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AMD Radeon HD 7970 Launched, Fastest GPU Tested

Posted by timothy on from the that's-rent-in-some-towns dept.

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.

5 of 281 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This would be really cool... by Hatta · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hush. Those idiots finance the advance of technology.

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  2. Bitcoin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yes yes.. Rendering yada yada. How many Mhash/s does it average when bitcoin mining? And what is the Mhash/Joule ratio?

  3. Linux Driver State? by chill · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

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    Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
  4. Re:This would be really cool... by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Says the idiot that only uses a PC for gaming.

    Adobe After Effects will use the GPU for rendering and image processing.

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  5. Re:I don't get it. by chill · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.