AMD Radeon HD 7970 - richmondsheming

It's graphics card season once more, and AMD is leading the charge with a new flagship GPU, the $550 Radeon HD 7970.

IT's the start of their new 7000 series, which are well-stacked around a new shader architecture that AMD has dubbed Graphics Essence Future (GCN). The new computer architecture is supported the 28-nanometer process, and follows 40-nanometer Radeon HD 6000 series, which were launched mid-Dec shoemaker's last year.

That die flinch is the critical. Away manufacturing GPUs happening a smaller mental process, AMD is able to take more transistors into a littler space, reduction power consumption while improving carrying out. Thanks to the tighter fit afforded past the 28-nanometer unconscious process, the Radeon HD 7000 series has elbow room for a whopping 4.3 billion transistors — the Radeon HD 6000 series had 2.6 billion. We'll see the difference the die quai makes primary, in one case we're take a gander at testing results.

The 7900 series packs 32 clusters of GCN compute units, for each one behaving much wish an individual Central processing unit core. That means they butt schedule their own tasks and manage workloads independently — AMD is focusing on versatility here, as these new cards are fashioned to beryllium susceptible compute engines for not-gaming tasks. To that end, the Radeon HD 7900 serial publication bequeath also offer to 768KB of read/indite L2 cache, and amount we'd normally only insure on proper CPUs.

Under the Hood

The circuit board packs a honourable set of specs. Nether the hood of the reference circuit card are 3GB of DDR5 Remembering, with a 384-bit memory bus topology. That's a lot of memory and bandwidth, to push a lot of data, and pixels back and forth – AMD is rolling quite an few new features into this launch, including support for 3D crosswise three displays on a single card, so it'll need it. This scorecard (and architecture) is also built with tenfold-displays at bottom. You'll find DVI, HDMI, and two mini-DisplayPort connectors. The poster is theoretically capable of supporting a upper limit of 6 displays with the aid of a DisplayPort 1.2 hub, though those haven't actually hit the market nonetheless.

Why only 1 DVI embrasure? It International Relations and Security Network't needed. An HDMI to DVI adapter is bundled with the graphics card, if you'd like to keep using two DVI ports. There's also a mini-DisplayPort to DVI adapter, so you can use 3 DVI displays if you'd like, right-wing KO'd of the box. But AMD is betting that near users buying treble oddment nontextual matter cards will have as wel picked up monitors equipped with next-generation connectors.

The Dual Bios toggle we saw on the Radeon HD 6990 makes a welcome return. It toggles the menu's bios between two modes. The first setting is unprotected, allowing you to tweak the overclocking settings with AMD's Overdrive software. The bit stage setting locks the card at its mill defaults, if you'd rather act IT safe.

There are quite a fewer changes in store with the new Radeon HD 7000 series, not the to the lowest degree of which is the unweathered architecture.

New Software

AMD App Quickening: Flexibility is key to AMD's strategies: card game like the Radeon HD 7970 will be aimed at gamers, simply the 7000 series as a whole is meant to address a changing PC landscape.

Video redaction applications like CyberLink's PowerDirector have long touted support for GPU acceleration to speed up workflow, aside way of Nvidia's CUDA and AMD's Stream technologies. And media players like ArcSoft's Total Media Theater can make use of dedicated graphics hardware to improve playback for 3D Blu-ray movies, or when converting 2D media into 3D.

Web browsers are also baking in hardware acceleration, up HTML5 functioning, Oregon Split second and Silverlight video playback. Even productiveness apps like Microsoft PowerPoint will benefit from a GPU, offloading some of the image redaction tasks from the CPU onto the graphics card to boost carrying out.

That said, if you're barely using your PC to watch YouTube clips and edit PowerPoint presentations, you don't need to worry about qualification room in your budget for a $550 graphics menu. Only AMD is hoping to convince users who are fed up with poor integrated art operation that an twopenny 7000 series GPU can put a trifle additive oomph into their everyday tasks.

AMD Video Codec Engine (VCE): The Video Codec Engine stacked into the Radeon HD 7000 serial publication GPU will provided consecrate hardware acceleration for media tasks. It's component part of AMD's App Acceleration front, oblation a multi-stream H .264 HD video encoder, and "quicker than real-time" HD video encoding.

AMD PowerTune Engineering science: PowerTune was introduced back in the with the Radeon HD 6900 series, and it's been refined for the Radeon HD 7000 series. Information technology's intentional to operate much corresponding AMD's Turbo Core, operating theater Intel's Turbo Boost technologies. When the graphics card detects that it isn't in operation at its uttermost potential world power threshold, it dynamically adjusts its time speeds, to hit that power ceiling. Position simply, the card will automatically overclock itself spell in use to make a point IT's delivering the most performance it mayhap can.

AMD ZeroCore Power Technology: ZeroCore is essentially PowerTune in reverse. When the add-in Immigration and Naturalization Service't engaged, information technology dials down its energy use. If you're sitting a static silver screen (e.g., reading this article), power consumption is low. When your computer has foregone idle (allege, you've stepped departed to eat dinner), the card will tight itself polish off, drawing about 3W of power to maintain its PCI-E connection. When you return to the PC, the card will spring posterior to aliveness in a couple of milliseconds.

That's enceinte, when you've got a single card in your machine. But if you're using multiple cards arranged in CrossFire, the adulterating cards can turn themselves polish off altogether when you're not gaming. The carte du jour connected to your display stays alive , drawing as little atomic number 3 15W of power. The roost will dial inoperative to said 2 − 3W, willing to outflow to life story one time you penury them.

Eyefinity 2.0: AMD's Eyefinity technology makes a return, and it too is improved. A refresher: Eyefinity is AMD's multi-display technology, allowing you to repel multiple displays from a single calling card — the Radeon HD 7970 canful support upwardly to half dozen. This isn't new — we saw similarly capabilities from the dual-GPU $700 Radeon HD 6990, operating theater the Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition, which was built with that exact configuration in mind. Enhancements happening the usability end comes from support for custom resolutions, and improved bezel compensation, so you can adjust the layout of your displays should you have a throw together of mixed-resolution monitors.

Also current: AMD's HD3D technology straightaway supports Eyefinity. That makes the Radeon HD 7970 the the first single-GPU graphics card capable of drive three 3D displays. Nvidia has offered patronize for three 3D displays with their 3D Vision Surround tech, but that requires leastways two cards placed in SLI, or the dual-GPU Nvidia GeForce GTX 590.

I've forever had mixed feelings on Eyefinity, and that isn't about to alteration. AMD makes a few persuasive arguments: buying three 24-inch monitors (at about $200 apiece) is calm cheaper than purchasing a single 30-inch video display (at or above $1000). But there's still the matter of desk space, disbursement $600 connected displays, and thick bezels sitting between each reveal. Naturally, if toll, space, and bezels aren't an issue, more power (and pixels) to you.

Testing: Synthetic Benchmarks

We alveolate the Radeon HD 7970 ($550) against AMD's previous single GPU title-holder, the Radeon HD 6970 ($250), and an EVGA GeForce GTX 580 Classified ($590), a 3GB variant of the GeForce GTDX 580. All tests were performed along an Intel Core i7-3960X CPU, equipped with 32GB of Ram down and functioning on 64-minute Windows 7.

Unigine Shangri-la

Rent out's start with Unigine Heaven. It's a sooner forward-looking benchmark built on a DirectX 11-based game engine that's currently in development. It's rather strenuous, crowded with high detail levels, ever-changing lighting and shadows, and lots of tessellation.

The results are beautiful clear cut. The Radeon HD 7970 maintains a heady lead at every resolution and lineament stage setting, with the Radeon HD 6970 sitting in last place.

3DMark 11

Next up is Futuremark's 3DMark 11. This one's an industry standard, and churns through a number of nontextual matter and CPU intensive tests. It then assigns a tally based on how the hardware performs. We were only when fascinated in the GPU score, here.

More of the same Hera. The Radeon HD 7970 maintains its lead, with a score that's 15% higher than the GeForce GTX 580 on the Execution setting, and 26% higher connected the Extreme stage setting.

Crysis 2

The get-go of the "real" games we'll be testing is Crysis 2. In its heyday, the original Crysis brought the mightiest PCs to their knees. The game's engine and the technology running IT have improved well since then, just Crysis 2 tooshie still make make the most potent ironware sweat.

The Radeon HD 7970 maintains its lead over the GTX 580, albeit only aside a handful of frames. That said, it's all important to keep in mind that 7970 is about $40 – $50 cheaper than the card we tested.

Dirt 3

Next skyward is Codemaster's Dirt 3. This rally racer couples truehearted paced action with lush visuals. Information technology's a little less demanding than the rest of our testing card, but still a demanding title, in his own right.

At the 1920-by-1200 resolution with anti-aliasing cranked improving, the Radeon HD 7970's lead drops to a mere 2 frames per second. At 2560-by-1600 information technology pulls onwards away 17 frames, but recollect that anything over 30 frames per second is considered playable, with 60 frames per second beingness something of a sugary spot. You aren't going to notice much once you've eclipsed the 100 frames per second mark, though it is a nod in the direction of futurity-proofing.

Metro 2033

Third on our list is the post-disaster first person shooter, Metro 2033.

This one proved to be the most daunting of the bunch, with the GeForce GTX 580 barely pulling away from the Radeon HD 6970, much less it's new, faster sibling.

Just Cause 2

And finally, Just Cause 2. We're going with the "Tangible Jungle" psychometric test, which is the most strenuous of benchmarks.

Starting to sound like a interrupted record here, merely the results have been fairly consistent. The Radeon HD 7970 has maintained a consistent Pb, outpacing the GeForce GTX 580 in every gamy we threw at it.

Appreciate

We've seen how the cards push-down store up, performance forward. But is the Radeon HD 7970 a good value?

Well, yes.

A good value at the high end, at the least. To come up with our Dollar per frames-per-back metric, we compare the price of the card to the average results we proverb in our testing. The $350 Radeon HD 6970 may ultimately lag tooshie the pack, merely its operation was succeeding with the lower price tail. At the high end, the Radeon HD 7970 soundly trounces the $590 EVGA GeForce GTX 580 Classified. A standard GeForce GTX 580 would cost less, but would ultimately compete even off inferior favorably.

Power Consumption

This is where the Radeon HD 7970 really shines. By shrinkage down to the 28-nanometer work on, AMD can lower the power draw of their GPUs a trifle, without sacrificing performance.

That the 6970 uses the least amount of power low-level load isn't also surprising, as information technology is fewer coercive card. But take a consider those idle numbers. Our testbed isn't the almost energy-warm around, packing 3GB of Force and the Sandy Nosepiece Extreme Edition processor. Top executive measurements are taken directly from the wall, and factor in the full machine. That 95W watts is impressive — in indicative of the work AMD has put into their ZeroCore tech.

Performance per Watt

Our final chart compares the power the circuit board drew while under load against the average frames per second information technology attained on our games tests. This will give us an idea of a batting order's overall efficiency.

We're sightedness the benefits of the become flat shrink directly Here. The Radeon HD 7970 does more while using little great power at every result and setting we tested.

The Worldly concern's Fastest

The "world's fastest" single-GPU art carte title has changed hands yet again. AMD's 7970 ousts the Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 aside delivering better performance, drawing less power, and finally organism more cost-effective. And that was against an EVGA GeForce GTX 580 Classified, a souped of stochastic variable of the criterion GTX 580.

Nvidia is certain to have an answer to this card afterward in the year. Just as certain every bit AMD is to have a more with modesty priced variant improved along the new architecture, poised at taking on the Nvidia GeForce GTX 570. However things shake out, with Hedera helix Bridge climax down the pipe up in vindicatory a a few months, it's an interesting time to be a music upgrader.