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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.
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.
Read radical news here
Hush. Those idiots finance the advance of technology.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
Says the idiot that only uses a PC for gaming.
Adobe After Effects will use the GPU for rendering and image processing.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Nope. Bang for buck this new card kicks the butt hard of the Workstation cards.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
The problem is that speed is only one part of the equation. that 8800GT only supports DX10.0. DX10.1 games may run, but you'll find them crashing after awhile unless the developer was very careful (they were not). DX11 games won't work at all.
You're much better off with a modern card that just has fewer execution units if you want to save money. They won't be out right away (the first release is always near the top end), but they will eventually show up. Since you're worried about saving money/power, you don't want to be an early adopter anyway. Oftentimes the very first releases will have worse power/performance ratios than the respins of the same board a few months down the road.
I read the internet for the articles.
Depends on the type of processing. GTX and Radeon cards artificially limit their double-precision performance to 1/4 of their capabilities, to protect the high-margin workstation SKUs. If all you're doing is single-precision math, you're fine with a gaming card.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Ray Tracing!!!
We're also capped right now because of too many single-threaded game engines. A given thread can only push so many objects to the GPU at a time. Civ5 and BF3, being the first games to make use of deferred shading and other DX11 multi-threading abilities, can have lots of objects on the screen with decent FPS.
The biggest issue I have with nearly all of my games is my ATI6950 is at 20%-60% load and only getting sub 60fps, while my CPU has one core pegged. My FPS isn't CPU limited, it's thread limited.
Because it was a question that people other than just me were curious about?
Did you read the entire post? Or did your head just explode when seeing "Linux" in a gaming thread?
nVidia already spends time on quality Linux graphics drivers. They run fine on both 32-bit and native 64-bit Linux systems. I was wondering if the AMD/ATI stuff had matured as well is all.
Take a valium and go back to getting your ass n00bed by 10-year-olds on BF or MW.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.