Official Radeon 7970 Review and discussion thread

[Logical]

Originally Posted by shadow001

It's got no choice and has to do it with pretty decent margins since AMD's card launched first, and there's still no solid ETA on when the high end version of kepler will be released, otherwise Nvidia would get roasted in reviews if it's only marginally faster too, but one has to wonder though what are the main priorities for the design on both tahiti and kepler.


Even though we use them primarily as gaming cards, i couldn't help but notice that the biggest performance increase with AMD's tahiti is in GP-GPU, as double precision floating point math got doubled over Cayman and is now twice as high as Fermi, as well as having direct hooks to help with programing likely using OpenCL.


So as much as we want maximum game performance, Nvidia also has to seriously buff up the raw math abilities and acheivable real world performance in GP-GPU, wich has nothing to do with gaming, yet the resources to do that heavy math are shared within the same die as the resources needed to make it a fast gaming card, so it's a delicate balance to make....As much as we're gamers above all else, it isn't just about gaming anymore, it's beyond that too.

True thats why the performance increase in game benchmarks from the AMD 7970 isn't justifiable against a GTX580...Throw a GTX580 3GB into the works which is around the same price as a 7970 and there isnt much difference at all in some real world benchmarks. Considering that 'imo' AMD has always been the budget option i certainly see no reason to go down the AMD route at this time...I also very highly doubt that Nvidias next flagship card will only be a small increase in performance from a GTX580 3gb but we will have to see...

[shadow001]

Originally Posted by Logical

True thats why the performance increase in game benchmarks from the AMD 7970 isn't justifiable against a GTX580...Throw a GTX580 3GB into the works which is around the same price as a 7970 and there isnt much difference at all in some real world benchmarks. Considering that 'imo' AMD has always been the budget option i certainly see no reason to go down the AMD route at this time...I also very highly doubt that Nvidias next flagship card will only be a small increase in performance from a GTX580 3gb but we will have to see...

One thing to keep in mind though is that this is a whole new arch that will be used for the next few years, and the performance we've seen so far is from the initial driver, so that's bound to improve over time, and it is competing with the GTX580 wich at this point has very mature drivers and there's probably not much more performance to dish out, though i do agree that in some games and settings, especially the 3 monitor setups, the 3 GB versions of the GTX580 do make a difference.


Depending on when Kepler is going to be released, and even though the HD7970 will go thru no hardware changes at all, it'll have drivers that are a bit more mature by then and more importantly, extracting more performance, so relying on these initial reviews amounts of a first glimpse, and i don't doubt it'll get another 15~20% faster 6 months from now( on average of course) with better drivers.


Kepler will be in the same situation the HD7970 is now once it releases, with it being a new architecture and it's initial drivers not exposing everything the GPU can do either, and it being a process that takes time until it's pretty close to it's maximum(probably over an entire year).

[fasedww]

Originally Posted by Muppet

I thought they weren't being released until the 9th.

Yeah I preordered from excaliber, then the next day they emailed me saying sapphire doesn't want them to ship tell the 9th, asked me if that was alright, I said no, I want my refund , they refunded my paypal account before I hung up with them. Whew' that preorder crap before launch date is mostly bullcrap and not worth it., I'll never do it again.

[Muppet]

Originally Posted by fasedww

Yeah I preordered from excaliber, then the next day they emailed me saying sapphire doesn't want them to ship tell the 9th, asked me if that was alright, I said no, I want my refund , they refunded my paypal account before I hung up with them. Whew' that preorder crap before launch date is mostly bullcrap and not worth it., I'll never do it again.

Well that sucks. I was looking forward to your impressions. It alway nice to read rewiews from proper websites, but a gamers view is more important IMO.

[Ninja Prime]

I might make an attempt to get one on launch, if so I'll post about it.

[K007]

[Roadhog]

heh, 2304 shader 7970 ready?

[shadow001]

Wouldn't be surprised if some of those higher clocked models are already out by the time Kepler shows up, and add more speed thru driver improvements by then as well, and that some still expect that Kepler will beat it by a decent margin(20~30% faster at least), and Kepler will have to be quite a big jump in gaming performance over a GTX580...

[Roadhog]

Originally Posted by shadow001

Wouldn't be surprised if some of those higher clocked models are already out by the time Kepler shows up, and add more speed thru driver improvements by then as well, and that some still expect that Kepler will beat it by a decent margin(20~30% faster at least), and Kepler will have to be quite a big jump in gaming performance over a GTX580...

I wouldn't be surprised if ATI just choose to clock them lower with less shaders because there is no competition now.

[shadow001]

Originally Posted by Roadhog

I wouldn't be surprised if ATI just choose to clock them lower with less shaders because there is no competition now.

Leave it as a refresh product once Kepler releases perhaps?....

[i SPY]

Originally Posted by Roadhog

heh, 2304 shader 7970 ready?

... snip..

but you missed the main "attraction" in this photo

Toxic 3G
gpu clock: 1125mhz

Atomic WC
gpu clock: 1335mhz

Atomic RX
gpu clock: 1335mhz


and you know what a 1200mhz 7970 can do ^^, ~11-12k gpu P score in 3dmark 2011



edit:

Check this crazy sheit out, LN2 7970 OC at 1650/1800Mhz

Gpu score 14.2k



http://kingpincooling.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1559

[K007]

Originally Posted by Roadhog

heh, 2304 shader 7970 ready?

wow..check out the o/c edition sapphire plan to release..