AMD Radeon HD 7950 Review Feat. Sapphire & XFX: Sewing Up The High-End Market
by Ryan Smith on January 31, 2012 9:02 AM ESTCrysis: Warhead
Kicking things off as always is Crysis: Warhead. It’s no longer the toughest game in our benchmark suite, but it’s still a technically complex game that has proven to be a very consistent benchmark. Thus even 4 years since the release of the original Crysis, “but can it run Crysis?” is still an important question, and the answer continues to be “no.” While we’re closer than ever, full Enthusiast settings at a 60fps is still beyond the grasp of a single-GPU card.
AMD’s first round of driver optimizations have given the 7900 a very solid footing in Crysis, putting the 7950 off to a great start. The 7950 is 19% ahead of the GTX 580 at 2560 and 14% ahead at 1920, putting the card in a comfortable position that for single-GPU cards is second only to the 7970. In spite of Crysis being shader-bound most of the time the 7950 is generally within 15% of the 7970, so it’s doing better than the theoretical performance gap between the two cards would predict. Meanwhile compared to AMD’s last generation offerings it’s not much of a contest: the 7950 is 20-25% ahead.
As for our factory overclocked Sapphire and XFX cards, they further close the gap between the 7950 and 7970. The 12.5% core overclock on these cards puts them between 7% and 10% faster than the stock clocked 7950, with the XFX card edging out the Sapphire due to its memory overclock. These cards do so well here than the reference 7970’s lead is reduced to just 5%.
The minimum framerates in Crysis are also looking good on the 7950, with the 7950 turning in a 10-22% better minimum framerate than the GTX 580 depending on whether we’re talking about 1920 or 2560. As like we saw with the 7970, the biggest lead is at the highest resolutions, which has typically been the case for AMD cards for some time now. The overclocked partner cards add to this, tacking on an extra 5-10% in performance.
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MrBungle123 - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
I don't think Anandtech is read by the "average user"... I would assume mostly gamers, enthusiasts, and IT pros here. Besides who buys 1920x1080 monitors? If the monitor isn't 1920x1200 or higher its not worth buying.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Hi poohbear;When drawing out the tests for the current GPU benchmark suite we debated between 1920x1200 and 1920x1080. Ultimately it was decided that 1920x1200 would be more useful for our needs and that 1920x1080 would be unnecessary; 1920x1080 is only slightly lower in resolution, so our 1920x1200 numbers are only slightly worse in performance than they would be with 1920x1080. The two should be treated as the same, as there's generally not nearly enough of a difference to matter.
-Thanks
Ryan Smith
Pantsu - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
It seems there's two choices for 7950, either a 450€+ custom OC card or a "v2" reference cheapo-PCB cards that go for 400€ in Europe. It would certainly be interesting to get a detailed look at how much of a difference that makes. To me those "v2" cards look a bit too nerfed in terms of VRM and cooling.IMO 7950 is priced accordingly and is no question better than a GTX 580 by any metric really. That's enough to justify a similar price. It's up to Nvidia to drop the GTX 580 price to compete, but I doubt they'll do that, and instead wait for GK104 to save the day. If it is a success we could see prices drop fast in the high end, but Nvidia isn't known for its low pricing, and neither does it have any need to try grab market share by undercutting its profits. There's a good cap between 7800 and 7900 and they could just occupy it with a GK104 and call it a day, until they get their big chip ready.
marc1000 - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Any word on 7870 from amd?UMADBRO - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Feb 15marc1000 - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Ty!just4U - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
That Sapphire cooler looks pretty much like their Dirt3 Edition 6950s one. A slightly different plastic shroud but fan's and underlay seem mostly the same.. atleast in the picture views I've seen.gamoniac - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
I found that, in IE 9, I have to click on the "Back" button on the browser six to seven times to actually go back to the main page. Taking a closer look at it, I noticed there are a bunch of "Share this Page" history item between this page (Ryan's HD7950 Review) and the main page that took place without my knowledge. Would this be a site bug or a advertisement bug?Ryan Smith - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
To the best of my knowledge (please keep in mind that I'm not responsible for site development), that's not something the site should be doing. In which case it could very well be an ad bug. If it continues to happen you should be able to use the IE9 developer tools (built-in, F12), to try to narrow down what exactly it is you're seeing.gamoniac - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Without spending too much time on it, I can see that there were a bunch of frame navigation caused by sharethis.com, which I think is the likely culprit. I am able to reproduce this issue on two separate Win7 SP1 machines; one of them is clean with almost installed except for the usual PDF reader and some benchmarking tools.Check out these three images I uploaded:
In the beginning:
http://i43.tinypic.com/nqwgti.jpg
Problem captured:
http://i44.tinypic.com/jai5gk.jpg
IE9 F12 screen shot showing frame navigation:
http://i44.tinypic.com/14y226q.jpg
Good luck.