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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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.