AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Review: Give Me Back That Crown!

[cangelini]

After watching its Radeon HD 7970 get outperformed first by Nvidia's GeForce GTX 680, and then its 670, AMD is striking back with higher clocks and a new driver that hits the afterburners in several games. But are the gains worth paying extra for?

AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Review: Give Me Back That Crown! : Read more

 

[esrever]

50 mhz boosts are kinda low imo

 

[Darkerson]

My only complaint with the "new" card is the price. Otherwise it looks like a nice card. Better than the original version, at any rate, not that the original was a bad card to begin with.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

Thanks for putting my name in teh review

now if only you could bold it :lol:

 

[wasabiman321]

Great I just ordered a gtx 670 ftw... Grrr I hope performance gets better for nvidia drivers too

 

[mayankleoboy1]

nice show AMD !

with Winzip that does not use GPU, VCE that slows down video encoding and a card that gives lower min FPS..... EPIC FAIL.
or before releasing your products, try to ensure S/W compatibility.

 

[hellfire24]

not trying to be a fanboy but "Still GTX 670 gives you best BANG FOR DA BUCK!"

 

[vmem]

[citation][nom]jrharbort[/nom]To me, increasing the memory speed was a pointless move. Nvidia realized that all of the bandwidth provided by GDDR5 and a 384bit bus is almost never utilized. The drop back to a 256bit bus on their GTX 680 allowed them to cut cost and power usage without causing a drop in performance. High end AMD cards see the most improvement from an increased core clock. Memory... Not so much.Then again, Nvidia pretty much cheated on this generation as well. Cutting out nearly 80% of the GPGPU logic, something Nvidia had been trying to market for YEARS, allowed then to even further drop production costs and power usage. AMD now has the lead in this market, but at the cost of higher power consumption and production cost.This quick fix by AMD will work for now, but they obviously need to rethink their future designs a bit.[/citation]

the issue is them rethinking their future designs scares me... Nvidia has started a HORRIBLE trend in the business that I hope to dear god AMD does not follow suite. True, Nvidia is able to produce more gaming performance for less, but this is pushing anyone who wants GPU compute to get an overpriced professional card. now before you say "well if you're making a living out of it, fork out the cash and go Quadro", let me remind you that a lot of innovators in various fields actually do use GPU compute to ultimately make progress (especially in academic sciences) to ultimately bring us better tech AND new directions in tech development... and I for one know a lot of government funded labs that can't afford to buy a stack of quadro cards

 

[andrewcarr]

So happy

 

[DataGrave]

Nvidia has started a HORRIBLE trend in the business that I hope to dear god AMD does not follow suite.

100% acknowledge

And for the gamers: take a look at the new UT4 engine! Without excellent GPGPU performace this will be a disaster for each graphics card. See you, Nvidia.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]mayankleoboy1[/nom]Thanks for putting my name in teh review now if only you could bold it[/citation]
;-)
Excellent tip. Told you I'd look into it!

 

[scrumworks]

When do you actually start using new games for benchmark? Let me give you a hint, WoW is not a new game and neither it's performance is any meaningful, because it's badly coded and looking a game and graphics are lousy Quake 2 level. See it yourself what kind of game they are testing here: http://tinyurl.com/dxarebj

 

[esrever]

could you do power consumption with a game instead of 3dmark? it seems these cards uses much less power durring gaming and 3dmark doesn't give a realistic showing. Maybe have both graphs would be nice so you know the maximal as well as the general gaming power use.

 

[DataGrave]

Maybe have both graphs would be nice so you know the maximal as well as the general gaming power use.

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[EzioAs]

AMD's Driver team really deserve praise this time. Kudos AMD!

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]scrumworks[/nom]When do you actually start using new games for benchmark? Let me give you a hint, WoW is not a new game and neither it's performance is any meaningful, because it's badly coded and looking a game and graphics are lousy Quake 2 level. See it yourself what kind of game they are testing here: http://tinyurl.com/dxarebj[/citation]
WoW is meaningful, actually.
New games will make it in when vendors start giving us more than two or three days to retest all of their graphics cards

 

[vrumor]

recon you are about as big of a fanboy of nvidia as people who are disliking your comment are of AMD. So before ya spout off about fanboi'ism, look in the mirror bud. I have a 7970 and until I read this I would tell people all day to get a 670. So I guess it holds true, truth hurts huh?

 

[sarinaide]

Very nice work, basically upping the way lower than Nvidia clocks to restore parity in performance. Obviously the buffed up speeds will increase the load power but the idle power and low state draws still are industry leading. A very good update.

 

[masterjaw]

Either way, this will be good for the competition and for us consumers.

And here's me, hoping that this kind of competition landscape would still be present in the enthusiast CPU market.

 

[xtreme5]

what????????? AMD over the GTX 680 no no, it's not possible noooooooooooooooooooooooo....

 

[sarinaide]

[citation][nom]recon-uk[/nom]Meh at best.[/citation]


I really hope this is trolling, rather than a calous endeavor to discredit a competitors product.

 

[EzioAs]

Btw Chris, does the new driver show significant performance increase in crossfire over previous one? Could you look up on that please?

 

[ta152h]

I don't know why AMD's driver team deserves praise. Their poor coding ability made the 7970 under-perform for six months. Obviously they were not as ready for the hardware as NVIDIA's folks were, and missed by a lot. That's not a good thing. Finally getting it right is good, but let's not forget the other part of it.

 

[stanistheman]

Hey nvidia fan boys? you feel like crying? you should cause your So called "Fastest gpu" the gtx 680 is no more ITS THE 7970 GHZ. even the 7950 beat the 680 is skyrim Go cry nvidia fan boys. its time for the 7970 to shows its better. 3gb vram? 384bit? less heat then 680? yes please. here i come 7970.

 

[stanistheman]

nice work amd