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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Galidou - Sunday, February 5, 2012 - link
Yeah and then they took out a 8800gt priced so low that they did cut their own leg themselves, lol it was ridiculous, everyone that bought a 8800gts and 8800gtx felt they had been fooled once more by the green goblin :/First time for ATI mispricing their video card higher and look the green goblin fans are all mad...
xeridea - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Cards always cost more on release as there is built up demand and stock is low. You could have gotten almost as good of performance a year ago... if you don't care about using nearly 100W more power under load, and run 10-25C hotter. There are still 580s selling well over $500 BTW. The Sapphire card has a distinct performance advantage, uses little power, runs 27C under load cooler, near silent, and is cheaper than the average price of the 580.Newegg prices its $20 cheaper than cheapest 580, is faster on average (still fairly new drivers), uses a _LOT_ less power (load and idle), Zerocore power, and a lot cooler all around.. Yeah I would say that is competitive.
Price will surely go down, especially when Nvidia finally gets off its butt and releases its next generation 3 months from now, but it won't make AMD look bad, they will just adjust prices.
OCedHrt - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
AMD is likely charging a premium while it can. Why would it want to significantly undercut NVIDIA pricing which will force NVIDIA to lower their prices as well. It's all about margin, hopefully.Galidou - Sunday, February 5, 2012 - link
Well that's because it's Nvidia's job usually to price their video card higher than they perform, so the green goblin fans are mad because for the first time, AMD fans and rich kidz will buy overpriced video card from the competitor.CeriseCogburn - Sunday, August 26, 2012 - link
LOLamd fanboys are still whining about price, 8 months later, after nVidia drove down their crapship $170 and 3 free games.
Let's face it, amd fanboys are the price whiners. Then after extensive whining, they claim, after the huge 33%+ discounts and free games, that's it's still too high so they will pinch $10 and get the slower amd card, or spend $30 more and get the slower amd card....LOL YES that's what they do.
yankeeDDL - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Chizow,either you have a very distorted perception of reality, or you're an Nvidia fanboy.
AMD is selling the 7950 at the same price of Nvidia's 580, with the difference that the 7950 has lower power consumption (and noise, and temperature ...) and a plethora of extras.
If you have any clue about what marketing is, you would know that it would be very stupid to lower the price further. They already offer more for the same price: no need to make it any more attractive.
And seriously: do you think that Nvidia, or any other company, in that position, would drop the card prices by $100? Seriously?
If and when Kepler arrives, and if the performance is where it needs to be, then Nvidia will be welcome to lower the prices, and AMD will be forced to follow. It is called competition: that's why it is good to have two (or more) player in a market, not a monopoly.
chizow - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Again, what don't you understand in my 'distorted view of reality'? I've already laid it out and many others have agreed. What AMD is doing here is unprecedented by pricing their next-gen parts according to last-gen performance.I asked someone else this, but what do you think the reaction would be if Nvidia took 14 months to respond to SI with a "next-gen" part that was only 15-25% faster than the 7970 but cost 10% more, or launched a 7950 equivalent for the same price? There's no progress there....
I mean at that point, even the Nvidia fanboys would declare epic failure don't you think? It makes you wonder why the ATI fanboys don't see it the same way.
As for marketing and competition and all that, you don't seem to get it. At the current prices, AMD makes it very hard for even their own users to justify the cost of these parts. The performance just is NOT there relative to the price when compared to last-gen parts. If they priced these cards more reasonably and similar to their last-gen parts, it would be a no-brainer. But the fact of the matter is, this level of performance was available at this price over a year ago.
yankeeDDL - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 - link
Chizow,what you said the 1st time was clear. No point on repeating it.
You're convinced that AMD should lower the price: frankly, I don't care to explain you why you're wrong. I already said it: the 7950 uses lower power, is less noisy and has more features than the 580, and it offers a (little) higher performance.
ANYONE today buying a 580 would be stupid as they would be getting less for the same price.
So, today, AMD has no reason, whatsoever to lower the price of 7950. AMD is not in business for charity, nor is Nvidia, so if you expect miracles (price-wise) you're in for a surprise.
chizow - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 - link
Right, there's no point in anyone buying a 580 now, just as no one has any reason to buy a 7950 today. If they wanted that level of performance, they could've gotten it any time in the last 14 months for the same price. If they were willing to pay for it, they already have a 580.If they felt the price for that level of performance was too high, they most likely have something in their rig already that fits that price performance metric, and the 7950 does NOTHING to shift their position. There is no incentive for someone who has a 6970 who is getting 85-90% of the 7950's performance to pay 50% more to "upgrade" when they obviously didn't feel that was worth it 14 months ago.
Similarly, do you think it is worth it to "upgrade" to a 7950 if you already own a GTX 580? Of course not! There's simply not enough incentive, and this is why AMD's pricing of this part fails (amongst many other reasons). Does that make sense?
B-Unit1701 - Wednesday, February 1, 2012 - link
What I want to know is where you got this idea that new GPU releases are 'answers' to the other guy's last release? Each new iteration of GPU tech from either side is an improvement or shrink of their own last release putting out more performance. The generation after is already half way thru design phase when the competition unveils their new card, the FASTEST an 'answer' could be developed is 2 generations, and more likely 3.The mistake your making is that assuming that the 580 was the bar AMD was shooting for. It wasnt. They were looking to introduce their new architecture without loosing ground. Looks like nVidias failure with Kepler will enable just that, time to tweak the new design to get the kind of performance numbers you expect to see from a 'next generation' product.