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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raghu78 - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
Correct. for gaming at the highest settings on ultra high resolution single monitor and multi monitor configurations there is only one leader in the market. Its the Radeon HD 7970 Ghz edition.http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canu...
Look at the 2560x 1600 extreme and 5760 x 1080 perf average. The HD 7970 Ghz edition is faster .
From the review
"In our opinion and with all other things being equal, the HD 7970 GHz Edition is the card to have for ultra high resolution gaming"
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
From the review: " What we have here is a statistical tie so the consumer’s performance-oriented choice will ultimately come down to brand preference."Yes, of course.... cherry picking again... so take a hot loud, housefire electrical sucking earth destroying sack of driver crap... it's the best card, of course...
That's great... all the penny pinchers here are right on it, I'm sure...
silverblue - Monday, June 25, 2012 - link
Fermi?Low blow, I admit.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, June 26, 2012 - link
The FERMI's performance blew the amd card to shreds.In this case, the house fire amd card sucks the low end of everything, an epic fail on every single metric, and amd has crap for compute software support so they lose there as well, just like any card loses when their driver software sucks in games.
Worse yet, amd often takes years to fix anything, if ever...then drops support.
Fermi WON when it "insulted you".
Housefire amd loses everything - total freakin LOSER.
raghu78 - Tuesday, June 26, 2012 - link
FYI there are reviews showing much bigger winshttp://www.hardware.fr/articles/869-18/recapitulat...
10 - 12% perf lead . So its not as simple as you think. The fact of the matter is Nvidia GTX 680 is losing the majority of games - Deus Ex, Alan Wake, Anno 2070, Crysis 2, Witcher 2, Witcher 2 EE, Dirt 3, Skyrim, Dirt Showdown, Crysis Warhead, Metro 2033. Also the margins in some of the games is very big - Dirt Showdown (50%), Crysis Warhead (15 - 25% depending on resolution) , Metro 2033 (20%), Witcher 2 (20%) , Anno (15%). Nvidia's wins in Shogun 2 clearly. BF3 is not a consistent win when you compare many reviews. Even Batman AC which runs better on GTX 680 with FXAA , runs faster on HD 7970 Ghz edition with 8X MSAA. So its clearly a case of you being in denial mode. so go on keep ridiculing others if that makes you happy.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, June 26, 2012 - link
Hey fanboy, your summary page shows the 680 at their weighted average special importance to each game 127 frames, and 7970, 127 frames.LOL - Amazing how you got 20% and 50% from EQUAL.
I tell you, the lies and spinning exceed political debate norms.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, June 26, 2012 - link
From your link, Dirt Showdown, where you have just claimed a 50% lead for 7970..." If the GeForce GTX 680 Radeon HD 7970 equals 1080p without advanced lighting, when it activated its dive performance, Nvidia does not have access to this patch soon enough that in order to propose specific optimizations. It will probably take one to two weeks for this to be corrected."
Let's see 0% or a tie = amd ahead by 50% !!!! according to raghu
LOL - I guess it's all in your heads - not even the reviewers own words can rallte the fantasies of amd out of control fanboys.
http://translate.google.pl/translate?hl=pl&sl=...
I'd say you're trolling but i think the fanboy and lack of intellect has you "doing what you believed was correct".
I could be wrong here, for the 1st time ever, though.
meloz - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
Excellent review, Ryan!Performance is great, but the noise is a big issue. I hope in future manufacturers pay more attention to this aspect.
kyuu - Friday, June 22, 2012 - link
The 7970GE isn't a card to buy with a reference cooling solution, obviously. With custom cooling solutions, the noise/temp won't be an issue. It's doubtful you'll see many, if any, manufacturers even release this card with the reference cooler.CeriseCogburn - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link
So amd sucks, but it's all good.Maybe that should be their new pr slogan.