AMD Radeon HD 7800 Series Specs Revealed in Leak

[AppleBlowsDonkeyBalls]

[citation][nom]maxinexus[/nom]Performance wise 7870 will fall somewhere between 6950-6970 closer to 6950. It will not surpass 6970 at all that is where 6890 will take the place to fill the gap between 1792 and 1408 SPs and to replace 6970 The average performance difference between 7970 and 7950 is about ~15% and 7950 has ~12.5% less SPs...likewise 7870 has 31.2% less SPs than 7970 so one should expect performance somewhere in this range 31-37.5% less...Anyway 6950 has about 31% less SPs than 7970 and performance wise it is on average 35% slower. So let's look at the 6950 and 7870, same number of SPs, ROP'S, and TMUs. So we are looking at performance somewhere between 31-35% less than 7970 or 0-4% better than 6950.The price you pay for 1SPs for 7850 at $220 is $0.171The price you pay for 1SPs for 6950 at $250 is $0.177The price you pay for 1SPs for 6970 at $300 is $0.195The price you pay for 1SPs for 7870 at $300 is $0.213The price you pay for 1SPs for 7950 at $450 is $0.257The price you pay for 1SPs for 7970 at $550 is $0.268[/citation]'

Wrong. GCN has significantly higher IPC than VLIW4, and the difference from the HD 7950 and 7970 boils down mostly to clock speed and not compute units. Clock-for-clock, the HD 7970 is only 5% faster than the HD 7950.

GCN having higher IPC is why you see the 512 SP, 32 TU HD 7750 match the 800 SP, 40 SP HD 6770.

Given these specs, the HD 7850 will be slightly faster than the HD 6950 and the HD 7870 will be slightly faster than the HD 6970. Stop spreading misinformation due to your ignorance.

 

[unther]

Hopefully we'll be able to unlock these cards like the last generation with a bios flash.

 

[maxinexus]

I compare real time measurements...I focused on FPS in games like metro and skyrim on 1920x1080.
I knew that I have to be more specific...Yes the new generation has improved cores but my the results correlates with old cores within 98% you can keep 2 percent for your mama

 

[maxinexus]

"Ridiculous comparison. 7000 SPs do a lot more than 6000 series, plus there's other factors like the 7900 having a bigger bus."
Wolfram23 dude, anything above 256-bit bus shows an awesome performance boost. Whoowhoo.
Hope you know that this is sarcasm.
Anyway 6950 and 7870 have the same bus 256-bit 7950/7970 have 384 bit. Seems like you just ridiculed yourself.
Appleblows: You should take some medication and statics classes if you can't see a correlation between SPs and performance. The best part was that your conclusion and my was exactly the same. Congratulations.
Anyway, all just relax this was just a hypothetical correlation study of 7800s performance. The only thing that is not fine is pricing...or pricing is right but product names are misleading. Anyway, I'm keeping my CF 6950@6970 till Kepler is out and AMD will have to drop the prices...well maybe Nvidia will play the same game and 680 will go for $750 and 670 for $650...this way AMD can keep 7970 at $550 and 7950 at $450 than we are all scrd

 

[yourxianda]

Maxinexus please stop, seriously. You are going to confuse lots of comsumers.

 

[ananke]

maxinexus calculations are very true. In graphics performance is linear to the hardware resources, because of the parallel processing. At least this should be true within the same architectural family of processors. IF 7850 is $220 and lower and 7870 is $290 and lower, they are OK to buy in case you upgrade from 4*** series, or you are coming from a much lower pricing tier. Otherwise, for the same price level you get the same performance as the previous generation.

I would say I wait for Kepler to see price/performance/thermals. NVidia has better software libraries, and since the only great leap by AMD is the general computing, but without the broad software support yet, these cards are not attractive enough for replacement of older hardware.

 

[verbalizer]

love to play with the HD 7870 but I think the price is a tad too high.
all the prices of the HD 7 series has been too high.
same thing will happen with nVidia releases too.

I need to hit the lottery and then I wouldn't care...

 

[gm0n3y]

I'm liking the 7xxx series so far, the prices are a little high though. Hopefully Kepler will be compelling and kick the GPU wars into a higher gear.

 

[ismaeljrp]

[citation][nom]malmental[/nom]love to play with the HD 7870 but I think the price is a tad too high.all the prices of the HD 7 series has been too high.same thing will happen with nVidia releases too.I need to hit the lottery and then I wouldn't care...[/citation]

Dude, the Nvidia Kepler will force prices down.
Either DIRECTLY ( i.e. agressive prices for Kepler )
Or INDIRECTLY ( i.e. AMD will lower prices to appeal more than NVIDIA )

thats always the way the cookie crumbles. Just wait it out a few months, you'll see.

Also as the 6000 series is phased out, prices will go down to fill those gaps.

 

[ismaeljrp]

So mark my words this is how it will play out.

Best AMD cards From top to bottom ( 6xxx vs 7xxx )

7990
6990
7970
7950
7890
6970
7850
6870
6850

 

[ismaeljrp]

* forgot the 6950 which will be above 7850

6950 over 7850.

 

[airborne11b]

I agree that Physx is only a minor improvement in a very small number of games, so it's not really an Nvidia selling point, but Nvidia has a few things that are much better then ATI.

3D Vision 2, it's MUCH better in terms of brightness and ghosting compared to old 3D vision 1, and ATI's HD3D capabilities. So for 3D gaming there is only 1 choice atm: Nvidia.

CUDA

Driver support. Nvidia's early released beta drivers, and all around driver support is very much superior to ATI. I find that to get good results for ATI rigs I build for people, I end up having to use 3rd party drivers to get decent results. Frankly, I think it speaks poorly on a GPU company when 3rd individual programmers can out do a huge company like AMD/ATI in driver support for their own products.

Price/performace/power/heat - ATI and Nvidia are nearly neck and neck today when it comes to these areas. price points are never more then a few $ above or below the competition. Both Nvidia and ATI's mid-high end GPUs run nearly the same temps, using almost the same power. Arguing over a few degrees C on or a couple watts less power useage on a gaming GPU is about as dumb as fishing for a 43 cent coupon for a $1000 TV.

So in the end, ATI and Nvidia both offer decent products, but imo Nvidia is the clear winner with better 3D support, CUDA, and better driver support. Not everyone uses CUDA applications, and being happy with drivers could be subjective, but 3D support without a doubt superior in Nvidia's favor.

ATI needs to come out with a nice unique feature soon, or they'll end up like AMD CPUs, getting bulldozed by the competition.

 

[esrever]

GCN units are slightly faster than the vliw4 in the 69XXs. Can't really tell by how much yet but I would guess around 5-10%. The 7770 was being compared to the 67XX and 68XX which used vliw5 which was 20-30% slower than vliw4. The 7870 and 7850 should perform somewhere around the level of the 6970 and 6950 respectively with less heat and more OC headroom.

 

[Xlack]

Boss card, This will be my next upgrade from the Radeon HD 6970

 

[verbalizer]

Boss card, This will be my next upgrade from the Radeon HD 6970

you should just X-Fire your HD 6970...

 

[Xlack]

Oh tru? Ye maybe haha forgot about that! First I need to get unlimited Download with my ISP -.-

 

[alextheblue]

[citation][nom]__-_-_-__[/nom]7850 2Gb will definitely be my next gxf.[/citation]I'll be watching that one very closely too. Good power, good bandwidth, I'm willing to bet thermals and power will be great too. If they hit the market under $250 for the 2GB models, I'm sold.

 

[fuzzion]

Click like if you prefer Nvidia

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]unther[/nom]Hopefully we'll be able to unlock these cards like the last generation with a bios flash.[/citation]

Not a chance, AMD has already stopped that from happening with the most recent 6950s and such by using lasers to damage otherwise unlockable cores to stop BIOS flashing from upgrading the cards to better cards.[citation][nom]maxinexus[/nom]I compare real time measurements...I focused on FPS in games like metro and skyrim on 1920x1080.I knew that I have to be more specific...Yes the new generation has improved cores but my the results correlates with old cores within 98% you can keep 2 percent for your mama[/citation]

It has been shown time and time again that increasing SP count does NOT increase performance proportionally and most of the time it's not even close to being proportional. You can look at the difference between a 6950 and an unlocked 6950 or 6970 at the same clocks, the difference isn't too great there either. It's also worth mentioning that the performance increase from having larger numbers of SPs increases with higher resolutions and probably higher quality settings too, so at 1080p you won't notice as much of a difference between a 6950/6970 or 7950/7970 comparison as you would at 2560x1440 or 2560x1600 or an eyefinity setup. It is worth noting that the difference is obviously still pretty small, but it is there. Only testing at one resolution is not enough, that is part of why we have multiple resolutions tested in a review.

The performance difference between tessellation on/off is also slightly smaller on cards with more SPs than similar cards (For example, 6970 is about 72% compared to the 6950's 71%).

Besides all of that, SP count and clock rate are not the only major factors for performance in games. Memory bandwidth is also very important, and 7900 has a huge advantage over 6900 in bandwidth. The 7970 has a 50% increase in bandwidth over the 6970 and that will affect performance considerably.

Besides all of this, like the previous poster said, the 7750 beats the 6770 and the 6770 has about 56.3% more cores than the 6770, despite the fact that the 7750 has lower clock rates on both the memory and SPs than the 6770.

Besides that, the 7970 is right behind the 6990 and GTX 590 in performance, it's almost as fast as two 6950s. That's a lot more than a 35% difference. The 7970 is slightly faster than two 6870s in crossfire at stock and can be overclocked to be in line with the 6990 and GTX 590.

Why is it that increased SP count isn't helping much? I think that the answer is simply because of how many different factors there are in video card performance. The SP count really isn't the greatest factor, I think that the GPU clock frequency is. A video card has so many very different performance variables that it's probably even more complex than a CPU. We have ROPs, memory bandwidth, cores, core IPC, and GPU clock frequencies, just to name some of the most obvious.

I think that GCN cores are significantly more than 2% faster than VLIW5 and VLIW4 cores. The 7750 vs 6770 shows a huge difference between VLIW5 and GCN. As for the 7900/7800 vs. 6900? Well, it's a little more difficult to say unless we see a 7950/7970 underclocked to the GPU clock rate and memory bandwidth of a 6970.

If you have personally tested some of the GCN cards, why don't you try comparing one against a 6000 or 5000 card with a similar amount of shaders after you bring them to the same clock speed and memory bandwidth? Seems like a good way to find out who is right or wrong here.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]ananke[/nom]maxinexus calculations are very true. In graphics performance is linear to the hardware resources, because of the parallel processing. At least this should be true within the same architectural family of processors. IF 7850 is $220 and lower and 7870 is $290 and lower, they are OK to buy in case you upgrade from 4*** series, or you are coming from a much lower pricing tier. Otherwise, for the same price level you get the same performance as the previous generation.I would say I wait for Kepler to see price/performance/thermals. NVidia has better software libraries, and since the only great leap by AMD is the general computing, but without the broad software support yet, these cards are not attractive enough for replacement of older hardware.[/citation]

Performance increases from increased shader counts isn't really linear. Again, the 7970 has 14% more shaders than the 7950, yet at the same clock rates it performs only 5% better, AT BEST. That means that they get even closer. And since the two seem to both overclock equally high, the 7950 is a lot cheaper while providing almost the same performance. I dare say that 5% or lower is not a discernible difference for most people, so the 7970 is worthless to people whom overclock unless it actually does overclock better. I really doubt that it does.

You need large differences in shaders to have a good performance difference when cards are at the same clock frequencies and architecture.

Besides that, the 7850 is around a 6950 in performance. The 7870 will also be at least as good as the 6970. The 7890 will probably be faster than the 6970, but slower than the 7950. However, the 7850 might be a little below the 6950, the 7870 a little below the 6970, and the 7890 a little above it... Either way, the 7890 is definitely faster than the 6970. It probably has 1536 shaders too. so it might provide a perfect comparison to the 6970 to show the difference between GCN and VLIW4. The 7870 could be measured against the 6950 and the 7850 against the 6870. They all have similar shader counts, so lets see if anyone wants to show us the differences.

New video cards that have a similar name to the previous generation are NOT always similar in performance. The Radeon 7970 kills the 6970 so this is obviously true. The 4000 cards are kiled by their 5000 counterparts. This didn't happen with the 5000s and 6000s because AMD made some changes into the naming scheme relative to the previous generation. Even then, you are still wrong because several of the 5000 cards are faster than their 6000 counterparts, not the same. The only cards that are the same are rebranded cards like the 5770/6770 and no cards in the 7700/7800/7900 lineups are rebrands, only the 7600 and below lineups have rebrands in them.

AMD only improved significantly in GPGPU computation? Bull crap, the 7970 can be overclocked to perform better than the 6990, a roughly 100% increase over the 6970. Even if you have both at stock, the 7950/7970 cards are FAR faster than the 6950/6970 cards in gaming. That's a pretty big gaming improvement as I see it. AMD's computational improvements are not the only significant improvements. For the same price level, AMD has 7800 cards around the performance of 6800/6900, but that doesn't mean that 7900 didn't happen and show huge improvements over 6900. 7900 is an attractive improvement over 6900, the problem is that getting a second 6870, 6950, or 6970 would be cheaper and offer similar performance to buying and overclocking a 7950 or 7970. A 7800 card that is comparable to a 6900 card in performance might be more expensive, but if it is a small difference then the slight money saved from power usage over a few years and/or overclocking capacity will negate the difference.

The same is true about going from any generation to the next generation, it's cheaper to buy another previous generation card and SLI/Crossfire it with your current video card than it is to buy next generation cards. If I bought a 4870X2 for $450 or so back in 2008 or 2009, would it be better to buy a 7950 for a similar price now, or buy a second 4870X2 for under $200 instead?

 

[freezenow]

See block diagram of "Pitcairn":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21blC8R2N_4&list=UUpxSTtWe3Ojvr7EjDc0qScA&index=1&feature=plcp

This clip is uploaded 1 month ago. . .

 

[blazorthon]

I forgot to mention this in above last post, but thanks to the die shrink, the 7970 still only uses about the same amount of power as the 6970 and even has a slightly smaller die size than the 6970 too.

 

[blazorthon]

Thumb me down all anyone wants, but that won't change the die size and power usage. The 7970's Tahiti die is slightly smaller than the Cayman die. The 7970 also will still have a 250w TDP similar to the 6970's TDP regardless of how many thumb downs I get.

 

[Yadhu]

These cards are going to make history cause they are the worlds 1st GPU to be equipped with a 28nm processor

 

[jessterman21]

Is it just me, or is $350 for the HD 7870 a great price, especially considering what many reviewers have overclocked that card to?