[Official] HD 7970 Reviews

TheMorningStar · 22 Dec 2011 at 18:08

The performance is good, not amazingly so though when considering the price, they are almost asking for the price of a 6990 and when considering that has a lot more silicone and VRAM (in total), basically much higher manufacturing costs, they have obviously just tagged on a sizable premium.

I imagine that prices will come down by February and for the moment they will be feeding off the early adopters, but I'm more interested in the 78x0 now. If they come in over £200 though my money is going into the second hand market.

Freddie1980 · 22 Dec 2011 at 18:11

Martini1991 said:
This is why I have the guy on my ignore list.

To be fair to the guy if he had qualified with crossfire performance against SLI performance he would have been right more or less, the 7970 looks like an absolute demon in Crossfire.

pgi947 · 22 Dec 2011 at 18:16

Ah well, be keeping my 6950's for some time yet then, be interesting to see what the green teams next move is

Thanks AMD, you have just saved me from ear ache from the missus about blowing money on my PC blah blah blah

xsistor · 22 Dec 2011 at 18:17

Purgatory said:
He has already replied

Page 3 of this thread.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=20853554&postcount=74 (You will love his reply)

This was his face this morning

I can't get enough of that pic..

Rroff · 22 Dec 2011 at 18:19

^^ No one said it would be - if you (anyone) bothered to read the posts properly the comments were that its "usual" for a new generation jump to be around 70% faster than the previous generation card in the same bracket (which is historically true in most cases).

Decidedly damp squid if this really is the actual performance of the 7970... bit embarassing to be an AMD fan boy right now I bet.

Purgatory · 22 Dec 2011 at 18:19

Freddie1980 said:
the 7970 looks like an absolute demon in Crossfire.

Agree, but it all depends on AMD keeping their crossfire drivers and application profiles working correctly and that still puts me off, but AMD did good in that respect and let's give praise where praise is due. The problem still for me is I don't do SLI or Crossflre and try to keep the noise/heat/energy levels down with my pc and I try to avoid adding stress to my systems and SLI and Crossfire is more stress to me for a gain I might not see depending on the games and drivers.

This is why many were waiting for 28nm cards, their hope was to drop dual card setups and their headaches. I was hoping for a card that can drive 2560 x 1600 resolution at the same speeds as a 580 can do 1920 x 1200, but it still is not there and the monitor upgrade will have to wait till Kepler or the cards after depending how the games market has changed then and what speed of card we will need to hit good frame rates.

BaNksY IV · 22 Dec 2011 at 18:21

Lol at half the posts on the thread!
Complaining about the price, i personally cant find a single retailer in the uk with one of these for sale with a price, also bear in mind the actual release hasnt happened yet. The only mention of any price is in the reviews but how often are they well out!
Performance, well these are brand new drivers so i should imagine performance will get even better.
Just look at what nvidia owners were saying about their last driver release giving them up to 10 fps quick and thats for a card with mature drivers already!

Really is making me laugh! Keep it up!

Jokester · 22 Dec 2011 at 18:22

The quote prices in the reviews will be the price straight from AMD!

stulid · 22 Dec 2011 at 18:24

So no 70%+ increase then? lol

xsistor · 22 Dec 2011 at 18:24

Rroff said:
^^ No one said it would be - if you (anyone) bothered to read the posts properly the comments were that its "usual" for a new generation jump to be around 70% faster than the previous generation card in the same bracket (which is historically true in most cases).

Decidedly damp squid if this really is the actual performance of the 7970... bit embarassing to be an AMD fan boy right now I bet.

Word on the street is Charles Demerjian's bright red panties are in 15 different knots.

Rroff · 22 Dec 2011 at 18:26

Freddie1980 said:
To be fair to the guy if he had qualified with crossfire performance against SLI performance he would have been right more or less, the 7970 looks like an absolute demon in Crossfire.

Thats not really telling the whole story tho, nVidia artifically limit their cards performance in SLI to reduce microstutter from becoming apparent to the user as much as possible, AMD "believe there is more value to the customer" maxmising performance, which is the better approach I'm not going to comment on

Rroff · 22 Dec 2011 at 18:28

xsistor said:
Word on the street is Charles Demerjian's bright red panties are in 15 different knots.

On the flipside tho I guess if they can get the price down a fair bit they are likely to hold the performance crown for the next few months, have time to get a better card out to compete with the proper kepler cards, etc. but its a very damp squib for a new generation... I'm almost waiting for the press releases in a couple of weeks time where they go "ooops turns out we a actually still using Evergreen shaders on these cards" (ala bulldozer transistor count).

Combat Fighter · 22 Dec 2011 at 18:29

stulid said:
So no 70%+ increase then? lol

Don't look like it.

Gonna keep my 5970 a little longer me thinks!

xsistor · 22 Dec 2011 at 18:33

Rroff said:
On the flipside tho I guess if they can get the price down a fair bit they are likely to hold the performance crown for the next few months, have time to get a better card out to compete with the proper kepler cards, etc. but its a very damp squid for a new generation... I'm almost waiting for the press releases in a couple of weeks time where they go "ooops turns out we a actually still using Evergreen shaders on these cards" (ala bulldozer transistor count).

True, true. I'm not liking what seems to be a sudden £20 price hike on GTX 580s among etailers, either. It gives all the more reason to AMD to hold on to premium prices.

Rroff · 22 Dec 2011 at 18:36

stulid said:
So no 70%+ increase then? lol

In some cases, but far more often its in the 25-40% region over the 6970 than in the 70% region.

This is what I was expecting from the 7870/50 not the 79xx cards.

Yaayuh! · 22 Dec 2011 at 18:39

Not bad AMD, not bad at all, should knock down those GTX580 prices.

One thing though, the performance isn't that much better than the GTX580 considering the 6 series from nVidia is due around Q2 2012. Which i can imagine will perform a lot better still... What will AMD have to combat that in the single GPU market?
Though that said, there are some drivers and patches to be released to improve the performance a bit i the next month or two.

Rroff · 22 Dec 2011 at 18:43

Rossi~ said:
Not bad AMD, not bad at all, should knock down those GTX580 prices.

One thing though, the performance isn't that much better than the GTX580 considering the 6 series from nVidia is due around Q2 2012. Which i can imagine will perform a lot better still... What will AMD have to combat that in the single GPU market?

If it knocks the prices down for the GTX5x0 cards that will be a good thing, in theory nVidia could put out an impossible to get hold of GTX580 "ultra" version with 3gig VRAM and handpicked, overclocked cores just to retake the performance crown on paper lol.

MichaelM · 22 Dec 2011 at 18:49

Rroff said:
If it knocks the prices down for the GTX5x0 cards that will be a good thing, in theory nVidia could put out an impossible to get hold of GTX580 "ultra" version with 3gig VRAM and handpicked, overclocked cores just to retake the performance crown on paper lol.

With the 7970's overclocking so well and the performance gains from overclocking resulting in real performance gains, it looks like these chips are not even stretching their legs yet.
Those Ultra 580 would have a MTBF that could embarrass the first revision 590's if they where pushed hard enough to compete with a factory overclocked 7970.

Will have to wait for Kepler to see Nvidia go beast mode on the 7000's.

Duff-Man · 22 Dec 2011 at 18:51

Well, I'm a little underwhelmed. I just got in and had a chance to read through anandtech's review (their technical discussion is excellent as usual).

When I saw the specs a couple of weeks ago (4.16Bn transistors, 2048 SP) I knew we wouldn't be seeing the "70-80%" hike that I was originally hoping for from the first 28nm high-end cards. But still - I expected performance to be a little higher than it is.

Yes, this new architecture is built around long-term design scalability, and compute applications, rather than raw throughput. Such changes in design paradigm will almost always lead to some reduction in per-transistor performance (as we saw with Fermi). But still - I'm left feeling a little underwhelmed.

I guess Nvidia's roadmap makes a little more sense now. A "768-core" Kepler, or thereaouts, should be able to compete well with the 7970. Nvidia can take the time to refine and respin their top-end 1024-core part, and introduce it at a more convenient time. I hope AMD have something to answer it with late next year.

Rroff · 22 Dec 2011 at 18:58

Duff-Man said:
When I saw the specs a couple of weeks ago (4.16Bn transistors, 2048 SP) I knew we wouldn't be seeing the "70-80%" hike that I was originally hoping for from the first 28nm high-end cards. But still - I expected performance to be a little higher than it is.

It should have been a lot closer to that given the supposed efficency increases with the new shader design... doesn't look like its doing quite as well in practise.