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
The Test
Starting with the launch of the 7970 we will be using our new GPU testbed, replacing both our hardware and most of our benchmarks. On the hardware side we’re using an Intel Core i7 3960X overclocked to 4.3GHz on an EVGA X79 SLI motherboard, giving us access to PCIe 3.0 while keeping most CPU bottlenecks at bay. While we’re only looking at a single card today, based on some informal surveys for multi-GPU testing we will continue to test our cards adjacent to each other to represent the worst case scenario, as it turns out there are a number of users out there who do use that arrangement even if they’re not in the majority.
On the software side we’ve refreshed most of our benchmarks; the suite is tilted towards DX11, but there are still enough DX9/10 tests to get a good idea of how new cards compare to pre-DX11 cards. On that note I know we have a lot of Skyrim fans out there, and while we wanted to include Skyrim benchmark we’re having trouble coming up with any good test cases (that don’t involve INI hacking) that aren’t incredibly CPU limited. If you have any suggestions, please drop me a line.
For drivers on AMD’s cards we’re using AMD’s beta 8.921.2-111215a drivers, which identify themselves as Catalyst 11.12 but are otherwise indistinguishable from the Catalyst 12.1 preview released last week. On that note, for those of you who have been asking about support for D3D11 Driver Command Lists – an optional D3D11 feature that helps with multithreaded rendering and is NVIDIA’s secret sauce for Civilization V – AMD has still not implemented support for it as of this driver.
For NVIDIA’s cards we’re using NVIDIA’s latest beta driver, 290.36.
Finally, as we’ve only had a limited amount of time with the 7970, we’ve narrowed our suite of cards just slightly in order to make the deadline. For those of you curious about how middle-tier cards such as the GTX 560 series and the Radeon HD 6800 series or various multi-card SLI and CrossFire setups compare, we’ll be adding new results to Bench throughout the rest of the month, and Eyefinity soon after that. For the time being since we only have a single card, we’re focusing on single card results with a single monitor.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.3GHz |
| Motherboard: | EVGA X79 SLI |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.2.3.1022 |
| Power Supply: | Antec True Power Quattro 1200 |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung 470 (240GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1867 4 x 4GB (8-10-9-26) |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 7970 AMD Radeon HD 6990 AMD Radeon HD 6970 AMD Radeon HD 6950 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 5850 AMD Radeon HD 4870 AMD Radeon HD 3870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 290.36 Beta AMD Catalyst Beta 8.921.2-111215a |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
292 Comments
View All Comments
CrystalBay - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Hi Ryan , All these older GPUs ie (5870 ,gtx570 ,580 ,6950 were rerun on the new hardware testbed ? If so GJ lotsa work there.FragKrag - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
The numbers would be worthless if he didn'tAnand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Yep they're all on the new testbed, Ryan had an insane week.Take care,
Anand
Lifted - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
How many monitors on the market today are available at this resolution? Instead of saying the 7970 doesn't quite make 60 fps at a resolution maybe 1% of gamers are using, why not test at 1920x1080 which is available to everyone, on the cheap, and is the same resolution we all use on our TV's?I understand the desire (need?) to push these cards, but I think it would be better to give us results the vast majority of us can relate to.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
The difference between 1920 x 1200 vs 1920 x 1080 isn't all that big (2304000 pixels vs. 2073600 pixels, about an 11% increase). You should be able to conclude 19x10 performance from looking at the 19x12 numbers for the most part.I don't believe 19x12 is pushing these cards significantly more than 19x10 would, the resolution is simply a remnant of many PC displays originally preferring it over 19x10.
Take care,
Anand
piroroadkill - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Dell U2410, which I have :3and Dell U2412M
piroroadkill - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Oh, and my laptop is 1920x1200 too, Dell Precision M4400.My old laptop is 1920x1200 too, Dell Latitude D800..
johnpombrio - Wednesday, December 28, 2011 - link
Heh, I too have 3 Dell U2410 and one Dell 2710. I REALLY want a Dell 30" now. My GTX 580 seems to be able to handle any of these monitors tho Crysis High-Def does make my 580 whine on my 27 inch screen!mczak - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
The text for that test is not really meaningful. Efficiency of ROPs has almost nothing to do at all with this test, this is (and has always been) a pure memory bandwidth test (with very few exceptions such as the ill-designed HD5830 which somehow couldn't use all its theoretical bandwidth).If you look at the numbers, you can see that very well actually, you can pretty much calculate the result if you know the memory bandwidth :-). 50% more memory bandwidth than HD6970? Yep, almost exactly 50% more performance in this test just as expected.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
That's actually not a bad thing in this case. AMD didn't go beyond 32 ROPs because they didn't need to - what they needed was more bandwidth to feed the ROPs they already had.