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
Total War: Shogun 2
Total War: Shogun 2 is the latest installment of the long-running Total War series of turn based strategy games, and alongside Civilization V is notable for just how many units it can put on a screen at once. As it also turns out, it’s the single most punishing game in our benchmark suite (on higher end hardware at least).
Similar to what AMD did with improving their DiRT 3 performance, NVIDIA has similarly improved their Shogun 2 performance. NVIDIA was previously bitten by a major performance regression introduced in a March update for Shogun 2, which significantly reduced performance at 2560 with our Ultra settings. With NVIDIA having fixed that regression through a driver update, their performance has now been restored.
Consequently this is the first game where the 7970GE can’t power ahead of the GTX 680 at 2560. The 7970GE is just fast enough to break past 30fps, but compared to the GTX 680 the latter has a 12% performance lead here, which is a big deal for NVIDIA since performance is low across the board here.
Like we saw with the GTX 670 versus the 7970 and the GTX 570 versus the 6970, performance patterns are quickly devolving to the point where any performance leads are extremely inconsistent and strongly depend on the game in question. Or in other words, we’re going to see a lot of back-and-forth movement with the 7970GE winning with some games and the GTX 680 winning with others. For better or worse there won’t be a single clear winner across every game.
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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