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
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Bethesda's epic sword & magic game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is our RPG of choice for benchmarking. It's altogether a good CPU benchmark thanks to its complex scripting and AI, but it also can end up pushing a large number of fairly complex models and effects at once, especially with the addition of the high resolution texture pack.
For the longest time AMD has had various problems with Skyrim, ranging from negative Crossfire scaling to mediocre performance. We haven’t had a chance to test the former, but with Catalyst 12.7 they’ve definitely fixed the latter. At 2560 the performance of the 7970 has improved to the point where it’s solidly CPU limited just like its NVIDIA competition, though for some reason NVIDIA continues to handle this situation slightly better than AMD.
In any case because the 7970 is now CPU limited at 2560 the 7970GE doesn’t have any room to grow. This isn’t a hardware fault, this is just a reflection of how RPGs tend to be CPU limited before they’re GPU limited. We may have to look at running extra graphics effects (e.g. TrSSAA/AAA) to thin the herd in the future.
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CeriseCogburn - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
They can justify it, the are the amd fanboy. Ever DOLLAR counts when it comes to card pricing, five or ten bucks makes amd the WINNER !!!!!!!! and greatest card value ever for enthusiasts !!!!!!!!!!!But then, moments later, the nearly unavailable and much more expensive montior is all theirs, at their bosom (moments before they harped amd wins in high rez triple screen no matter the data) - now suddenly they have a 1920x1200 IPS or whatever...
Here's why...
1920x1080: " GeForce GTX680 is on average 17.61% more efficient than the Radeon 7970.
Here, the performance difference in favor of the GTX680 are even greater "
1920x1200: " GeForce GTX680 is on average 10.14% more efficient than the Radeon 7970.
At slightly higher resolution appears to have slightly worse performance of the new card (compared to 1920x1080). "
That's an over 7% performance difference overall... nVidia still kicks amd's lousy second placer, but it's not SO embarrassing at 17%+....
See, now they all love 1920x1200 and will DEMAND as hyper-harpies that anand keep the monitor rez as is...
In the end it will just be anand "listening" to it's fan base.... R O F L
Dude, they COULD just run their 1920x1200 in 1920x1080 for the benches - it's not hard at all - but you know... amd doesn't look better than crappy as heck then..
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
link (since the descending swarm won't see it above)http://translate.google.pl/translate?hl=pl&sl=...
silverblue - Monday, June 25, 2012 - link
I couldn't care less which it is as long as the image is good. I do think you're downplaying the framerate advantage of 1080p over 1200p though as we're talking an extra 11% screen area going from one to the other.1200p used to be far more common and Apple are one of the manufacturers keeping it alive (along with 4:3 ratios).
Ananke - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
Real good dudes use 1920*1200silverblue - Monday, June 25, 2012 - link
Nah. With a card like these, I'd rather use 2560xwhatever. :PZok - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
Maybe I missed it in the article, but does the lack of hardware changes mean that existing 7970s can be "upgraded" by being flashed with a 7970GE BIOS (so long as they can hit the clock speeds)?haukionkannel - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
No it can not be upgraded... So what else has been changed?http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7970...
Zok - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
Well that's disappointing. Wonder if there are hardware changes or a workaround is possible.haukionkannel - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
You said that you may use some extra setting for Scyrim... How about using some popular extra large texturemap upgrade? It would be more punishing to use those larger texturemaps, and In Scyrim, like Oblivion before, those texturemaps are guitep popular among users of more poverfull graphic cards!milkod2001 - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
7950/70 games+computing /trade off :noise+power less efficient670/80 games/trade off:weak in computing
the only card I find as a good choice would be 670 but it needs to get to 300-350 price level