AMD Radeon HD 7970 Review: 28nm And Graphics Core Next, Together As One

Metro: 2033

Paired with Crysis as our second behemoth FPS is Metro: 2033. Metro gives up Crysis’ lush tropics and frozen wastelands for an underground experience, but even underground it can be quite brutal on GPUs, which is why it’s also our new benchmark of choice for looking at power/temperature/noise during a game. If its sequel due this year is anywhere near as GPU intensive then a single GPU may not be enough to run the game with every quality feature turned up.

As often as we concern ourselves with Crysis and 60fps, with Metro it’s a struggle just to break 30fps. The 7970 becomes the first video card that can accomplish this at 2560 though it’s going to need quite a bit more performance to run Metro fluidly from start to end.

Compared to the GTX 580 the 7970’s lead in Metro is similar, but the scaling with resolution is even more pronounced. At 2560 it’s ahead by 30%, while at 1920 this drops to 21%, and finally at 1680 it’s only 16%. Meanwhile compared to the 6970 the response is much flatter; 33% at 2560, 28% at 1920, and 27% at 1680. From this data it’s becoming increasingly evident that the value proposition of the 7970 is going to hinge on not only what you consider its competitors to be, but what resolutions you would use it at.

While we’re on the subject of Metro, this is a good time to bring up the performance of the 5870, the forerunner of the DX11 generation. The performance of the 7970 may only be 20-30% higher than its immediate predecessors, but that’s not to say that performance hasn’t increased a great deal more over the full 2 year period of the 40nm cycle. The 7970 leads the 5870 by 50-60% here and in a number of other games, and while this isn’t as great as some past leaps it’s clear that there’s still plenty of growth in GPU performance occurring.