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AMD Radeon HD 7970 Launched, Fastest GPU Tested
MojoKid writes "Rumors of AMD's Southern Island family of graphics processors have circulated for some time, though today AMD is officially announcing their latest flagship single-GPU graphics card, the Radeon HD 7970. AMD's new Tahiti GPU is outfitted with 2,048 stream processors with a 925MHz engine clock, featuring AMD's Graphics Core Next architecture, paired to 3GB of GDDR5 memory connected over a 384-bit wide memory bus. And yes, it's crazy fast as you'd expect and supports DX11.1 rendering. In the benchmarks, the new Radeon HD 7970 bests NVIDIA's fastest single GPU GeForce GTX 580 card by a comfortable margin of 15 — 20 percent and can even approach some dual GPU configurations in certain tests." PC Perspective has a similarly positive writeup. There are people who will pay $549 for a video card, and others who are just glad that the technology drags along the low-end offerings, too.
...if most PC games weren't just shitty console ports these days. If you spend over $150 on a graphics card you're an idiot.
I rebuild my machines every two years. My previous rig couldn't do Crysis as max settings so my latest system has dual 5870's that I got for $400 a piece. I'll never splurge like that on video cards again. Then again, 2 years later, I still max out the sliders on every game I get. It's great to have that kind of computing power... but maybe I should have waited 6 months? Those cards are going for $150 today.
Due to console gaming retarding pcs.
im on single radeon 6950 (unlocked to 6970 by bios flash), and i am doing 5040x1050 res (3 monitor eyefinity) on swtor (the old republic), all settings full, and with 30-40 fps on average, and 25 fps+ on coruscant (coruscant is waaaaaaay too big).
same for skyrim. i even have extra graphics mods on skyrim, fxaa injector etc (injected bloom into game) this that.
so, top gpu of the existing generation (before any idiot jumps in to talk about 6990 being the top offering from ati ill let you know that 6990 is 2 6970s in crossfire, and 6950 gpu is just 6970 gpu with 38 or so shaders locked down via bios and underclocked - ALL are the same chip), is not only able to play the newest graphics-heavy games in max settings BUT also do it on 3 monitor eyefinity resolution.
one word. consoles. optional word : retarding.
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This is good news for many who are looking for bargain Video Cards. I recently purchased a GT240 on Newegg for $40 which performs as well as a Geforce 8800 sold for $600 a few years ago.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
and others who are just glad that the technology drags along the low-end offerings, too
Has the advance of high-end NV and AMD GPUs dragged along the Intel IGP in any way, shape, or form?
Yes yes.. Rendering yada yada. How many Mhash/s does it average when bitcoin mining? And what is the Mhash/Joule ratio?
What is the state of Linux drivers for AMD graphics cards? I haven't checked in a few years, since the closed-source nVidia ones provide for excellent 3D performance and I'm happy with that.
But, I'm in the market for a new graphics card and wonder if I can look at AMD/ATI again.
No, I'm not willing to install Windows for the one or two games I play. For something like Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, (modified Quake 3 engine), how does AMD stack up on Linux?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
..keeping you nice and warm in the winter?
The only difficulty I have had with my 5870 was during the first week that Rage was out. It was a terrible mess. Once the drivers and game were patched, everything worked fine. I have never had issues with any Indie games though. "Compatibility" is typically measured in the number of patches made to the drivers to work around the various developers' interpretations of OpenGL or DirectX.
Well .. PC Perspective had to benchmark this card with some sort of drivers... Guess what; those probably were written by AMD personell. It's already faster than the competitors offering. If it had any major defects they surely would have mentioned it in the article. So if that's total garbage, it can only improve, no? :P
I'm not that afraid the cards will be usable only as badly designed space heaters. Because apparently that's something they do badly... having a similar thermal envelope as the previous gen cards. The developers of high power PSUs will be the least pleased with this new product
Why card manufacturers utilize (rightfully) new manufacture processes (28nm transistors) only to push higher performances?
Why the hell don't they re-issue a, say, 8800GT with the newer technology, getting a fraction of the original power consumption and heat dissipation?
*That* would be a card I'd buy in a snap.
Until then, I'm happy with my faithful 2006's card.
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
But can it run Unity on two screens without lag? I suspect that whatever video card I buy, the modern Linux dualhead display will feel slower than it did in 2005 :-/
Which version are you having trouble with? Are you sure that you're not just mindlessly repeating a 7 year old meme? Are you also one of the people who switched to Chrome because "Firefox uses too much memory" when simple tests show that Chrome uses more? I know it feels like you're a part of the club when you repeat what you hear from the other club members. But don't confuse groupthink with truth - especially when it comes to the quickly-changing world of tech.
because, there is at least ONE research that shows human physiology and senses are able to perceive differences in frame rates above 24 fps as smooth ?
no. the question is rhetorical. there isnt one single research that shows humans are able to perceive a difference in between 40 fps and 60 fps. its total bullshit.
hdmi specification requires 24 fps. not 60 fps. because, 24 fps is scientifically backed, whereas the only thing backing 'i can perceive 60 fps' is the self-propagated bullshit from gamers. nothing else.
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When I brought home my R690M-chipset-based netbook ATI had already abandoned the X1250 graphics in it and dropped them from fglrx (assuming they were ever in there) and they apparently haven't given the folks making the ati driver enough information to support it properly despite their claimed commitment to open source (IME intel has made good on this in more cases than AMD) so it craps all over my system if I try to run Linux, even with RenderAccel disabled.
ATI Rage Pro stuff is the only ATI stuff that seems to work flawlessly under Linux for me... but how old is that? And how bad were the windows drivers for those cards when they were new?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm speaking as a technician that works in a shop that uses almost exclusively ATI cards and having experienced many many problems caused DIRECTLY by shitty ATI drivers.
I got here through a series of tubes
Ironically, when I started reading people's comments, my driver failed and had to be reloaded in Windows 7 for my year old NVidia card.
//TODO: create a signature
Yeah, but you know very well that the policies back then (many years ago) don't apply to ATI practices with new hardware, which is what this article is about. For starters, it's a different company now. Also, their relationship with the OSS community has changed a lot. Maybe they're not going back and fixing 7 year old problems, but that doesn't mean that their new stuff has the same problems. I'm not saying that everything is peachy now with the drivers, but I'm saying that I see too many people base their conclusions on what they know to be outdated reasons.
Those freezes are probably the driver crashing and resetting itself. It used to be that a driver crash brought down your whole system, but now they can do it in the background silently and all you'll notice is some stuttering (or a short freeze).
I suspect that ATI and nVidia have been able to use the silent-restart feature to sell more defective cards. If your system totally locks up every half hour when playing a game, you're going to return the card. If it freezes but then resumes silently you may be annoyed but not pin the blame on the card, and not be annoyed enough to actually take action. It could be the disk, motherboard, or something else too, you don't get an indication that it was a video card problem. The very first revisions of this feature used to pop up a box telling you what happened, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
I read the internet for the articles.
Read below before you start going all fan boy. I routinely have problems with that shitty catalyst software on a wide numbers of computers in the shop I work. It's experience talking. So I guess you could count your trolling as unsuccessful.
I got here through a series of tubes
How is this modded as insightful?
What have Linux driver to do with this card? How are Linux users in any way the target market for a high end enthusiast GAMING graphics card?
Perhaps once you can purchase BF3 or the like for Linux, then ATI and NV will spend more time writing drivers for Linux.
I cannot imagine that anything more than an older HD48xx series will help you in any way.
its THAT obvious, THAT well known, THAT common, THAT normal, and yet among the approximately 6 people who called me 'idiot' in this thread after i asked them where was any research that showed people can perceive 30, 40 and 60 fps, have yet to still bring ONE research.
oh, one of them linked to a random website/blog that says the same thing, from some dude's mouth tho. thats what they understand from 'research'.
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I had a similar problem with my nvidia 7600gt, where I would get lock ups every 10 minutes or whatever in most games, which was apparently caused by a hardware bug. There were also green dots and lines that would appear on the screen. Like they would start as dots and turn into lines if i scrolled down a web page for example.. So this type of shit isn't limited to ati/amd.
I'd recommend using OCCT to run a stability test on the card, and also note the temperatures and system voltages it hits when fully loaded.
What you're describing could also be an overheating issue or a power supply shortage. If the temperatures are approaching boiling, that's a problem. If the voltage drops significantly when your CPU and GPU scale up, that's also a bad sign.
Alternatively, yeah it could be crummy drivers.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Where are the other review links?
http://www.overclockers.com/amd-radeon-hd-7970-graphics-card-review/
http://www.madshrimps.be/articles/article/1000250/#axzz1hFPj6oTt
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7970/
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/49646-amd-radeon-hd-7970-3gb-review-25.html
Overclockers
Well nvidia just released a new beta driver the other day it seems to be stable and I haven't had a TDR since yesterday with it.
Win7/vista 32
Win7/vista 64
XP
XP 64 server and 2003 64 server
The TDR problem has been on going with the 280 release and all that the 275.33's were the last stable release, it looks like the 290's are finally stable. Only took them 6mo.
Om, nomnomnom...
Which version are you having trouble with? Are you sure that you're not just mindlessly repeating a 7 year old meme? Are you also one of the people who switched to Chrome because "Firefox uses too much memory" when simple tests show that Chrome uses more? I know it feels like you're a part of the club when you repeat what you hear from the other club members. But don't confuse groupthink with truth - especially when it comes to the quickly-changing world of tech.
Well there's been a few version changes in firefox since this time but at my last job 6 or so months ago I had to run chrome because the employer-issued laptop simply couldn't run firefox or couldn't anything *besides* firefox... Chrome on the other hand ran perfectly on this pathetic laptop. So chrome is taking up less of something. If not memory than...something else? All I know is on a laptop with very limited resources Chrome ran great and FF ran crap.
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
there is no difference in between 25 fps, or 30 fps or 40 fps to the human eye playing a game. other than the counter fraps shows. there wasnt any difference in between these with respect to human physiology and eye-brain connections either.
Cite?
Did you actually read that thesis? The author defined his methods and subjects well, and created test situations with clear, measurable metrics in addition to just user perception. He then shows the data he got and you can do your own conclusions. I cannot understand, how that paper would somehow not count as research.
You see, the point of science is not to about WHO did something and what were their credentials. That's the whole point. Only truth matters, and how you approach it. Not only did the author of said thesis postulate something, he actually tested it by meticulous experiment and proved his case. This is what SCIENCE is.
After reading that paper, if you disagree, you really have to have something to show for it. Either do your own study or present us with a critique of the paper, because that undergrads just completely destroyed your position.
What's the Bitcoin Mhash/sec?
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
My high-end hardware doesn't run it right, and my hardware is better than yours and more expensive than yours.
Likewise, ioDoom3 will be coming out soon with integrations from Doom3_Voodoo2 Patch and FastVoodoo so that you can see how shitty an engine truly is when all it's eye-candy are shutoff so that the Owner/player can experience the engine with the logical controls and quicker primitives. Whatever it takes to win is what proves how non-efficient an engine truly is, and Crysis is worse than Doom3.
I like the prospect of turning off the graphics card. I could use a KVM to switch to built in graphics. It's a shame they didn't actually put a low end chip with built in memory that could run on a couple watts. Seems short sighted to me.
Yeah, but you know very well that the policies back then (many years ago)
No, less than two years ago. AMD is the same company it was then, since that's post-merger. You're full of shit, and you don't know what you're talking about, and if you had looked the chipset I was talking about up with WIkipedia you would know that this was depressingly recent. You may comment again when you have done the requisite homework. Or, you know, when you stop working for AMD, you astroturfing tool.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
bitcoin comments gone?
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
From what I have heard, the crashes come from the card clocking the memory speed up and down. This also can cause corruption and flicking on the screen when it happens too. The 'solution' is to go into AMD's overdrive utility and fix the memory clock to some value. I don't know what this does to the power consumption, and in some cases it doesn't seem to help either.
I must say I don't really care for either ATI's or nVidia's products, but when your only other option is Intel's integrated graphics you've got to pick on.