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
Portal 2
Portal 2 continues the long and proud tradition of Valve’s in-house Source engine. While Source continues to be a DX9 engine, Valve has continued to upgrade it over the years to improve its quality, and combined with their choice of style you’d have a hard time telling it’s over 7 years old at this point. Consequently Portal 2’s performance does get rather high on high-end cards, but we have ways of fixing that…
Given Portal 2’s wide range of performance it’s possible to at least somewhat bog it down on the GPU side without any special tricks thanks to its heavier use of shaders than in past Valve titles. Given a fast enough card I believe we could hit the 300fps internal Source framerate cap on our testbed, but thankfully at 2560 we’re nowhere close. In any case at 2560 the 7970 is well into the stratosphere, delivering 128.9fps, which is 18% better than the GTX 580. Meanwhile at 1920 as with so many other benchmarks that lead shrinks, this time down to 11%. Meanwhile the 7970 enjoys a smaller lead over the 6970, beating it by only around 30% at either resolution.
The great thing about the Source engine is that it’s well studied, and by utilizing DirectX9 it’s open to a few more image quality enhancements than DX10+ games. We’ve always wanted to have a standard benchmark with more anti-aliasing than just MSAA, and Portal is the perfect candidate. So for the second part of this test, we’ve turned on Super Sample Anti-Aliasing (SSAA) through NVIDIA and AMD’s driver control panels. With SSAA the entire scene gets anti-aliased, going beyond just removing the jaggies at polygon edges and removing all signs of shader aliasing too, making Portal 2 a very good looking game.
As expected, SSAA makes the performance of everything tank. At 2560 the 7970 is well below 60fps, and every other single-GPU card is slower yet. Once we get down to 1920 performance finally reaches a point where it’s playable, as the 7970 reaches 72.2fps.
Compared to its competition, it’s interesting to note that we appear to have hit an entirely different set of bottlenecks by using SSAA. The 7970 leads the GTX 580 by 9% at both resolutions while it leads the 6970 by 25% under the same conditions. We believe that at this point we’re seeing the limitations of ROP performance, which would explain why the 7970’s lead diminishes versus both the GTX 580 and 6970. The additional bandwidth the 7970’s design affords the ROPs can only go so far until it once again becomes a matter of pixel pushing power.
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CeriseCogburn - Sunday, March 11, 2012 - link
We'll have to see if amd "magically changes that number and informs Anand it was wrong like they did concerning their failed recent cpu.... LOLThat's a whole YEAR of lying to everyone trying to make their cpu look better than it's actual fail, and Anand shamefully chose to announce the number change "with no explanation given by amd"... -
That's why you should be cautious - we might find out the transistor count is really 33% different a year from now.
piroroadkill - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Only disappointing if you:a) ignored the entire review
b) looked at only the chart for noise
c) have brain damage
Finally - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
In Eyefinity setups the new generation shines: http://tinyurl.com/bu3wb5cwicko - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
I think the price is disappointing. Everything else is nice though.CeriseCogburn - Sunday, March 11, 2012 - link
The drivers suckRussianSensation - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Not necessarily. The other possibility is that being 37% better on average at 1080P (from this Review) over HD6970 for $320 more than an HD6950 2GB that can unlock into a 6970 just isn't impressive enough. That should be d).piroroadkill - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
Well, I of course have a 6950 2GB that unlocked, so as far as I'm concerned, that has been THE choice since the launch of the 6950, and still is today.But you have to ignore cost at launch, it's always high.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
I agree RS, as these amd people are constantly screaming price percentage increase vs performance increase... yet suddenly applying the exact combo they use as a weapon against Nvidia to themselves is forbidden, frowned upon, discounted, and called unfair....Worse yet, according to the same its' all Nvidia's fault now - that amd is overpriced through the roof...LOL - I have to laugh.
Also, the image quality page in the review was so biased toward amd that I thought I was going to puke.
Amd is geven credit for a "perfect algorythm" that this very website has often and for quite some time declared makes absolutely no real world difference in games - and in fact, this very reviewer admitted the 1+ year long amd failure in this area as soon as they released "the fix" - yet argued everyone else was wrong for the prior year.
The same thing appears here.
Today we find out the GTX580 nvidia card has much superior anti-shimmering than all prior amd cards, and that finally, the 7000 high end driver has addressed the terrible amd shimmering....
Worse yet, the decrepit amd low quality impaired screens are allowed in every bench, with the 10% amd performance cheat this very site outlined them merely stated we hope Nvidia doesn't so this too - then allowed it, since that year plus ago...
In the case of all the above, I certainly hope the high end 797x cards aren't CHEATING LIKE HECK still.
For cripe sakes, get the AA stuff going, stop the 10% IQ cheating, and get our bullet physics or pay for PhysX, and stabilize the drivers .... I am sick of seeing praise for cheating and failures - if they are (amd) so great let's GET IT UP TO EQUIVALENCY !
Wow I'm so mad I don't have a 7970 as supply is short and I want to believe in amd for once... FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DID THEY GET IT RIGHT THIS TIME ?!!?
slayernine - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Holy fan boys batman!This comment thread reeks of nvidia fans green with jealousy
Hauk - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
LOL, Wreckage first!Love him or hate him, he's got style..