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
Starcraft II
Our next game is Starcraft II, Blizzard’s 2010 RTS megahit. Much like Portal 2 it’s a DX9 game designed to run on a wide range of hardware so performance is quite peppy with most high-end cards, but it can still challenge a GPU when it needs to.
For 2560 and 1920 we’re using 4x MSAA, which must be forced through the driver control panel as Starcraft II does not natively support anti-aliasing. As is often the case with forced MSAA the resulting performance hit is rather high, which is why SC2 can still tax our high-end GPUs.
Starting at 2560, things are looking good for the 7960. At 70.2fps it takes a 19% lead over the GTX 580, and is the only single-GPU card to crack 60fps at that resolution. Against the 6970 it also looks quite good, with a lead of just under 40%.
But when we drop down to 1920, the 7970’s tendency for its lead to drop with the resolution takes full force. Here the 7970 is only 2% ahead of the GTX 580, and looking at 1680 (without MSAA) has the 7970 being outright outgassed by the older GTX 580 by nearly 33%. Interestingly enough however we don’t see the same thing happen against AMD’s own cards, as the 7970 remains ahead of the 6970 by about 35%.
While it’s primarily 1920 and 2560 we’re interested in, it’s still worth pondering on 1680 for a moment. Given the consistent performance of the 7970 versus the 6970, it looks like we’re not simply seeing architectural strengths and weaknesses here. AMD simply cannot hit the high framerates of the GTX 580 here, and at this point we have to suspect that unless AMD is somehow ROP-bound, that we’re looking at a driver limitation of some kind that starts to particularly manifest itself at 1920 and below.
In any case while Starcraft II is not a particularly strong game for the 7970, at the very least the raw performance is there. The performance differences are largely academic as the 7970 is more than capable of powering through even 2560. As such if the 7970 is going to struggle to beat the GTX 580 at any game, this is one of the less meaningful games to struggle at.
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Scali - Monday, December 26, 2011 - link
Lol, how's that, when I'm the one saying that AMD's cards are the best performers in Crysis 2?I'm neutral, a concept that is obviously alien to you. Idiots...
Scali - Monday, December 26, 2011 - link
Heck, I'm also the guy who made Endless City run on non-nVidia cards. How does that make me an nVidia fanboy?CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
That's sad when an nvidia fanboy has to help all the amd fannies with software coding so they can run a benchmark, then after all that work to help the underprivileged, nothing but attacks after the facts... finally silence them.It's really sad when the truth is so far from the pop culture mind that actually speaking it is nearly forbidden.
Thank you for helping them with the benchmark. Continue to be kind in such ways to the sour whining and disgruntled, as it only helped prove how pathetic amd dx11 was...
james007 - Friday, December 30, 2011 - link
This sounded like such an awesome card and I was psyched to get it the moment it comes out -- until reading the part about dropping the 2nd DVI port. A DisplayPort-to-SLDVI doesn't do it, for me, because my desktop has to drive two 30" displays. In fact, I would love to be able to drive a third display so I can have a touch-screen also. My current (previous-generation) VDC does drive both displays just fine.This does not seem like such an infrequent requirement, especially for high-end users. Why would they drop the ability to drive the 2nd display? !!!
Argh!
The_Countess666 - Saturday, December 31, 2011 - link
not trying to sell you anything but, HDMI to dual-link dvi does exist (see link, or google yourself for other shops).http://sewelldirect.com/hdmi-to-dvi-dual-link-cabl...
and these cards do have 1 HDMI-out so that should work for you.
Penti - Wednesday, January 4, 2012 - link
It's the IHV that makes those decisions any way, just because it's not on a reference card doesn't mean they won't show up or that you can't build a card with it. But the HDMI supports more then 1920x1200 finally on this card any how. I guess they could deliver a card with the old type of DVI>HDMI adapters. Obviously opting for HDMI and multidisplaycapable displayport 1.2 makes more sense though. It's been around for years now.Penti - Wednesday, January 4, 2012 - link
Just make sure you actually has the number of connections you need when buying the card, many 7970 bords only appear to support single-link DVI on the DVI-connector.poordirtfarmer2 - Wednesday, January 4, 2012 - link
Enjoyed the article.So this new 79XX architecture is about a GPU architecture that’s also good for “compute work”. The reference to NVIDIA ‘s professional video cards (Quadro ; Telsa), implies to me that this might mean video cards viable for use both in gaming and in engineering / video work stations.
I’m not a pro, but do a lot of video editing, rendering and encoding. I’ve avoided dedicating a machine with an expensive special purpose QUADRO video card. Am I reading the wrong thing into this review, or might the new 79XX and the right driver give folks like me the best of both worlds?
radojko - Thursday, January 5, 2012 - link
UVD 3 in NextGen is a disappointing. Nvidia is two generation in front with PureVideo HD 5.psiboy - Monday, January 9, 2012 - link
Well Mr Ryan Smith I must ask why the omission of 1920 x 1080 in al lbenchmarks... given that almost every new monitor for quite some time has been natively 1920 x 1080... what is it with you guys and Tom's lately.. you both seem to have been ignoring the reality of what most of your readers are using!