AMD Radeon HD 7970 Video Card Review @ [H]

I would have preferred to see this compared to a stock 580, more tangible review imo.
 
Dan_D said:
If you are going to buy a high end graphics card today then the 7970 seems like the only choice which makes sense unless NVIDIA drastically cuts the price of the GTX 580.
Click to expand...

Can you buy a 7970 today? :p

It would not suprise me if NVIDIA drops the price next year and paper launches Kepler just to poop in AMD's shoe. They could even just die shrink the 580 call it a 585 and probably match or exceed the 7970 prior to Kepler. Who knows. I for one am glad I can sit on the bench, eat my popcorn and let the 2 companies fight it out.
 
Ugh, reading comprehension fail. Read through half this thread before seeing that the majority of people are stating that this card "barely" beats the 580 reviewed and is more expensive.

The 580 reviewed cost $600. Therefore, the 7970 outperforms, in some cases substantially, the highest-end 580 yet developed and is $50 cheaper.

While I really like the idea of comparing the new card against the high-end 580, it also seems to muddy the waters quite a bit. What is the performance delta of the Galaxy MDT 580 vs a stock 580?

And finally, wow. This thing is an amazing piece of engineering. Faster, cooler, and barely more power? AMDs CPU division needs to go to the other side of the building and learn a few things, I think.
 
PRIME1 said:
Can you buy a 7970 today? :p

It would not suprise me if NVIDIA drops the price next year and paper launches Kepler just to poop in AMD's shoe. They could even just die shrink the 580 call it a 585 and probably match or exceed the 7970 prior to Kepler. Who knows. I for one am glad I can sit on the bench, eat my popcorn and let the 2 companies fight it out.
Click to expand...

UUUmmm OK, only "if and buts were candy and nuts", etc....or popcorn in your case.
 
pelo said:
EDIT: those stating that this card disappoints are just about the biggest fanboys I've ever seen or are legally blind. Apparently a 15%-25% increase in games and lower power usage with cooler temperatures, far better tesselation performance and more overclocking headroom and also cheaper than the 3GB GTX580 isn't good enough... Seriously, what the hell is wrong with people?
Click to expand...

Or we realize that AMD isn't the only company on the planet that will be making 28nm parts, and Nvidia's 28nm parts should have absolutely no trouble matching a card using 250~ watts and only provides 20% more performance than a GTX 580.

Nvidia is so close to the 7970's performance that it actually could engage in a price war with the 28nm card if it decided to. Nvidia could easily lower the price of the 1.5GB GTX 580 to $400 to stop the bleeding for a few months. I have no idea if they are going to do this, obviously. The point is that the 7970's performance is so low that it can be nearly matched by a GTX 580.

Let's go back into time into 2009 and go for a hypothetical . Let's imagine that the 5870 barely beat the GTX 285 while using slightly less power and the 5850 lost to it at a fairly comfortable margin. Let's also imagine that this hypothetical 5870 was priced at $549, and this hypothetical 5850 was priced at $399. Do you think people would have been happy about the 58xx series in this hypothetical

Maybe this is all TSMC's fault. Maybe the 28nm process is abysmal, and this is the best AMD or Nvidia can do with it. If that is the case, then Nvidia's 28nm parts will be just as lame as this. The GK104 is rumored for release around March to May, so we should know in a couple of months.
 
Supertag said:
Or we realize that AMD isn't the only company on the planet that will be making 28nm parts, and Nvidia's 28nm parts should have absolutely no trouble matching a card using 250~ watts and only provides 20% more performance than a GTX 580.

Nvidia is so close to the 7970's performance that it actually could engage in a price war with the 28nm card if it decided to. Nvidia could easily lower the price of the 1.5GB GTX 580 to $400 to stop the bleeding for a few months. I have no idea if they are going to do this, obviously. The point is that the 7970's performance is so low that it can be nearly matched by a GTX 580.

Let's go back into time into 2009 and go for a hypothetical . Let's imagine that the 5870 barely beat the GTX 285 while using slightly less power and the 5850 lost to it at a fairly comfortable margin. Let's also imagine that this hypothetical 5870 was priced at $549, and this hypothetical 5850 was priced at $399. Do you think people would have been happy about the 58xx series in this hypothetical

Maybe this is all TSMC's fault. Maybe the 28nm process is abysmal, and this is the best AMD or Nvidia can do with it. If that is the case, then Nvidia's 28nm parts will be just as lame as this. The GK104 is rumored for release around March to May, so we should know in a couple of months.
Click to expand...

I would count on NV having the same issues with the 28nm parts if there are any...Fermi was big...I can only imagine what Kepler will be!

I think March/April is more of a wish than reality...especially if 7970's won't be hitting retail stores until mid-late January.
 
Supertag said:
Or we realize that AMD isn't the only company on the planet that will be making 28nm parts, and Nvidia's 28nm parts should have absolutely no trouble matching a card using 250~ watts and only provides 20% more performance than a GTX 580.

Nvidia is so close to the 7970's performance that it actually could engage in a price war with the 28nm card if it decided to. Nvidia could easily lower the price of the 1.5GB GTX 580 to $400 to stop the bleeding for a few months. I have no idea if they are going to do this, obviously. The point is that the 7970's performance is so low that it can be nearly matched by a GTX 580.

Let's go back into time into 2009 and go for a hypothetical . Let's imagine that the 5870 barely beat the GTX 285 while using slightly less power and the 5850 lost to it at a fairly comfortable margin. Let's also imagine that this hypothetical 5870 was priced at $549, and this hypothetical 5850 was priced at $399. Do you think people would have been happy about the 58xx series in this hypothetical

Maybe this is all TSMC's fault. Maybe the 28nm process is abysmal, and this is the best AMD or Nvidia can do with it. If that is the case, then Nvidia's 28nm parts will be just as lame as this. The GK104 is rumored for release around March to May, so we should know in a couple of months.
Click to expand...

Refer to my quote about AMD making only 3% profits since their acquisition of ATi. For a full year they operated in the red. They won't be selling video cards at such a low price that it barely covers their manufacturing, R&D, marketing, and whatever else they have to pay for. They sold the 5850 and 5870's at lower prices because they wanted to get their foot in the door with great products for cheap and they did that. Keep in mind that Intel is growing in the video segment due to their HD2000/HD3000 sandy parts and AMD's own APUs will be chewing up graphics cards sales. Remember last year when people were buying low-end discrete cards just because they needed video and onboard graphics blew donkeyballs? Well that isn't happening anymore and won't happen again. The days of really cheap amazing discrete video cards is over.

As far as Kepler is concerned: it's not here yet. Predictions mean squat. Refer to the rumor-mill around the 7970 and now look at the benchmarks. Some people were stating a 50% performance increase over a GTX580. Slides and rumors aren't worth the bandwidth they take up. We saw that with Bulldozer and now we see that here. Don't assume anything marketing guys give you will be true, and that applies to nvidia, intel, AMD and whoever else is feeding you information. Thank god for sites like [H] who don't post rumors as news and wait till benchmarks to give an honest opinion without pussy-footing around. To all the guys at [H], a real big thank you.

Finally, a GTX580 won't catch a 7970. It's 15-25% behind it and if you take into account overclocks then you need to take into account overclocking on both cards, which the 7970 will handle even better.

What are you saying again?
 
Last edited:
Just wow ... just wow! Amd hits the ball out of the park compared to it's previous generation.
They had to sell their cards cheaper cause they couldn't compete before.
It's well priced for what it does and it does it well.

Reading the article , i couldn't help but think it was too powerful for a single monitor.
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=pc
32% using 1920x1xxx resolution ... yep

Can't wait to see crossfire performance and maybe a budget version for the cheapskates like me ;P.
Amd keep the streak alive with the HD 7770 :cool:
 
dook43 said:
RadeonPro allows for user-defined Eyefinity and support for PLP????? News to me.
Click to expand...

My bad, I skimmed right over the first of the two parts and just saw the custom defined crossfire profiles, which radeon Pro has allowed us to do.

SO catalyst 12.x allows for PLP? That is fucking AWESOME news. I'm going to have to try this after work today. hadn't gotten around to testing the 12.1 drivers yet.

So tired of messing around with SoftTH. Great when it works, but it doesn't always work, and not with Crossfire/SLI.
 
This AMD card runs good and has even better computing performance.
Also I expect the drivers to be improved for launch time to give another 5 or 10% more performance over GTX 580 on games.
 
I dont think 12.1 has it, I think it's going to be present in 12.2 or 12.3 according to the slides, and it may be a 7900 only feature.
 
PRIME1 said:
If you are talking about video cards, NVIDIA has around 60% or more of that market. They took a fat check from Intel and left the integrated market.
Click to expand...

Overall. But the cards they sold 5 years ago don't count towards this year's earnings. They've shipped less cards than AMD for more than a year now?

Anyway, that's beside the point. The point was AMD offered cheap cards with incredible price-to-performance until they established themselves as equal or better and they even started shipping more than nvidia. Now that they've got their foot in the door they can actually make some $$ instead of breaking even.
 
Maybe I missed it but I was most disappointed to see no mention of noise. According to other sites, this is one noisy card. I will be waiting for one with a rather less noisy cooling system.
 
Zarathustra[H];1038179261 said:
Maybe you only play older titles, like your games looking like crap cause you can't turn the settings up, or play on a low resolution monitor, but the statement above simply isn't true.

Stop repeating a falsehood.

Even two 7970's may not be sufficient. We will have to wait and see.

We need all the GPU power we can get.
Click to expand...

I think harmattan's statement is essentially correct. Of course we all want more performance, the question is cost and the benefits for even people who buy these kinds of cards needs to be for more than a handful of games at extreme settings unless you are really extreme had have VERY deep pockets. But some people are and do have the cash to spend on even very incremental performance increases.

I'd still have to buy 3 7970s to exceed the performance of my 3 over year old 580s and at 2560x1600 in Metro 2033 we're looking at around only 25% more performance. Now that might very well enough to make the difference with Metro all maxed out at 2560x1600 but that's a ton of dough and the VAST majority of games won't get any noticeable benefit going from 3 580s to 3 7970s at 2560x1600.
 
Quartz-1 said:
Maybe I missed it but I was most disappointed to see no mention of noise. According to other sites, this is one noisy card. I will be waiting for one with a rather less noisy cooling system.
Click to expand...

You missed it...

Therefore, the HD 7970 is running 9 degrees cooler, with very close fan speeds. There is also no fan noise to speak of. We didn't notice the fan spinning at all while we were playing games.
Click to expand...
 
heatlesssun said:
I'd still have to buy 3 7970s to exceed the performance of my 3 over year old 580s and at 2560x1600 in Metro 2033 we're looking at around only 25% more performance. Now that might very well enough to make the difference with Metro all maxed out at 2560x1600 but that's a ton of dough and the VAST majority of games won't get any noticeable benefit going from 3 580s to 3 7970s at 2560x1600.
Click to expand...

Sweet! Could you link the review with 7970's in TriFire please?
 
pelo said:
Refer to my quote about AMD making only 3% profits since their acquisition of ATi. For a full year they operated in the red. They won't be selling video cards at such a low price that it barely covers their manufacturing, R&D, marketing, and whatever else they have to pay for. They sold the 5850 and 5870's at lower prices because they wanted to get their foot in the door with great products for cheap and they did that. Keep in mind that Intel is growing in the video segment due to their HD2000/HD3000 sandy parts and AMD's own APUs will be chewing up graphics cards sales. Remember last year when people were buying low-end discrete cards just because they needed video and onboard graphics blew donkeyballs? Well that isn't happening anymore and won't happen again. The days of really cheap amazing discrete video cards is over.

As far as Kepler is concerned: it's not here yet. Predictions mean squat. Refer to the rumor-mill around the 7970 and now look at the benchmarks. Some people were stating a 50% performance increase over a GTX580. Slides and rumors aren't worth the bandwidth they take up. We saw that with Bulldozer and now we see that here. Don't assume anything marketing guys give you will be true, and that applies to nvidia, intel, AMD and whoever else is feeding you information. Thank god for sites like [H] who don't post rumors as news and wait till benchmarks to give an honest opinion without pussy-footing around. To all the guys at [H], a real big thank you.

Finally, a GTX580 won't catch a 7970. It's 15-25% behind it and if you take into account overclocks then you need to take into account overclocking on both cards, which the 7970 will handle even better.

What are you saying again?
Click to expand...

You addressed the price part of my argument, and ignored the performance part. It is the combination of the two that is annoying to me. Do you think people would be as annoyed at a $550 price if it was 45-55% better than the GTX 580? My hypothetical argument is about the performance of the 7970 compared to the GTX 580 relative to the performance of the 5870 to the GTX 285. I actually agree that the old pricing model had to die. This is also caused by increased costs from TSMC.The point of mentioning the price is to couple it with the relative performance.

As far as the second paragraph, this is just silly. "Let's just ignore that good argument as to why the 7970 isn't that good"

As far as the third argument, I never said it would "catch" it in the sense of beating it in raw performance. I am saying that it would be very easy for Nvidia to "catch" it on a performance per dollar basis by lowering the GTX 580 to $400 or even $450. A small price move on their largest margin product would keep the GTX 580 extremely competitive on a performance per dollar basis in this segment. Obviously $500~ cards are never logical on this basis, and there would be hoards of people rushing to buy a 7970 if it was 1% better than a GTX 580 at a $4,999 price point, but that demand from these people cannot be mitigated.
 
heatlesssun said:
I'd still have to buy 3 7970s to exceed the performance of my 3 over year old 580s and at 2560x1600 in Metro 2033 we're looking at around only 25% more performance. Now that might very well enough to make the difference with Metro all maxed out at 2560x1600 but that's a ton of dough and the VAST majority of games won't get any noticeable benefit going from 3 580s to 3 7970s at 2560x1600.
Click to expand...

What if you didn't have 3 580s? I'm not gonna accuse you of fanboyism, but you have to look at this with a level head...

You probably spent over fifteen hundred on 3 highest end single graphics cards and you want to justify spending another fifteen-hundred on 3 more because 25% performance increase isn't enough? When was it ever justified to spend fifteen hundred dollars on a 25% increase in graphical power for gaming? You own 3 GTX580s... these cards weren't meant for you, dude.

And I did address the performance the 7970 gives over the 580s... It's 15-25%. You know what else was 15-25%? Sandy over Nehalem, or even Sandy over Thuban. Are those not good upgrades? What if they were the same price and you needed a new CPU for a brand new build all other things being equal? I'd vouch that you wouldn't pick 2 dead platforms that perform worse.

For a second, forget upgrading from a GTX580. If you had to pay $500 for a video card today and the 7970 and the GTX580 were available to you, which would you choose? If you're picking the one that's 15-25% worse and uses more power, produces more heat, runs hotter and has less overclocking headroom then you're doing it wrong.
 
Last edited:
pelo said:
Finally, a GTX580 won't catch a 7970. It's 15-25% behind it and if you take into account overclocks then you need to take into account overclocking on both cards, which the 7970 will handle even better.

What are you saying again?
Click to expand...

I'm trying to figure out why 20% performance increases between models is OK for Nvidia (480 -> 580) and ok for Intel (Gulftown -> SB--- did it even increase 20% over previous?) But somehow this is just not acceptable for AMD to do. It seems like they are being graded at a much higher level than the rest here.
 
dook43 said:
I dont think 12.1 has it, I think it's going to be present in 12.2 or 12.3 according to the slides, and it may be a 7900 only feature.
Click to expand...

If this is the case, it would be worth the 7900 upgrade for this feature alone.

What slides are you referring to? Do you have a link?
 
Supertag said:
Or we realize that AMD isn't the only company on the planet that will be making 28nm parts, and Nvidia's 28nm parts should have absolutely no trouble matching a card using 250~ watts and only provides 20% more performance than a GTX 580.

Nvidia is so close to the 7970's performance that it actually could engage in a price war with the 28nm card if it decided to. Nvidia could easily lower the price of the 1.5GB GTX 580 to $400 to stop the bleeding for a few months. I have no idea if they are going to do this, obviously. The point is that the 7970's performance is so low that it can be nearly matched by a GTX 580.

Let's go back into time into 2009 and go for a hypothetical . Let's imagine that the 5870 barely beat the GTX 285 while using slightly less power and the 5850 lost to it at a fairly comfortable margin. Let's also imagine that this hypothetical 5870 was priced at $549, and this hypothetical 5850 was priced at $399. Do you think people would have been happy about the 58xx series in this hypothetical

Maybe this is all TSMC's fault. Maybe the 28nm process is abysmal, and this is the best AMD or Nvidia can do with it. If that is the case, then Nvidia's 28nm parts will be just as lame as this. The GK104 is rumored for release around March to May, so we should know in a couple of months.
Click to expand...

wishfull thinking as a 580 in stock form is nowhere NEAR close to the performance of the 7970 in stock form.
 
kac77 said:
I'm trying to figure out why 20% performance increases between models is OK for Nvidia (480 -> 580) and ok for Intel (Gulftown -> SB--- did it even increase 20% over previous?) But somehow this is just not acceptable for AMD to do. It seems like they are being graded at a much higher level than the rest here.
Click to expand...

That's just what happens when people love their products too much. They attempt to justify their own spending habits by degrading others' any possible way they can by talking as little sense as possible.

And 20% is too high for gulf>SB. It was probably a bit lower if you take into account overall performance and the price but it always is.
 
pelo said:
Overall. But the cards they sold 5 years ago don't count towards this year's earnings. They've shipped less cards than AMD for more than a year now?

Anyway, that's beside the point. The point was AMD offered cheap cards with incredible price-to-performance until they established themselves as equal or better and they even started shipping more than nvidia. Now that they've got their foot in the door they can actually make some $$ instead of breaking even.
Click to expand...

In Q1 and Q2 of this year NVIDIA had 59% of the market. They increased that by another 30% in the Q3 this year. Which would put them at something like 78% of the market.

http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases...in-board-shipments-decline-from-last-quarter/

http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases...up-16.7-over-last-quarter18.4-over-last-year/

Nvidia is exiting the integrated graphics segments and shifting focus to discrete GPUs. The company showed significant discrete market share gain (30% qtr-qtr)
Click to expand...
 
pelo said:
For a second, forget upgrading from a GTX580. If you had to pay $500 for a video card today and the 7970 and the GTX580 were available to you, which would you choose? If you're picking the one that's 15-25% worse and uses more power, produces more heat, runs hotter and has less overclocking headroom then you're doing it wrong.
Click to expand...

Look, the 7970 is CLEARLY a better GPU then the 580, it should be being a year later. If I didn't do 3D I'd be fairly interested in 3 7970s, I might get one to replace a 480 in my backup rig. And no, there's no reason to buy a today 580 at current prices. Those will HAVE to come down.

The 25% performance gain is solid over a 580 but it's a lot more complicated than that depending on what you do. For me it's 3D, sure I could gain some performance that I may or not notice but loose support for a feature what I do notice quite a lot.

I guess when you're spending $1600 on video cards, you just want something WOW is all. For some people coming from older cards and single monitors, they'll get a WOW for only $550.
 
Zarathustra[H];1038179592 said:
Yeah, but they also absolutely destroyed AMD's 5000 series boards.
Click to expand...

Huh? Nope. I provided the link for a reason you know. So that I wasn't just making stuff up.
 
PRIME1 said:
In Q1 and Q2 of this year NVIDIA had 59% of the market. They increased that by another 30% in the Q3 this year. Which would put them at something like 78% of the market.

http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases...in-board-shipments-decline-from-last-quarter/

http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases...up-16.7-over-last-quarter18.4-over-last-year/
Click to expand...

Again, that's total market share. See?
capture-614x250.jpg


They gained and sold more than Nvidia in the same time frame to make up more market share, which accounts for ALL discrete GPUs, not just sold in that specified time frame. The cards sold in 2011 AMD has a lead, which is how many they shipped for that calendar year:

jpr_q2_2011_gfx_mkt_553_revamped.png


I'm talking shipped this year ^^ and that's why their overall market (all GPUs, not just those sold in 2011) share in discrete graphics cards has been increasing. If you want to take Intel out of that then the AMD number is even more impressive. There's confusion where mobile comes into play, but you have to take into account that nvidia outsells AMD in the discrete laptop department. Think about it, if AMD's overall discrete GPU market share has increased during a year-to-year span then that means they've sold more cards than nvidia in that year, hence why they're overall market share has increased.
 
Last edited:
heatlesssun said:
I remember it well because I bought three 480s. But that's when I went to 3D Surround gaming so the 480s were the best option. If I hadn't been interested in 3D I would have gotten 3 5870s.
Click to expand...

So you went from 3 480's to 3 580's and you really are having a hard time wrapping your head around the sense of buying the 7970 over the previous generation?!?!
 
kac77 said:
Huh? Nope. I provided the link for a reason you know. So that I wasn't just making stuff up.
Click to expand...

Really?

The 480 beat the 5780 in almost every title, and when it came to titles in which tesselation could be turned up, it absolutely DESTROYED the 5870 in tesselation performance.
 
kac77 said:
So you went from 3 480's to 3 580's and you really are having a hard time wrapping your head around the sense of buying the 7970 over the previous generation?!?!
Click to expand...

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.
 
dook43 said:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=37TFTYDX

Pg 41, 42

I don't see 4960x1600, but the key word is Custom Resolutions. Flexible Bezel Management is already released, so you'd be able to run the 30" today at 1600x1200 and bezel manage them with a couple of 20"s.
Click to expand...

Looks interesting. They don't explicitly state the ability to run different resolutions or orientations on each monitor like you would need for PLP, but I'm hoping!

--Matt
 
pelo said:
Again, that's total market share. See?
Click to expand...

It says right at the top of the image you linked "this quarter market share". :rolleyes:

Your other image includes integrated graphics. I'm talking about video cards. Anyways it's getting offtopic.
 
Zarathustra[H];1038179628 said:
Really?

The 480 beat the 5780 in almost every title, and when it came to titles in which tesselation could be turned up, it absolutely DESTROYED the 5870 in tesselation performance.
Click to expand...

Yes it beat the 5870 but it didn't destroy it. As you said "almost every title" not all. That's not being "destroyed". If you did the math you'll find that the 480 had the same 20 - 30% performance delta that the 7970 has over the 580. This is why harping on the 20% increase in performance isn't making sense. In addition go ahead and go through the review at launch. The 480 didn't beat the 5870 across the board. This usually occurred in heavily tessellated games and was far from universal and then at what power load did all of that occur?
 
Last edited:
PRIME1 said:
It says right at the top of the image you linked "this quarter market share". :rolleyes:

Your other image includes integrated graphics. I'm talking about video cards. Anyways it's getting offtopic.
Click to expand...

market share includes all video cards and not just those sold that quarter. If you increase in market share from quarter to quarter that means you've sold more in that time span... I mean, they made up a 16% difference within a single year over the market share (again, all GPUs and not just those sold within that calendar year) and that's NOT including the Llano. That's incredibly impressive. The bad news there is that they made a profit in the thousands of dollars and operated in the red for a full calendar year before that in order to gain ground in the discrete GPU market share. It is off topic, but only a slight digression; AMD won't have much cheaper graphics cards than nvidia and I'd expect the prices to be far closer now than they were before because they've made up that ground and sold more in the past year +. Chances are that we'll have to pay a pretty penny if we want to upgrade from the high-end 5000 series, 500s, 6000s and even 400s to Keplers and 7xxx.
 
Last edited:
Zarathustra[H];1038179592 said:
Yeah, but they also absolutely destroyed AMD's 5000 series boards.
Click to expand...

Are you sure about that? If there was an advantage it was well within the 20% realm, which we all know from posters here today that this is not even close to "destroying" the competition, in fact they should have just given up and stopped making video cards for such a humiliating showing. The nerve of those guys..making hardware that outperforms the competition and then charging what the market will bear! I demand congress take action.

I've got a permanent facepalm mark on my head from today. I think AMD has made one kick ass video card here and it will only get better for them in the next few months with the derivatives. I'm hoping NV gets their 28nm parts out in short order so that the market is again competitive, we'll see then what happens to the prices of the 79xx boards.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top