AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Review: Battling For The Performance Crown
by Ryan Smith on June 22, 2012 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- GCN
- Radeon HD 7000
OC: Gaming Performance
Moving on to our gaming performance section, let’s see what our 15% overclock can do for gaming performance. Assuming the 7970GE’s performance continues to scale well with clockspeeds, we should see around a 10-12% real world performance gain.
Starting as always with Crysis, what was already an incredible lead for the 7970GE becomes increasingly absurd. The 7970GE OC sees a further 8% performance improvement here, pushing it past 60fps at 1920 and past 40fps at 2560. Against the stock GTX 680 it’s now leading by 35% on average framerates.
Minimum framerates on the other hand haven’t changed by nearly as much. Given what we know about PT Boost and Crysis’s love of memory bandwidth, it’s reasonable to assume we’re being held back by memory bandwidth limits here.
Moving on to Metro, the 7970GE once again gains 8-9% due to our overclock. The earlier 56W jump in power consumption at the wall makes it an expensive gain, but as it stands this is by far the fastest we’ve seen a single-GPU card perform at Metro.
With Batman we once more see gains of around 9% from our overclock. Even at 2560 our framerates are now in excess of 70fps.
With Portal 2 being one of the 7970GE’s biggest defecits relative to the GTX 680, a solid overclock can help to close the gap but it’s not enough to eliminate it. Still, it’s enough to push the average framerate over 60fps at 2560 with SSAA. The overall scaling from the overclock also looks very good here, with the 7970GE OC picking up a larger than normal 11-12%.
Finally we have AMD’s other notable weak spot, Battlefield 3. Much like with Portal 2 overclocking can’t eliminate the GTX 680’s lead, but it can significantly cut into it. At 2560 and at 1920 with MSAA this is enough to push past 60fps, making for a solid 10% performance gain from overclocking.
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silverblue - Tuesday, June 26, 2012 - link
I think that's the way people do every review. However, ordinarily I'd recommend looking back at the 680 review, but as we've seen with the new Catalyst drivers, performance can vary over a relatively short period of time. So, a future article such as "AMD's Radeon 7970 and NVIDIA's GTX 680: How Much Difference Can A Few Months Make?" might be very nice *hint hint*. ;)Temelj - Thursday, July 12, 2012 - link
For simplicity, the OC data should be put up on this graph for reference purposes and ease of use. Who on earth wants to troll a few reviews and collect this data manually? At the very least include a reference link to the previous article that compares the NVidia 680 and provides the OC scores.Also, instead of a conclusion write up why not have a result summary showing all performed tests, the cards there were used as reference and provide a tabular view clearly showing the top runner of each test (or top 3).
b3nzint - Wednesday, June 27, 2012 - link
So what about ; DX11 DirectCompute, SmallLuxGPU, Fluid simulation, WinZip 16.5 tests. amd is winning streak. Dont buy nvidia, its an empty thing!CeriseCogburn - Saturday, June 30, 2012 - link
If you're going to use winzip to game, and support evil proprietary corruption in software by amd while using open source, great, hypocrisy and lying to stone cold stupid amd fans for years works well !Fluid sim - not a game
DX11 DC - not a game
SmallLux - not a game
Oops ! "Empty" suddenly applies to amd when it wins any "benchmarks that are not real world for end users, ever."
I guess empty crap no one uses, declared fraudulently, as a "win", sways the dark hollow spaces in the hearts and minds of the little amd fans. It's sad.
yay123 - Saturday, June 30, 2012 - link
hi there I'm buying this card but my psu is cm gx550w does it fit well if I oc it?Temelj - Thursday, July 12, 2012 - link
If you can afford a card like this, why not just upgrade your power supply?Review System Requirements here: http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/70...
Jamahl - Thursday, July 5, 2012 - link
Comments totally ruined by CeriseCogburn's bullshit on every page.Is this maddoctor in disguise, or one of the other Nvidia zealots? Whatever, just IP ban this weirdo and be done with it.
Mauhi123 - Monday, October 15, 2012 - link
Dear All.Hello,
I am having 3960x and DX79SI and graphics card asus hd7970-dc2t-3gd5
i am not able to boot the computer. when i am bootiing the computer on mother board 2 digit led shows "00" duble zero and on led screen shows "0_" and stops, but i can reboot the computer useing ctl+atl+del. i can able to oparate bios. that means the computer is not in hanging mode.
Please Help me ASAP......
seansplayin - Tuesday, November 20, 2012 - link
I have the Xfx 7970 Ghz edition and I really am not sure what is the big deal with the noise. My Card is not that loud. Honestly Power control settings @ +20%, Gpu core 1175 and memory @ 1600 completely stable. The games I play are at 1080P MAx everything and my GPU rarely gets above 70C, which is only around 40% fan speed. @ 40% fan speed I literally cannot hear the GPU fan unless I have the speakers completely turned off and even still I have to listen carefully to actually discern that the noise I hear is coming from the Video Card. My experience in gaming the GPU fan noise is absolutely NOT an issue. when I'm running synthetic GPU benchmarking apps like geekbench's Furmark then the card will ramp up around 70% fan speed and you can hear it, but even then it is really not an Issue. I am using the latest catylist beta Driver 12.11 which as added 15% increase in BF3 FPS and 10% increase in Dirt 3, basically taking Nvidia's crown in virtually every game.I do lot's of Video transcoding and the openCL domination this card produces is amazing.
Yesterday I trancoded a 1080P 5.3GB .mkv file to .mp4 with nero 11 when using AMD's app acceleration codec the transcode took 20 minutes as compared to 60 minutes when I used Nero's .mp4 codec at the same output settings. Durring the Transcoding the GPU stays at I believe 300 mhz with the GPU at 20% load average. when doing transcoding the gpu hoovers around 111F with the Fan at like 5%.
I love this card.
My Computer has three states, Idle 60% of the time, gaming and transcoding 40% of the time. At Idle with AMD's zero core this video card is using 10 watts less than Nvidia's 680, In gaming it's beating the 680 in almost every game now, and when it comes to encoding open cl and open gl it's basically a blowout averaging 75% more than the 680. If your an Nvidia fan (I formally was) and open CL is important to you, go with the Fermi cards because on most GPGPU processing they outperform with Kepler cards.
IF you question anything I've said do some google homework. Catalyst 12.11 actually does what they say, I can attest to it at least when it comes to Encoding, playing BF3 and Dirt 3
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