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[Official] HD 7970 Reviews

Rroff said:
They should price them a bit under the 580 really, then no one will care that they aren't quite all they could have been. Not that I'd buy one even then but thats another story. They'd be solid cards at £300 even £350 but at best part of £500 its just not worth it.
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That's what they should have done, straight in at 6970 prices +£4/50, then they would be a fantastic buy.

Gibbo told me that you have 2 on pre-order!
 
Freddie1980 said:
AMD have already said that they dropped the ball with the 5870 release by setting its price point far to low so I'm guessing they don't want a repeat of last time.
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100% agree with you there, they really did drop the ball there they easily could have sold the 5870 for a lot more, I snapped one up the 1st week they came out for £306 with next day delivery and it lasted me a decent time and was cuffed to bits with it untill I got fed up with AMDs drivers and sold it on and moved to a GTX 580.

One of the main reasons I would not get a 7970 even if it was faster then a 6990 is the drivers and AMD would have to prove to me the drivers are not going to turn into a bad joke as they have done recently. I would always now sit back and watch what people are saying about their drivers before I dive back into AMDs camp again. They really need to show me that they can make drivers and their hardware work as designed for more than the release drivers and a few driver sets that don't break applications and games just to make a new application or game work.


Well time to sit back and wait for Kepler and see what mess or magic Nvidia have waiting for all of us. So far the AMD 7970 to me is nothing more than another speed bump on a new process and new architecture. Nothing that is making me go crazy like the 5870 did and made me call every supplier for the ASUS 5870 I wanted.. I'm sat here thinking nice update with some nice Crossfire results (I don't use Crossfire or SLI and never will) but not a card for me as an update from what I have and not the card I was waiting for to maybe go to 2560 x 1600 on a single card and have the same sort of performance I have currently at 1920 x 1200 with my GTX 580.. Also the price is well priced as I expected really but a nagging feeling inside me says it's an AMD card that quickly looses resale value and does not have the extras like CUDA and PhysX ( I know PhysX is not really here or there, but adds some resale value) and their drivers are shocking at the best of times.


Nagging feeling says wait for Kepler and if they don't show anything amazing wait till the next generation before updating what I have, there is not many titles a GTX 580 or even a AMD 69xx card can't run at HD resolutions well.. Thanks to console ported games .. Also maybe worth waiting now till the new generation consoles come out and new graphics/game engines come out to really push hardware again.. the frostbyte engine to me still looks like a console aimed gaming engine (Like the new crytek engine) and not really pushing PC hardware in a manner I want to see and in a manner that optimises the code well for PC hardware to get the max performance for your £, the developers to me recently seem to be very lazy and even when they have poorly optimised code they get away with it due to the power of the PC hardware now, I remember the days 48k and 16k was all we had and we could put a lot in that space and make it run very optimised.


Anyway I can rant all day about hardware this year.. SB-E 2011 platform was the first let down for me, overpriced and not great performance for todays software... Then I was left waiting to see what 28nm would bring to graphics hardware and well.. not very much so far that I have not seen before as the typical speed bump.. sound cards again creatives new gen is nothing more then an X-FI again rebadged and painted in pretty colours... lets hope 2012 brings the goods us PC enthusiasts like to see.
 
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Drivers, drivers, drivers, yawn, yawn, yawn, off to bed I go, can't be ##### with the same old ####, different thread(or post Purgatory):(!
 
Well just come on and had a quick glance at some reviews and comments. 2.5fps quicker than the 580 at 1920 X 1200 etc in BF3 and Amd think this is a success. If this is the best they can do with a new process, a big jump to 28nm, then I think this is a big fail to be honest, extremely dissappointed is an understatement, its not trouncing the 6970 never mind the 580, OMG! £440-£500, joke to be honest. FAIL!!!!!!!:(
 
Duff-Man said:
Agreed. I was expecting to check the review pages today and see somewhere in the region of a 40-50% average bump over the GTX580. Sub 30% is not what I was hoping to see - especially for a core that's only 6% smaller than Cayman.
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Dont know why so many people keep saying these things... it's like, am i the only person on the planet that can see the obvious?? :confused:

This is AMD's answer to Nvidia's Fermi, and as with Fermi many of the extra transistors are there for computing perposes, NOT for gaming. GPU's are not just for games anymore, they can run C++ now and do almost anything a CPU can. If you look at Fermi, considering how many extra transistors it had it wasn't actually that much faster than AMD's cards, which had way less transistors, being as many of Fermi's transistors are not specifically for gaming (they're for computing). So naturally if AMD are doing the same here then it should be obvious that we're going to get the same results.

The gaming performance of these new cards is pretty much exactly what i was expecting. Although future games could see big performance increases if they make use of the computing power that GPU's now have - for instance more complex physics, collision detection and game A.I can now be handled by both the GPU and CPU, but nothing yet makes use of this and likely wont for a long time.
 
MR.B said:
This is AMD's answer to Nvidia's Fermi, and as with Fermi many of the extra transistors are there for computing perposes, NOT for gaming. GPU's are not just for games anymore, they can run C++ now and do almost anything a CPU can. If you look at Fermi, considering how many extra transistors it had it wasn't actually that much faster than AMD's cards, which had way less transistors, being as many of Fermi's transistors are not specifically for gaming (they're for computing). So naturally if AMD are doing the same here then it should be obvious that we're going to get the same results.
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Well, it's not the transistor count that surprises me so much as the transistor density. I already mentioned it in another thread, so I'll just re-post:


Duff-Man said:
One thing has struck me though:
The 28nm process allows (in principle) a relative increase in transistor density of 2.05 times (i.e. +105%), whereas the actual transistor density has increased by 'only' 74%. This is quite out of character from previous generations, which have more closely followed the expected transistor packing density (you can check the numbers on the wikipedia pages).

It will be interesting to see how Kepler fares in this regard. It could be that the more intricate design of GCN requires a somewhat looser transistor arrangement than the VLIW cores. But, if nvidia are also producing a ~70-80% increase in transistor density then it's more likely indicative of issues with the 28nm process. That's not necessarily to say it's down to issues with the manufacturing process at TSMC - it could be more physical problems associated with running high-speed transistors at such small sizes. If this IS the case, then we might not see such large gains from Kepler either.
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Since you mentioned Fermi, it also makes for a good example. Compare it against the preceeding-gen top-end Nvidia card; the GTX285:

GTX 285: 1.4Bn transistors over 470mm^2, on 55nm
GTX 480: 3.0Bn transistors over 529mm^2, on 40nm

Now, the increase in transistor packing-density from 55nm to 40nm should be ~89.1% ( 55^2/40^2 ). Going to the (vastly more complex) Fermi design, transistor density increased by 90% - very much in-line with the expected increase.

Now this is something we haven't seen this time around. Packing density from 40nm to 28nm implies a 105% increase in transistor density, whereas we are seeing see only 74%. THIS is where the discrepancy between expected and observed performance is creeping in. I was expecting a similar die-size to the 6970 (and it happened...), but I was also expecting transistor density to scale as it has historically, which would have implied over 5Bn transistors, and with it a significant bump in performance.
 
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For £220 i have two 5850's in crossfire that can outperform a 580 and just be under this amd 7970.

Only thing that is making me want to change is 1gig vram. but i play at 1920x1080. and the only vram limited game i feel is bf3. what do i do?
 
Reading the WidescreenGaming review the Eyefinity numbers are very interesting.

"When you add up the average frame rates on each game with the HD 7970, it's totals 558.9 frames. Doing the same for the HD 6970 gives you 410.3 frames. Comparing the two shows a weighted performance improvement of 36%. Doing the same calculations for Eyefinity performance totals 257.4 frames on the HD 7970 and 176.6 frames on the HD 6970. Comparing these two shows a 46% improvement."

So looks like a nice improvement for a multi screen setup. :)
 
cannot wait for this. i am really due an upgrade. was worried when i saw one dvi port but there is an adapter for the hdmi socket
 
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Duff-Man said:
Now this is something we haven't seen this time around. Packing density from 40nm to 28nm implies a 105% increase in transistor density, whereas we are seeing see only 74%. THIS is where the discrepancy between expected and observed performance is creeping in. I was expecting a similar die-size to the 6970 (and it happened...), but I was also expecting transistor density to scale as it has historically, which would have implied over 5Bn transistors, and with it a significant bump in performance.
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the bulldozer is the same at 32nm, that's way below the expected transistor count for a 32nm core that size. Seems like Global Foundries (who fab both) are having issues with density. Could be due to leakage perhaps?
 
Faztastic said:
For £220 i have two 5850's in crossfire that can outperform a 580 and just be under this amd 7970.

Only thing that is making me want to change is 1gig vram. but i play at 1920x1080. and the only vram limited game i feel is bf3. what do i do?
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Im in the same boat, if you have less than 8GB RAM get 8GB RAM, makes a massive difference for just £35.
 
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