AMD Radeon HD 7950 Review Feat. Sapphire & XFX: Sewing Up The High-End Market
by Ryan Smith on January 31, 2012 9:02 AM ESTGetting the Most Out of GCN: Driver Improvements
With the launch of any new architecture there’s still a lot of room for improvement on the part of driver developers, and GCN is no exception. On January 20th AMD released the first driver update for the 7000 Series, which brought with it an interesting mix of bug fixes, new features, and performance improvements. On the feature side AMD enabled support for Analytical Anti-Aliasing and Super Sample Anti-Aliasing for DX10+ games, an overdue feature that we’re very happy to see finally make it to AMD cards. Meanwhile on the performance side the new drivers improved the performance of the 7000 series in several games. Game performance typically rises slowly over time, but as this is one of the first post-launch driver releases, the gains are larger than what we’re used to seeing farther down the line.
To get an idea of where performance has improved and by how much, we reran our entire benchmark suite on the 7970.
As to be expected, at this point in time AMD is mostly focusing on improving performance on a game-by-game basis to deal with games that didn’t immediately adapt to the GCN architecture well, while the fact that they seem to be targeting common benchmarks first is likely intentional. Crysis: Warhead is the biggest winner here as minimum framerates in particular are greatly improved; we’re seeing a 22% improvement at 1920, while at 2560 there’s still an 11% improvement. Metro:2033 and DiRT 3 also picked up 10% or more in performance versus the release drivers, while Battlefield 3 has seen a much smaller 2%-3% improvement. Everything else in our suite is virtually unchanged, as it looks like AMD has not targeted any of those games at this time.
As one would expect, a result of these improvements the performance lead of the 7970 versus the GTX 580 has widened. The average lead for the 7970 is now 19% at 1920 and 26% at 2560, with the lead approaching 40% in games like Metro that specifically benefited from this update. At this point the only game the 7970 still seems to have trouble pulling well ahead of the GTX 580 is Battlefield 3, where the lead is only 8%.
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SlyNine - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
I think it's you that has been sleeping. You're comparing EBay prices for god sakes. We are talking about new releases.The 5870 released 2 1/2 years ago at 379$. It was 2x as fast as the 4870.
When the 4870 released it cost what, 300$ in mid 2008. It was over 2x as fast as the 3870.
How about the amazing 9700pro at around 400$, In some cases being 4X faster then the 4600TI.
This is perhaps a step up from the to the likes of the 2900XT or 5800ultra. But both of those had some rocking competition to deal with. Like the 8800GTX and the 9700pro.
If you think this 30% better performance is worth 580$ then you have no concept of value.
Phate- - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
It took you long enough to notice. Better to go and have this discussion in the comments of the HD6970 review.Galidou - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Because it's next gen, performs better for the same price and overclocks probably WAY better plus maybe a chance to mod it to 7970? Is that enough?SlyNine - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Its not better performance for the same price. This time the price has scaled with performance.Normally when a new GPU gen releases its much better performance at the same price as the previous kings release.
Look at the 9700pro, 8800GTX, 5870. Those were great cards for the time. The 7970 is just, Eh. Not bad enough to be considered a 2900XT or a 5800 Ultra. But at least those 2 cards had much better competition.
bhima - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Actually, AMD's prices for these cards are SO bad, most people will just wait or buy older tech. Hell at least Intel's Sandy Bridge i5-2500K came out at a reasonable $215 which really isn't that high for the performance you get from it... in fact, there is no other CPU at the same price that even comes close, nor was there a CPU last year for the same price that even comes close. Here, AMD is pricing themselves out of the market.mdlam - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Right, and their egregious pricing mistake is why all their cards are selling out since launch. Because all of AMD's business MBA's and experts are no match for your idea of "a good deal"Maybe you've noticed that things are usually more expensive at launch because of hype, and the fact that you have the fastest card makes pricing irrelevant. Well hell whatever, you didn't even notice that Sandy bridge 2500k opened up at $260-270 dollars at launch, what's the point in taking this further.
Dribble - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
I noticed that when the 5870 and 5850 came out they blew away the competition and were relatively cheap. What was the 5850 price when it came out - about half of the 7950? Yet the performance leap over previous gen for 5850 was much larger then for 7950. That's why everyone is a bit disappointed.gibsnium - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
The 2500k launched that the same price it is today; bought one from newegg at 219$ at launch.
Master_shake_ - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
doesn't anyone else remember when the 8800 ultra was released and Nvidia threw a thousand dollar price tag on it???how short are your memories??
mdlam - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
I remember it can barely run crysis