AMD Radeon HD 7970 Pro Reviews

While we know not a lot people run triple-card video configurations, looking at the gameplay experiences between NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 3-Way SLI and AMD Radeon HD 7970 Tri-Fire CrossFireX sure gives us an interesting topic for discussion and surely brings some things to light when it comes to Red vs. Green. This is the ultimate build in terms of gaming performance, but the experiences between both couldn\'t be more different. There is an overall smoothness and consistency advantage to SLI that is superior to CrossFireX when gaming at high resolutions like 5760x1200. These types of configurations are mostly going to be used to push multiple displays and high resolutions. You would think that the advantage would go toward HD 7970 Tri-Fire since it has more VRAM and memory bandwidth. Indeed in some cases we saw where we could technically use higher settings with Tri-Fire. However, even in those circumstances SLI still felt smoother, and there wasn\'t a large noticeable visual quality difference. We do think GTX 680 3-Way SLI could still benefit from more VRAM, we were definitely seeing limitations of 2GB in some instances. In games that really matter, like BF3 Multiplayer GTX 680 3-Way SLI provided better performance, a smoother experience, and even higher in-game settings. We hear from sources that there are 4GB GTX 680 cards coming. These customized video cards are likely to be expensive, but these might just be the thing to truly make 3-Way SLI shine. A 3-Way SLI setup of three GTX 680 4GB video cards will have the room to push settings in all the games here were we discovered VRAM limitations. This will most certainly be the ultimate and superior setup compared to Radeon HD 7970 Tri-Fire when those are released.

Purchasing the very best graphics card today means choosing between the GeForce GTX 680 or Radeon HD 7970. Both cards provide excellent performance at a full-HD resolution; indeed, a strong case can be made for saying they're overkill for monitors with a native 1,920x1,080 resolution. 30in, 2,560x1,600-resolution monitors remain expensive, and while popular technology sites such as HEXUS use them for evaluating graphics cards, the real-world implications aren't clear cut. Of greater import, perhaps, is seeing how these monster GPUs perform when tasked with running three full-HD monitors for truly widescreen gaming. Knowing that a trio of said monitors costs about the same as either of these £400 cards and that it's easy to set both cards to push pixels to an effective 5,760x1,080-resolution display, our high-quality benchmarks show that the GeForce GTX 680 has the edge over the Radeon HD 7970. The results are a little surprising given how NVIDIA has engineered the card - one would assume a 256-bit memory bus, 2GB framebuffer and comparatively-low ROP throughput would cause it to stutter at such settings.

The Radeon HD 7970 has a lot of overclocking headroom. Also consider the fact that our Radeon HD 7970 is based on a stock heatsink and fan with a reference PCB, and we are experience overclocking potential such as this? Now consider the potential that exists when add-in-board partners build customized PCBs, customized power circuitry, customized components, customized BIOS, and custom heatsink and fan units. We might see even greater overclocking potential and performance to be had out of the Radeon HD 7970. This isn't the end of overclocking by any means with the Radeon HD 7970, this is just the beginning, and the beginning is already leaps and bounds better than the last generation.

AMD has created an extremely efficient video card with the Radeon HD 7970, which is not surprising given the history of video cards the last couple of generations. What is surprising is the performance advantage compared to a Radeon HD 6970 in the power envelope it is operating. The AMD Radeon HD 7970 is eloquence and efficiency in design. It is not cheap, at $549 it will set you back a decent amount of cash. At this price it is more expensive than a standard GeForce GTX 580, as well Radeon HD 6970. Thankfully, the performance justifies the price, by producing greater real-world gameplay experience advantages and large framerate improvements. Our only real concern right now is quantity and availability. We should see full retail on these video cards around January 9th, so there is going to be a bit of waiting. AMD has taken the performance crown back, and currently has the fastest single-GPU video card for PC gaming. We experienced dramatic improvements over the Radeon HD 6970, and consistent improvements over an overclocked GeForce GTX 580. In our experiences, it was the newest DX11 games that pushed Tessellation which received the most improvement. If future games use more Tessellation, we may see the Radeon HD 7970 separate itself in a greater degree from the Radeon HD 6970 and GeForce GTX 580.

The Radeon HD 7970 may be a gaming product, but today was just as much a launch for AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture as it was for their new single-GPU king. GCN is the biggest architecture overhaul for AMD since R600 in 2007, and it shows. AMD has laid out a clear plan to seriously break into the GPU computing market and GCN is the architecture that will take them there. This is their Fermi moment. At this point I’m not comfortable speaking about the compute performance of GCN in absolutes, but based on our limited testing with the 7970 it’s clear the potential is there. At times it’s competitive with the Fermi-based GTX 580 and at other times it’s quite a bit faster. In the hands of experienced developers and given enough time to learn the quirks of GCN, I believe GCN will prove itself. It’s much too early to tell if it will be able to withstand the eventual arrival of NVIDIA’s Kepler, but certainly this is the best shot AMD has ever had.

AMD has today announced its fastest-ever GPU in the form of the Radeon HD 7970 3GB, codenamed Tahiti. This new card brings considerably more power to bear than the previous-generation Radeon HD 6970 2GB, and an increase in performance is achieved through a wholly revamped architecture based on a cutting-edge 28nm process. Radeon HD 7970 is composed of a greater number of cores, texture-units, and memory bandwidth. These are allied to a leaner, cleaner architecture called Graphics Core Next (GCN). This approach moves away from the graphics-orientated VLIW architecture, as used on previous Radeons, and embraces an altogether different formula. AMD wants, and needs, future GPUs to excel at both gaming and general-purpose computing, and thus GCN is a logical move that stems from the way the graphics market has evolved. Radeon HD 7970 is a general-compute device that also chews through graphics code; the GPGPU consideration is paramount and not just a throwaway notion tacked on at the last minute.

Our look at the reference Radeon HD 7950 and HD 7970 cards shows there to be a 15 per cent gap in performance in favour of the range-topping GPU. But raise the HD 7950's clocks to the higher speeds of the 7970 and the gap melts away to around five percent, often a little less, depending upon gaming title. This type of analysis is sometimes moot because the second-rung GPU often has problems in running at the higher speeds of the very best card in the family, yet such is the frequency headroom of the HD 7950, ramping way, way past the 925MHz core and 5,500MHz clocks of the HD 7970, that overclocking it is wonderfully easy. Indeed, add a bit of voltage into the mix and it flies. So what have we really learnt from this exercise? The Radeon HD 7970 is still the better card for performance junkies; it offers a smidge more performance and is guaranteed to run at 925MHz/5,500MHz clocks without any fiddling from the end-user. However, if it was our money on the table and the choice was between a £350 HD 7950 or £440 HD 7970, knowing what we do, we'd go for the cheaper offering and push up the speeds ourselves. Heck, we'd even be saving some power, too.

Gamers looking for the fastest graphics card in the world can rest assured that, at least for a while, the Radeon HD 7970 is it. Our testing has shown that when you move beyond FPS averages and get picky about consistently smooth action via low frame latencies, the differences between the most expensive cards in the market, including the 7970 and the GeForce GTX 580, tend to shrink. What that means is you're not always likely to feel the difference between one card and the other while playing a game, even if the average frame rates look to be fairly far apart. One can't help but wonder, as a little green birdie pointed out to us, whether AMD's choice to dedicate lots of die space to compute-focused features while, say, staying with eight ROP partitions hasn't hampered the 7970's ability to take a larger lead in gaming performance. Still, the 7970 draws substantially less power than the GTX 580, and heck, we had to choose carefully and crank up the image quality in order to make sure our suite of current games would be clearly performance limited on these cards. The Radeon HD 7970 ticks all of the right boxes, too, from PCIe 3.0 to video encoding to DirectX 11.1 and so on. For the time being, it's clearly the finest single-GPU video card in the world, and as such, it's earned a TR Editor's Choice award.

Unlike the majority of GPU product launches over the last few years, this one isn’t a hard launch. AMD lifted the veil on the Radeon HD 7970 today to give you all a taste of what it has in store in the coming weeks. Those of you interested in buying one of these cards today won’t be able to. Products are shipping into the channel over the holiday season with expected availability on January 9, 2012. As for pricing, AMD has set the MSRP at $549—no small chunk of change for a single-GPU. We understand where AMD is coming from, however. The Radeon HD 7970 is decidedly faster than reference GeForce GTX 580 cards, which are currently selling for about $490 on up; so the new Radeon’s price premium is justified. If you do the math, that’s an approximate 12% price premium for 16%-31% better performance, more frame buffer memory, better power characteristics, Eyefinity support, and more advanced features. In comparison to the handful of custom 3GB GeForce GTX 580 cards, which hover around the $600 mark, the Radeon HD 7970 ends up looking like a relative bargain. If you can realistically say that about a high-end graphics card.

The Radeon HD 7970 is an impressive feat for AMD in terms of performance, and its fresh new architecture bodes well for future cards from the company. But unless you’re cavalier about dropping $549 on a graphics card just for bragging rights, you may want to wait a bit. After all, AMD is expected to roll out a whole bunch of more-affordable next-gen cards in the coming months. And Nvidia will, of course, have an answer to the Radeon HD 7970 at some point, as well, which should help bring the price of the Radeon HD 7970 (as well as the HD 7950) down a bit. Because as fast as the Radeon HD 7970 is, none of the 7900 Series' new features are must-haves—at least until we see what Windows 8 and DirectX 11.1 have to offer.

The ASUS Radeon 7970 3GB GDDR5 video card is based off the AMD reference design, but comes with GPU Tweak and a BIOS that is overclocking friendly!

The HD 7970 might not deliver the same bang for your buck proposition as AMD's previous generation flagship cards, but it has secured the performance crown for the time being. Based on the dozen games that we tested, the HD 7970 was 17% faster than the GeForce GTX 580 at 2560x1600 and just 14% slower than the GTX 590.

As the first 28nm GPU, the HD 7970 3GB was always going to be exciting; with such a significant step down in transistor size and subsequent increase in stream processors and clock speeds, the GPU was always going to have enormous performance potential. In Arma II at 2,560 x 1,600 with 4x AA it was an incredible 50 per cent faster than the GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB. This is a one-off result rather than a trend, but for the most part the HD 7970 2GB was still around 20 per cent faster than Nvidia's current single-GPU top dog, if only at ultra-high resolutions such as 2,560 x 1,600 with 4x AA. However, in comparison to its predecessor, the HD 6970 2GB, it's considerably quicker – in BF3 we saw an increase in speed of 40-50 per cent. Previously we’ve been happy with a 20 per cent jump in performance from one generation of GPUs to the next. Of course, the dual-GPU HD 6990 4GB and GTX 590 3GB cards are still the fastest. We never expected the HD 7970 3GB to surpass them, but it has certainly closed the gap, especially when overclocked. From our own experiences we fully expect board partners to release cards with GPU frequencies of 1GHz and up, with the pre-requisite price premium of course.

If you love fast graphics cards, you are simply going to be infatuated with the new Radeon HD 7970. For the first time in a couple of generations, AMD will have the fastest single-GPU solution on the market - at least until we see what NVIDIA is going to do later in the year. The Tahiti GPU offers more than enough horsepower to push past the year-old GTX 580 and take the performance crown and is able to do so using less power than NVIDIA's GeForce option as well. With performance and efficiency this impressive we can easily see the upcoming Southern Islands based Radeon 7800 and 7700 cards offering just as compelling a solution to the graphics market. Obviously we were hoping for a lower price on the Radeon HD 7970 - even if it isn't really justified based on today's market conditions. Yes yes, I know, you are getting better performance and twice the frame buffer of the GeForce GTX 580 (3GB vs 1.5GB), and for $50 that seems like a pretty reasonable offer for enthusiast gamers that want the best of the best.

Fantastic performance, although the sky-high price puts this out of reach for most

It may well be the fastest single-GPU card around, but the price is absolutely prohibitive. At £350 it would have been a hit, as it is we have no choice but to look elsewhere for a GPU recommendation.

AMD's new Radeon HD 7970 successfully introduces the company's new Graphics Core Next GPU architecture to the market. The move away from the VLIW shaders promises increased flexibility and higher performance, while still retaining compatibility with driver optimizations done for the VLIW architecture. In our testing we see AMD's new flagship cruise past NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580 with a healthy 15% performance margin averaged over all our benchmarks - at 2560x1600, making it the fastest single GPU graphics card in the world. 2560x1600, at least 1920x1200, should be your gaming resolution, otherwise the card won't be able to play out its full potential. With EyeFinity support for several monitors, the card could also power a triple monitor high-end gaming rig. Moving to an 28 nanometer GPU process brings a significant reduction in power consumption by itself. AMD has improved on this with several new technologies. Combined, this results in the highest performance per Watt result we have seen from any high-end card so far. With well below 200 W during typical gaming, the card's heat output is reduced as well. Even though AMD claims improvements in their heatsink design, the card is still fairly noisy during 3D gaming, not much quieter than NVIDIA's GTX 590, which is a dual GPU design that sucks twice as much power. In terms of overclocking we saw spectacular results for a new GPU architecture based on a new production process. We could increase the GPU frequency by over 15% and memory by 25% which results in the highest memory clock we have ever seen on a graphics card.

The AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB graphics card chews through DX11 game titles, overclocks like a beast and is very power efficient!

The Radeon HD 7970 proved to be the fastest single-GPU video card ever released. It was between 8% and 33% faster than the GeForce GTX 580 in most games we ran. The exceptions were Deus Ex: Human Revolution, where both video cards achieved the same performance level, and Far Cry 2, where the NVIDIA video card was 13% faster at 1920x1200, with both achieving the same performance level at 2560x1536. Using the video card for video encoding with Media Espresso 6.5, we saw the Radeon HD 7970 running 52% faster than the GeForce GTX 580, 59% faster than a Core i7-3960X CPU (which is the fastest desktop CPU available on the market today), and 124% faster than a Core i7-980X, making it a terrific video card for accelerating processing using the GPGPU technique.

For the time being AMD’s HD 7970 sits in a preeminent position within the GPU market and we’d highly recommend it to anyone looking for a high end graphics card. Its combination of extreme performance at every resolution, advanced features and a relatively low power signature make it one of the best products released in the last two years. There are however some nagging questions which mostly revolve around availability and final cost. Aside from the fact that we’re seeing yet another paper launch from AMD, supply of 28nm GPUs will be tight for the foreseeable future so we don’t have high expectations for the HD 7970’s initial availability once it actually hits the retail channel. And yet if the planets align and products are ready to buy at a fair price, AMD could very well have an insurmountable lead by the time the competition launches their answering salvo.

It's expensive, but this is easily the most powerful single-GPU graphics card we've seen

Loaded with features and new technologies, the AMD Radeon HD 7970 is the fastest single-GPU video card you can currently buy.