Lottery winner?
We talked about Radeon HD 7970’s
architecture and performance, but there is one thing we have not mentioned –
price. This is the main fact of graphics card fight, and in the case of HD
7970, this can be the thing really burying it.
It can be the fastest simple graphics card
nowadays, but there are still very few reasons to justify for the price, except
from the fact that chip with 4.3 billion transistors, running on new production
process, will be more expensive to produce.
Besides, there is a question whether you
really need the performance level provided by HD 7970. Very few of us are
running a screen that can process the 2,560 x 1600 resolution, so in fact the
1,920 x 1,080 resolution is more feasible. At that resolution, the excellent
Nvidia GTX 580 with the price of $525 is the card you need.
We wonder how much the upcoming second
version of GPU is. Is it $1,050? It is a pity since if the card has a price
similar to the one at which AMD first aimed for HD 6970, it will be much better
welcomed.
However, there are some good points of HD
7970 that the prices cannot hide because they will be announced throughout the
Tahiti series. It is impressive ZeroCore Power technology. The ability to turn
off GPU almost completely at free mode is the design’s great mystery, and
increases double when you take into the CrossFire setting.
In CrossFire mode, all GPUs will be used
when you are playing game, but when you reduce to 2D desktop mode, except from
the main card attached to the screen, all GPUs will turn off, fans and all.
That is so impressive and means that when
you are using your own hot device in general computing tasks, you will not need
a separate Sellafield to provide power for it.
HD 7970 overclocking potentiality is not
very impressive, either. We reached big overclocking, which makes us wonder why
it is not ranged as the first 1GHz GPU at first. We got the answer from AMD’s
separate graphics card product management director, Zvika Greenstein, at a
recent new technology for Graphicss Core Next. ‘One of the things computer
addicts like to do with their cards is overclocking them. They pay much for
that. We can define the position of HD 7970 as the fastest graphics card of the
market at reference clock mode, so we think that we can also leave it for the
final user.’
In fact, AMD does not need to overclock
silicon because it will base on motherboard producers to do that. In contrast,
they will charge higher for the last users.
We also encountered some driver problems
with card. We could not have considerable performance data from HD 7970 in the
new Sandy Bridge E device, with the tests always behind GTX 580.
Therefore, it was too difficult for us to
introduce AMD Radeon HD 7970, especially when we know Nvidia’s counter-attach
is just some months away. According to internal information in Nvidia, the firm
is confident in the chance that the leading Kepler card will beat HD 7970
provided power by AMD Tahiti XT.
If Nvidia’s card is even more expensive
than HD 7970, this card may begin to look worth money. There is likely that the
card provided power by the second Tahiti will be the one we really want to
introduce. Unfortunately, HD 7970’s launch, due to undefined reasons, has been
delayed for one month. I am dounbful and want to say that AMD is trying to earn
as much money as possible from this card before the cheaper HD 7950
outdistances it.
So, it is another wait-to-see launch –
waiting for Nvidia Kepler and seeing how much HD 7950 is cheaper than this
expensive card.
Specs analysis
The test results show absolute game victory
for the new AMD card, with HD 7970 at top in all game tests. One of the
strongest impressions is the test scores of Heaven 2.5.
However, the two computing tests we used
did not really show improved computing power of the new architecture. But that
may be much related to the software which does not take advantage of silicon
effectively.
Nevertheless, GTX 580 outdistanced the new
AMD card consideraby in the test of HD H.264 GPU encoding although HD 7970
beated it in the Open CL-based GPU Caps Viewer test.
DirectX 11 tessellation performance
|
Heaven 2.5
|
Scores: the higher, the better
|
|
AMD HD 7970
|
28.3
|
|
Nvidia GTX 580
|
21.7
|
|
AMD HD 6970
|
17.2
|
DirectX 11 game performance
|
Arkham City
|
Frames speed/second: the higher, the
better
|
|
AMD HD 7970
|
49
|
|
Nvidia GTX 580
|
41
|
|
AMD HD 6970
|
36
|
DirectX 11 game performance
|
Crysis 2
|
Frames speed/second: the higher, the
better
|
|
AMD HD 7970
|
37
|
|
Nvidia GTX 580
|
30
|
|
AMD HD 6970
|
23
|
DirectX 11 game performance
|
DiRT 3
|
Frames speed/second: the higher, the
better
|
|
58
|
37
|
|
Nvidia GTX 580
|
50
|
|
AMD HD 6970
|
44
|
DirectX 11 game performance
|
Metro 2003
|
Frames speed/second: the higher, the
better
|
|
58
|
18
|
|
Nvidia GTX 580
|
15
|
|
AMD HD 6970
|
14
|
DirectX 10 game performance
|
JustCause 2
|
Frames speed/second: the higher, the
better
|
|
58
|
47
|
|
Nvidia GTX 580
|
36
|
|
AMD HD 6970
|
32
|
Open CL performance
|
Media Espresso
|
Seconds: the higher, the better
|
|
AMD HD 7970
|
51
|
|
Nvidia GTX 580
|
23
|
|
AMD HD 6970
|
69
|
PC Format’s verdict
It can be the fastest GPU simple card at
current, but its price is too high – we recommend waiting for its competitor.
