AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB Graphics Card Review - Tahiti at 28nm
Battlefield 3
Battlefield 3 (DirectX 11)
Battlefield 3™ leaps ahead of its time with the power of Frostbite 2, DICE's new cutting-edge game engine. This state-of-the-art technology is the foundation on which Battlefield 3 is built, delivering enhanced visual quality, a grand sense of scale, massive destruction, dynamic audio and character animation utilizing ANT technology as seen in the latest EA SPORTS™ games.
Frostbite 2 now enables deferred shading, dynamic global illumination and new streaming architecture. Sounds like tech talk? Play the game and experience the difference!
Our Settings for Battlefield 3
Here is our testing run through the game, for your reference.
The new Tahiti GPU from AMD is able to beat out the GTX 580 here by 13% at 1920x1080 but by as much as 20% at 2560x1600 all while maintaining noticeably higher minimum frame rates. The lead the HD 7970 holds over the HD 6970 is pretty dramatic even at 1080p - 42% - and that only gets bigger the higher the resolution. The GTX 560 Ti 2Win actually performs quite well, beating out the GTX 580 at 1080p but with a much lower minimum frame rate. And, as expected, the 1GB frame buffer really starts to hurt the 2Win at 2560x1600.
PC PerspectiveUpcoming Events
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If it's faster that the 580, it kind of makes sense that it costs a bit more. It's pretty disappointing to see the prices of current gen cards stay so high for so long though. Hopefully when we see Nvidia's new card we'll see some price drops all around on the current generation.
My thoughts exactly. I was hoping to see AMD drive the performance/dollar up with this release. At this rate single GPUs will be launching at $1000 in 2 years :(
I want to blame the rich guys who will actually pay the extra 2-300 dollars for the extra 10-20 percent performance, but I can't. I would do the same if I had the extra cash haha.
That is pretty funny! You obviously don't remember how much the 8800GTX and Ultra cost when they were launched. I paid $950.00 for my first 8800GTX. With the price drop just go Crossfire it keeps getting better and better, as well as cheaper.
I'm glad that point came across well in my review. I love the performance out of this, but I guess I just expected/wanted AMD to undercut NVIDIA to put pressure on them and start the price wars again.
There is still a chance that NVIDIA cuts the GTX 580 down to $425 or something - they have a lot of room with the GTX 570 priced at $340. If they do that, then AMD will have to drop the 7970 price.
Good solid review. I think i was hoping for a little more of a performance increase over the 580. I look forward to seeing eyefinity benchmarks with this card with crossfire setup.
Couple of edits:
Page 3, talking about DDMA:Multi-tasking under image of triple screen gaming with soccer on background tv:"With the Radeon HD 7970 it is not possible to both play a game and..." should that be now, given the way the rest of the sentence and paragraph read?
Metro 2033 @ 1920x1080 line graph X-axis labels are the default Series1/2/3/4 instead of the gpu name labels.
Yes, it is now possible.
Yeah, thanks for that type - kind of a big difference. :)
And also, yes, we are looking forward to doing both Eyefinity and CrossFire testing very soon!
Let me know if there are particular titles you want to see tested!
I'm sure it goes without saying BF3 in Eyefinity is what everyone wants. Not much else brings two 6970's to a crawl.
Would it be possible to disable vsync on Skyrim and re-run your tests? There are several methods which successfully disable it, including editing the .cfg file (iPresentInterval=0) or using a utility like Radpro to force vsync disable on the process. As it stands, that particular game's set of benchmarks is totally useless. Nice card, though.
Based on my research and testing, I wasn't able to find a way to do disable Vsync with AMD cards without modding the game, which seems less than ideal.
If you have a link to a solution though directly, I'll gladly try it!
Who are you going to believe?
http://nl.hardware.info/reviews/2472/32/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review-dirt-3...
I saw a slide that showed this card doing separate audio out to each display and intelligently switching if a video was moved to another display. Any truth to that? Testing? That would be pretty awesome. Thanks.
Whoops, must have skipped that page.
Ryan what is with porn music...Oh found my 7970 wetspot.
given the current state of the art re Vid games, isn't it all still a matter of pushing pixels? if that's the case, then clearly something aint right here - look at the 40nm vs 28nm Pixel Fillrate figures in Ryan's video - barely any gain at all
Pixel fill rate is not really the defining factor right now. It is not how many pixels you can push its what you calculate on those pixels in real-time. Shading power! Oh, and geometry is picking up again in importance.
Great review, its nice to see someone actually moving the technology along, and innovating. Seamlessly it seems, this time.
Agreed. More than than a year with the GTX 6970 and GTX 580 is enough for me.
good review
This card is way over priced.
I for one will be sticking to my current setups. For now.
The sweet spot for this level of card is 399.
While performance is better its not enough for me.
I want to see Nvidia's offering. If they hold their current pricing structure, match or better performance, then AMD will be punished big time.
Will give me a certain amount of pleasure, as I hate price milking, just because they can.
Yes, what NVIDIA has to say about GPUs in the next few months will be very important here. Curious to see if Kepler will hold up to its promises.
I shall be placing my 2 5870's for one of these as im very impressed by these benchmark scores especially in BF3 as thats the game im playing atm. I have 2 1080p monitors sitting under our tree so i can see these cards taking a bashing with the few high end games i play
Thanks for the excellent review Ryan
Thanks!
And have fun with Eyefinity!
Great review, but I cant see spending upwards of $600 for it =/
It is a lovely video card - shame the price is a bit high. I do hope Nvidia responds with something equally impressive. 2012 is going to be interesting.
By the way, have you guys considered adding Star Wars: The Old Republic to your battery of tests? It's the biggest MMO to launch in years and I would expect that a large portion of your readers will be interested.
We did consider it, but didn't have to validate before this article. We still might, depending on how GPU-bound the game is, if it all.
Extremely glad the GCN architecture Isn't as terrible as bulldozer ended up. I went to the skyrim page first and was waiting for a huge dissapointment, but yeah.
I am intrigued to see how my box will handle the new card. I have an MSI 4850 512mb and am upgrading to the next card made by the 48xx series team. Sort of amazing to think of the differences in performance is going to be 5-10x better when comparing raw specifications alone.
If anyone is interested I will be doing some benchmarks and testing things out, if PCPER wants to use those for a writeup or discuss it, I would be more then happy to provide it and listen to your thoughts.
CANNOT WAIT!
ALSO: There are a lot of people waiting to upgrade, waiting for the "new stuff" from either to decide on what to do, that is why the pricing is so high right away. Like I said above and I am sure many others will be grabbing the 4950, it is more about upgrading then it is price. These cards last 3-4 years, and the price initially is worth it for the upgrade possibilities and expanded feature set then what is currently available in terms of power usage, temperature, performance, and so on.
Sure man, we'd love to have you write a guest story about the upgrade experience. I am sure quite a few readers will be in the same boat.
I personally think that graphics cards are way overpriced. I will keep my 570 for a good while I suppose. I have a hard time spending more than 350$ especially when you see how games for PC are having problems to run well. Major issues with Battlefield 3, even in the menus, like it is corrupted, image and sound. The beta ran fine which is weird. Will try one more install and if not fixed will have to throw it away, 60$ badly invested. Other games run just fine. Wrote to the company, no reply. By the way, game prices are also way too high in my opinion. Saw Rage for 20$ free delivery at newegg.com, same game at newegg.ca = 60$ +++ 10$ delivery. That is not right. Waiting for a newegg response...they will not sell to a Canadian on their US site of course.
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