Official Radeon 7970 Review and discussion thread

[Viral]

Win 8 uses DX11.1. I think DX12 probably won't arrive until late 2013 at the earliest. It will probably be some time after the next xbox launches, just like DX10 launching around a year after the 360.

[Q]

Not super impressed. It's competitive with the 580 and beats it a bit over 50% of the time, but is a year late for that type of performance. I think it's priced this high since it is technically "the fastest single card" on the planet. I'm thinking it drops to the $350-400 range as soon as NVIDIA releases the next gen.

The refresh will be interesting.

[newparad1gm]

It's great that they are finally supporting 3D in Eyefinity now. The XFire and Eyefinity performance is awesome, and hopefully driver updates will make it even better. If only AMD would come up with their own in-house solution a la 3D Vision rather than forcing us to use 3rd party software like DDD or iz3D for 3D gaming, I would seriously be considering switching my 3D Vision Surround box to AMD.

As for the card itself, it has great single card improvements over the 6970, and supports D3D11.1 (although it'll be a while before any games support it). Anybody want a 6970?

[Roadhog]

Still considering buying them now or waiting for a refresh.

[Rollo]

Originally Posted by Roadhog

I think i'm going to wait for a refresh on this.

[Roadhog]

Originally Posted by Rollo

Maybe not read my other posts... The crossfire performance is rather fantastic. Plus, they overclock extremely well it seems.

If anything I will wait till water blocks are out for them as they seem to be rather loud.

[red777star]

Blah not really impressed. I believe next Nvidia card will bring much more performance to the table.

[shadow001]

I'm surprised that no one has noticed these, even though they're theoretical but says a lot:








On both raw fillrate and especially texturing speed, it pretty much murders any single GPU card, but as always only when it's needed in an actual game and at high enough game settings.


Now notice where the biggest gains are for it generally?....That's right, in triple screen eyefinity where a lot more fillrate and texturing speed actually gets used up in practical terms, and why the performance gap is smaller when using a single display compared to a GTX580...The card is basically underused and severly limited by other factors( CPU or I/O perhaps?).


That's something that will be a constant even for kepler and still using a single display and expecting a huge performance increase....Using a single display isn't enough of a load period, no matter the game being benched.

It goes on further here:

The most impressive thing is that the HD6990 has 64 Rops and the GTX590 has no less than 96 Rops in total, and they barely pull ahead in raw fill rate....So those have to be some mighty powerfull rops in the HD7970, since there's only 32 of them..


Same goes for texturing, both dual GPU cards have a lot more texturing units between both GPU's and the single GPU HD7970 has "only" 128 of them, yet again it isn't far behind when being mesured...


Gentlemen, those are some Rops and texture units with some serious real world performance right there, and a huge leap over previous single GPU cards, and it can't really be the 384 bit bus since the GTX580 has it too, and the HD7970 has about a 25% increase in memory bandwith over the GTX580, but some results are much higher than 25%, specifically when used in eyefinity...


This is one extremely efficient GPU period, then add the overclocking ability on top and lower power use and it's a pretty impressive package overall....

And more here

Well that for single GPU comparisons once Kepler is out sure, assuming AMD doesn't increase the size a little further in a refresh part....Cayman is a 389mm^ part while tahiti is 365mm^, and even though 24mm^ doesn't sound like much, considering it's built at 28nm that's probably a couple hundred million transistors extra...


Where things really get screwed up is in memory bandwith, as the HD7970 is using the fastest GDDR 5 memory around and a 384 bit bus this time, so how does kepler beat that by enough margin in memory bandwith constrained scenarios so that it has a performance lead in those situations....Moving to a 512 bit bus perhaps?, and getting that extra 25% memory bandwith that way, since it'll likely be using the same GDDR 5 memory too.


Keep in mind that the true high end for AMD is the dual GPU HD7990 coming out in march, wich if the single GPU does what it does, crossfire scales even better with this generation, should give Nvidia engineers quite a few headaches in making a dual Kepler card to beat that one...We don't even know when the single GPU version of kepler will show up, never mind the dual GPU one to beat the HD7990...


Edit: i think AMD pulled an HD5870 with the HD7970 on Nvidia and it'll take them the better part of 2012 to release a full lineup to beat this, but that's just me.

[Roadhog]

This is interesting...

[Redeemed]

Originally Posted by Roadhog

This is interesting...

Don't let tRollo see that.

[cmsmith]

Originally Posted by Viral

Win 8 uses DX11.1. I think DX12 probably won't arrive until late 2013 at the earliest. It will probably be some time after the next xbox launches, just like DX10 launching around a year after the 360.

I had never heard of DX11.1 before. I'll have to do some reading up on it.

If it's the case that DX12 won't be included and it is indeed comming in 2013, then I suspect Xbox 3/720/whatever it will be called will have support for DX12 as well as it being released for Windows.

I'm curious to see what it will have.

[shadow001]

Originally Posted by cmsmith

I had never heard of DX11.1 before. I'll have to do some reading up on it.

If it's the case that DX12 won't be included and it is indeed comming in 2013, then I suspect Xbox 3/720/whatever it will be called will have support for DX12 as well as it being released for Windows.

I'm curious to see what it will have.

DX11.1 is basically adding PRT( DX's version of id's software megatexture idea), and stereo 3D glass support from the start, to make it easier/simpler to add 3D glass support as the game is being made, not as an afterthought...