AMD Radeon HD 7970 Video Card Review @ [H]

I am definitely more interested in seeing the 7950 after reading this.
 
Time to wait for Kepler I guess. Honestly, I just hope something better comes out late March.

Seems 40nm -> 28nm doesn't mean very much.
 
xIronCrossx said:
Time to wait for Kepler I guess. Honestly, I just hope something better comes out late March.

Seems 40nm -> 28nm doesn't mean very much.
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I think you are underestimating it. Not very mature drivers, radically different architecture and it overclocks like a boss. Give it time and they will squeeze more performance out of it.
 
xIronCrossx said:
Time to wait for Kepler I guess. Honestly, I just hope something better comes out late March.

Seems 40nm -> 28nm doesn't mean very much.
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Err...up to 60%+ improvement over the prior generation?! Am I missing something here, I'm not understanding all the disappointment here.
 
TwistedAegis said:
Usually I'm on board with heatless' logic, but I have to wonder about that as well. However I think his main argument is that the AMD cards don't do 3D, which is his main reason for not upgrading, not necessarily not enough of a performance increase.
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I kept one of the 480s and sold the two for only a $200 dollar loss combined so it's wasn't that much of a deal. 3D is pretty demanding, so 20% helps out a lot. Indeed in the If AMD really did 3D the 7970s would be tempting.
 
TwistedAegis said:
Err...up to 60%+ improvement over the prior generation?! Am I missing something here, I'm not understanding all the disappointment here.
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And likely crossfire scaling that'll at least match the 6xxx generation's, which was better than SLi scaling already. I'd wager that with 3 7970's you'd see over 50% performance increase over 3 580s with updated drivers.

It's like the retard brigade invaded [H] today. Unbelievable....


People have to understand that this card is competing against the GTX580 right now. It also beats the card by a very comfortable margin in performance, tesselation, cooler, less power and yet is priced $50 cheaper. Throwing Kepler into the ring is completely hypothetical as we know absolutely nothing about its performance. Furthermore, the high end models that compete with the 7970/580 won't be here for another 6 months.
 
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TwistedAegis said:
Err...up to 60%+ improvement over the prior generation?! Am I missing something here, I'm not understanding all the disappointment here.
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But most are looking at the AVERAGE not the best case scenarios. If the average were 60% then that's a whole other matter.
 
xIronCrossx said:
20% improvement over a 1 year old card.
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No, 20% improvement over a very new OC'ed non-reference card that costs $50 more than the non-OC'ed 7970, not the stock 1 year old card. Like I said, I think comparing the specially OC'ed 580 card was a good idea, but only if the readership actually uses their reading comprehension, which doesn't look to be the case.
 
TwistedAegis said:
No, 20% improvement over a very new OC'ed non-reference card that costs $50 more than the non-OC'ed 7970, not the stock 1 year old card. Like I said, I think comparing the specially OC'ed 580 card was a good idea, but only if the readership actually uses their reading comprehension, which doesn't look to be the case.
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Oh shit a whole 90mhz over the stock on core. Shit that requires a custom card to do, reference can't do that! :rolleyes:

The difference would be 1-3FPS maybe 5FPS if you're really lucky. So it has a lead of 21%, damn.


Its not a bad card, I would say its even good. But nothing to go crazy over.
 
I'll just wait for the 7990 :D My 6990+6970 setup should hold me over for a while. I'm glad that ATI managed to come out with a superior product with decent drivers that worked with current games instead of waiting for the [H] to test the product and find out that the drivers sucked.

I like where ATI is going...
 
mekkanic said:
Is it that hard to read that they used an "MTD" version of the 580GTX for the sake of testing mutiple display gaming on one video card? :eek:

I'll just wait for the 7990 :D My 6990+6970 setup should hold me over for a while. I'm glad that ATI managed to come out with a superior product with decent drivers that worked with current games instead of waiting for the [H] to test the product and find out that the drivers sucked.
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Nope its OC'ed to such an ungodly amount that it completely ruins the HD 7970s 100% improvement :p
 
Sign me up for two. One of the things that always irked me about SLi and Crossfire was the wasteful power draw at idle, which is what my system sits at 80-90% of the time. Zero Core is a great feature. Now you can get 4 of these things and still eat less power than 1 of the previous generation cards at idle.

Hope nVidia, implements something similar in their next gen card. I tried nVidia's Hybrid SLi/HybridPower back in the day. Unfortunately that technology did not work, since although the fans shut off on the cards, the temperatures rose to insane levels when turned off. I hope ZeroCore works as advertised.
 
xIronCrossx said:
Oh shit a whole 90mhz over the stock on core. Shit that requires a custom card to do, reference can't do that! :rolleyes:

The difference would be 1-3FPS maybe 5FPS if you're really lucky. So it has a lead of 21%, damn.


Its not a bad card, I would say its even good. But nothing to go crazy over.
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Not to mention it has half the memory of the 7970. I would like to see it up against an overclocked 3GB card.

Why not test it against the fastest card there is, the ASUS Mars 580 x2? :D

As I said I'm looking forward to what Kepler has to offer vs this. I think it will be worth the wait. That's just my 2 cents (after inflation). While I am not impressed with the 7970 it is not a Bulldozer failure or even R600. It's an incremental update with some other nice tweaks, which is better by far than the previous 2 examples.
 
PRIME1 said:
As I said I'm looking forward to what Kepler has to offer vs this. I think it will be worth the wait. That's just my 2 cents (after inflation).
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actually, you shouldn't compare the two

a more relevant comparison will be kepler vs. 7970 refresh (which isn't unreasonable to expect in 6 months)
 
That's_Corporate said:
actually, you shouldn't compare the two

a more relevant comparison will be kepler vs. 7970 refresh (which isn't unreasonable to expect in 6 months)
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Late March/April = 6 months? :confused:

Also, I don't think this card is crap, but I don't think its that great either.
 
pelo said:
And likely crossfire scaling that'll at least match the 6xxx generation's, which was better than SLi scaling already.
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Hmmm, that's a bit of an overstatement. AMD scaling numbers might overall be a bit higher on paper but in practice SLI scaling often just works better, less hitching and oddities. Look at the last reviews of game performance on [H].
 
heatlesssun said:
Hmmm, that's a bit of an overstatement. AMD scaling numbers might overall be a bit higher on paper but in practice SLI scaling often just works better, less hitching and oddities. Look at the last reviews of game performance on [H].
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Nope, its all about Max FPS! Who gives a shit if minimum FPS are bad and it goes up and down a lot, all about the Max FPS! ;)
 
xIronCrossx said:
Late March/April = 6 months? :confused:

Also, I don't think this card is crap, but I don't think its that great either.
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Nvidia is going to be releasing their cards from a bottom>up approach rather than releasing the higher end cards at the beginning. We're looking at a probably 6 month wait until we see a Kepler that competes with the 7970 unless nvidia decides to change their plans.

I think the card is amazing and follows what nvidia offered from their 4xx>5xx cards and AMD did with 5xxx>6xxx. It's an incremental increase that lived up to expectations and exceeded them in some areas, like power draw at idle and load and oodles of OC headroom.

I always buy the mid-range cards so I'm waiting to see just what both AMD and Nvidia have to offer :)
 
heatlesssun said:
Hmmm, that's a bit of an overstatement. AMD scaling numbers might overall be a bit higher on paper but in practice SLI scaling often just works better, less hitching and oddities. Look at the last reviews of game performance on [H].
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Generally less microstutter. It's a shame they did not have enough cards to send out for crossfire (which I find odd since they are launching in just a few weeks). I wonder if there might be a problem with crossfire.
 
Not sure whether to get a 7970 or go with the 580 if they drop in price. I only play at 1080 so....
 
PRIME1 said:
Generally less microstutter. It's a shame they did not have enough cards to send out for crossfire (which I find odd since they are launching in just a few weeks). I wonder if there might be a problem with crossfire.
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One thing that helped with microstuttering on both AMD and Nvidia cards was PCIE 3.0, and oddly one of the only thing that it helps with (sorry Zarathustra, other than helping with microstutter I still think it's damn near useless). Also, FPS benchmarks are done as an average so "looks good on paper" is "good" because it takes into account the dips as well as the highs. AMD has had issues with microstuttering in crossfire that they've hopefully ironed out, though. I've never noticed it while gaming but I guess it depends on the title and whether or not you're sensitive to it and if you are I'd imagine it can make you want to break things

Also, they'll probably be releasing driver updates for the 7xxx card(s) before the 7970 goes on sale so any cross-fire related performance would likely change by the time we can get our hands on them anyway so any crossfire-related benchmarks would be moot.
 
chrnochime said:
Same here. I just use my TV as the monitor, so anything above 1920x1080 is moot to me.
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Yeah or maybe wait and see what the 7950 is gonna come in at. Who knows I know I'm not doing anything until the 7970s are available in stores, as much as I'd like to right now.
 
So according to the hardware heaven SLI/Xfire review in Eyefinity, here is how the 7970 in Xfire compares to the 580 in SLI @ 5760x1080:

+45% in BF3
-14% in Skyrim
+132% in F1
+56% in Shogun:TW2
+41% in Batman:AA

They don't use canned benchmarks, either. Can't wait for the H review, if those numbers hold up I think that's a pretty significant performance gain.
 
TwistedAegis said:
So according to the hardware heaven SLI/Xfire review in Eyefinity, here is how the 7970 in Xfire compares to the 580 in SLI @ 5760x1080:

+45% in BF3
-14% in Skyrim
+132% in F1
+56% in Shogun:TW2
+41% in Batman:AA

They don't use canned benchmarks, either. Can't wait for the H review, if those numbers hold up I think that's a pretty significant performance gain.
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in F1 benchmark the SLI didnt work or it ran out of RAM.

most of them were RAM limited, so i would take that benchmark with grain of salt.
 
pelo said:
One thing that helped with microstuttering on both AMD and Nvidia cards was PCIE 3.0, and oddly one of the only thing that it helps with (sorry Zarathustra, other than helping with microstutter I still think it's damn near useless).
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Where did you read this?
 
larkin said:
Where did you read this?
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I'll try to dig it up again, but I swear I remember reading it. I'll edit this post when i find it.

Don't bother looking at the crossfire benchmarks. Although they're clearly supported it's also clear that it's in beta. Just wait till they're posted here right before or right after the cards go on sale.
 
pelo said:
One thing that helped with microstuttering on both AMD and Nvidia cards was PCIE 3.0, and oddly one of the only thing that it helps with (sorry Zarathustra, other than helping with microstutter I still think it's damn near useless).
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Why are you apologizing to me? :p

I don't recall being a huge PCIe 3.0 fan :p

That being said, even with PCIe 2.0 I have never experienced microstuttering.

My theory is that it has something to do with people running SLI/Crossfire with one board in a slot with PCIe lanes coming off of the CPU and, and one board in a slot with PCIe lanes coming off of the chipset.
 
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OC beast :eek:
 
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