite understand for amd fanboys that's forbidden, one must tow the stupid crybaby line and never deviate to the truth.crazzyeddie - Sunday, December 25, 2011 - link
Page 4:" Traditionally the ROPs, L2 cache, and memory controllers have all been tightly integrated as ROP operations are extremely bandwidth intensive, making this a very design for AMD to use. "
Scali - Monday, December 26, 2011 - link
Ofcourse it isn't. More polygons is better. Pixar subdivides everything on screen to sub-pixel level.That's where games are headed as well, that's progress.
Only fanboys like you cry about it.... even after AMD starts winning the benchmarks (which would prove that Crysis is not doing THAT much tessellation, both nVidia and new AMD hardware can deal with it adequately).
Wierdo - Monday, January 2, 2012 - link
http://techreport.com/articles.x/21404"Crytek's decision to deploy gratuitous amounts of tessellation in places where it doesn't make sense is frustrating, because they're essentially wasting GPU power—and they're doing so in a high-profile game that we'd hoped would be a killer showcase for the benefits of DirectX 11
...
But the strange inefficiencies create problems. Why are largely flat surfaces, such as that Jersey barrier, subdivided into so many thousands of polygons, with no apparent visual benefit? Why does tessellated water roil constantly beneath the dry streets of the city, invisible to all?
...
One potential answer is developer laziness or lack of time
...
so they can understand why Crysis 2 may not be the most reliable indicator of comparative GPU performance"
I'll take the word of professional reviewers.
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, March 11, 2012 - link
Give them a month or two to adjust their amd epic fail whining blame shift.When it occurs to them that amd is actually delivering some dx11 performance for the 1st time, they'll shift to something else they whine about and blame on nvidia.
The big green MAN is always keeping them down.
Scali - Monday, December 26, 2011 - link
Wrong, they showed plenty of demos at the introduction. Else the introduction would just be Jen-Hsun holding up the mock card, and nothing else... which was clearly not the case.They demo'ed Endless City, among other things. Which could not have run on anything other than real Fermi chips.
And yea, I'm really going to go to SemiAccurate to get reliable information!