XFX’s Radeon HD 7970 Black Edition Double Dissipation: The First Semi-Custom 7970
by Ryan Smith on January 9, 2012 6:00 AM ESTGame Performance: Portal 2, Battlefield 3, Starcraft II, Civilization V
Regardless of the resolution and anti-aliasing setting used, the BEDD’s lead on the reference 7970 is always 7-8%, indicating that it’s another game largely GPU limited and one of the biggest benefactors of XFX’s factory overclock.
Battlefield 3 is also another consistent title. XFX’s 8% core clock and 4% memory clock overclock gets you 6-7% more on BF3, which is good news for XFX as this is one of the hardest games for the 7970 to pull away from the GTX 580.
With Starcraft II we’re back to seeing gains varying with the resolution. At 2560 it’s nearly 8% faster than the reference 7970, but at 1920 it’s only 5% faster. Based on what we’ve seen with AMD’s performance at 1680, AMD seems to have some general frame setup issues with SC2 that are limiting their ability to scale too far past 100fps, hence the weaker scaling at 1920.
Finally with CivV we have the biggest gap of them all. At 2560 the BEDD gains 8%, but at 1680 it’s only 1%. Whatever AMD has done with the 7970 to improve their performance in CivV this much, it apparently is resolution dependent. At lower resolutions the 7970 becomes more reliant on the CPU, probably a consequence of AMD’s lack of driver command list support.
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wifiwolf - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - link
I would assume it's a nice fit for you too as you tend to persist.Morg. - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - link
Precisely.Information : good
Information + Information about the Information : better
The content presented here is not worthless, one just has to know what it is and how it is limited (i.e. anandtech needs funding, they can't do all benchmarks themselves, etc.)
AssBall - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 - link
Trolls like you?Not informative.
Not factual.
Not worth reading.
MrBunny - Monday, January 9, 2012 - link
point made. formulation could be more along the lines that this cooling solution(though being louder at idle but cooler) is nicely executed being the card is overclocked and there by beating the reference design cooler easily in temps and noise.the only thing that they need to fix is the the idle fan pwm so it can be silent at idle aswell.
@Njoy i think he read it just right.
Morg. - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - link
Just edit the bios manually when tools are available and you can change the curve from the original (which XFX didn't bother to modify for some reason .. they simply had to lower the first point in the curve to 15% or something - unless as I said there was a minimum voltage for the fans to start -- )R3MF - Monday, January 9, 2012 - link
how is GCN an architecture targetted at compute tasks when it is no more capable of DP FP than the VLIW4, in that it is still only capable of doing DP tasks at 1/4 speed of SP?or, is the 1/4 only a function of crippled consumer drivers, whereas professional products will see perhaps 1/2 for DP FP?
Morg. - Monday, January 9, 2012 - link
Probably the latter.All in all, GCN is exactly like Fermi (which is also like an older design) and the performance characteristics should be very close in the end - where it matters (i.e. not gamer products).
R3MF - Monday, January 9, 2012 - link
would be a shame if true, especially when paying $549 for the hardware!Morg. - Tuesday, January 10, 2012 - link
Are you really doing GPU accelerated computing ??R3MF - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 - link
me? no.but it is going to become a very mainstream thing for performance hungry applications, and i always dislike buying artificially disabled products.