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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mczak - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
page 4 states that the clocks of the OC 7950 are the same as the shipping clocks of the 7970 (so the cards only differ by the shader units) which isn't true as the reference core clock of the 7970 is 925Mhz, not 900Mhz.Now that's only a 3% difference but given the performance difference from those OC 7950 to 7970 often ends up only being ~5% this definitely is significant.
carage - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
When will the actual cards be available for sale?I've just checked Newegg, Tiger Direct, Micro Center, Fry's, and Amazon, none of them have the 7950 listed.
antef - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
I feel like I'll be waiting forever for a $250 28 nm part (whatever that may be...)casteve - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Thanks for the review. Looking at the Sapphire card, it's a 30%+ speed bump over the 6950 for just 13 watts more power. I look forward to the 78xx and the GTX 6xx this spring and more reasonably priced mid-ranged gaming cards.Articuno - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
That's why the 7950 is so absurdly expensive. The 5850 was miles ahead of anything nVidia had when it launched, and remained miles ahead throughout the entire first Fermi generation, yet it was launched at a very affordable and acceptable $259 price point.Despoiler - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
I'm not sure what kind of fantasy land you are living in, but the 7950 beats the 580 in everything. It's priced at $450, which ~$17 is cheaper than tier 3 PNY 580 cards. Most 580 cards sit around $500. Why should AMD price the 7950 at $250 and make zero or likely lose money? AMD has better cards. They are actually charging what they should be charging. It was a complete blunder to launch the 5850 and 5870 cards at the prices they did. The only saving grace is they likely converted a lot of Nvidia buyers. The 5850 was my first AMD card and I'm not likely to go back to Nvidia with my bad experiences with their card makers.AnandThenMan - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Is it true that you did not update the BIOS on the XFX card as per emailed instructions from AMD? According to Hardwarecanucks.com retail versions of the card have an updated BIOS that review samples sent out did not.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
We're using the latest BIOS from XFX, 015.013.000.010.000705.http://images.anandtech.com/doci/5476/XFX.gif
AnandThenMan - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Thanks. It looks like the XFX is just too damn loud, I'm finding their stuff is quite sub par lately.AnandThenMan - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 - link
Page 3 of this thread, no BIOS version is given however.http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php...
"Basically, XFX emailed all media days before launch stating that their retail cards had revised fan speed profiles that allowed for slightly increased temperatures but kept the fans MUCH quieter. They sent us all a the retail BIOS file with the proper speeds. What you see above are the differences between the beta and the final release BIOS"