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AMD's New Radeon HD 7950 Tested
MojoKid writes "When AMD announced the high-end Radeon HD 7970, a lower cost Radeon HD 7950 based on the same GPU was planned to arrive a few weeks later. The GPU, which is based on AMD's new architecture dubbed Graphics Core Next, is manufactured using TSMC's 28nm process and features a whopping 4.31 billion transistors. In its full configuration, found on the Radeon HD 7970, the Tahiti GPU sports 2,048 stream processors with 128 texture units and 32 ROPs. On the Radeon HD 7950, however, a few segments of the GPU have been disabled, resulting in a total of 1,792 active stream processors, with 112 texture units and 32 ROPs. The Radeon HD 7950 is also clocked somewhat lower at 800MHz, although AMD has claimed the cards are highly overclockable. Performance-wise, though the card isn't AMD's fastest, pricing is more palatable and the new card actually beats NVIDIA's high-end GeForce GTX 580 by just a hair."
What's the calculations per watt? Will I be able to put them in a crossfire frankenbox to make my fortune?
So when will there be cards affordable by normal people? Also for me the biggest thing to come out of the new design is that we should be able to get a passively cooled card with more performance than the HD5750.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
"a few segments of the GPU have been disabled"
As in, can be re-enabled with a custom BIOS or something?
Oh, a new cellphone? Welcome to 1986. Yawn.
But does it run Linux?
No, seriously... last time I tried to install Ubuntu with an ATI card (a few months ago), I couldn't get dual monitors to work correctly.
The restricted drivers exist, but are unstable, awkward and painful. Linux and Nvidia - a bit better in my experience..
When Nvidia puts out a $500 card, it's attractively priced.
When AMD puts out a faster card for 10% less, it draws complaints about the price from the same reviewer. What gives?
That's me 40 years ago, but you wouldn't know it today, eh? I was in high school, I was a football star. All the girls wanted to dance with me. And I had a Diamond Viper. It was the fastest on the block.
I have a low-end AMD card running 3 monitors right in front of me (Radeon HD 3450) . Must've been user error. ;)
I kid I kid... =P It was actually a huge PITA to set up 3 monitors, but before that I had been running two monitors very nicely for a very long time. It's incredibly easy in my opinion.
This is the card I used for the 3 monitors: http://www.jaton.com/VGA/graphics_card_detail.php?pid=138
...well, let's clear things up: I was always an AMD fan. Their CPUs rocked. I had a seriously great time overclocking my SS7 gear until it boiled.
The graphics cards sucked though. I'm talking about the old Radeon AGP cards. Put down your paddles, lads, 2006 was the last time I bought an ATI branded card (an X1800) and IMHO it sucked monkey balls. I couldn't even get it to perform at low resolution on Unreal 2002. That's why I went straight back to the store and swapped it for an NVidia 7600GT. Oh, yeah, life was sweet after that.
A couple weeks ago I bought a secondhand Sapphire HD3650 with 512MB DDR2. OK, it's a bloody old and very low spec card by tech standards, but it blows my GF 7600GT right out of the water - even on a slower, single core 64-bit processor running 32-bit platform. That made me a fan of ATI/AMD graphics right there. The old machine (Core Duo) with the NVidia is now collecting dust.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
(not the GP) You wouldn't like it. Seriously. Speaking truthfully, my senior year in high school (25 years ago) I -was- a football star at a large Texas school, and drove an older corvette with a big-block. I -also- was a grade-A, unadulterated, shallow, ass-blossom douchebag with absolutely no values worth speaking well of. It's an over-rated experience that set me back years growing up and becoming an actual person. If I had to do it over once again and given a choice, I'd rather lose an arm.
im on a 6950, it is clocked at 810 mhz, but it can do 910 mhz by just using the ati catalyst slider. no fancy stuff. if you go into serious overclocking, you can approach 1000 mhz easily, if you play with the voltages and stuff.
moreover, X950s are generally unlockable. for example i unlocked the 6950 im sitting on, unlocking 24-30 or so shaders, basically making it a 6950. i could also flash a 6970 bios and make it a full 6970, but that's totally unnecessary, since i can get more than that by overclocking.
a good deal.
Read radical news here
"Beats NVIDIA's high-end GeForce GTX 580 by just a hair."
You don't say. Must not have factored in Nvidia's history of selling and shipping GPUs that were known to be defective and then conspiring with the purchasers to hide this fact from the users until after their warranties ran out.
If they had, this new GPU would out perform Nvidia's by huge leaps and bounds.
6150 Go. Look it up.
In the interest of fairness, I'd also like to point out that the 580 still costs more than the faster 7950. And yet the reviewer still gripes.
You should probably still be cheering because that means the last gen stuff will drop like crazy! Hell the HD4850 I've got in here now retailed for $240 at release, know how much i paid for it a year and a half ago? $60. And frankly it still cranks out the purty on my 1600x900 monitor.
Of course that gets to the heart of the matter and why they are having to push 3D and GP-GPU and Eyefinity, simply because games don't keep up anymore. With the exception of a few games i call "benchmark bait" like Crysis frankly most of the games are console ports and all that extra power is sitting there twiddling its thumbs.
So while i'm hoping this will mean I'll find a steal on a 5850 or 6850 just because they crank out less heat honestly I doubt I really NEED it for any of the games i'm playing. What you'd actually use this card for except for winning benches and showing you have the biggest epeen is beyond me, is there even a game that would stress this bitch?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Try a flight simulator like DCS:Black Shark 2 or DCS:A-10C. They will work out any video card pretty hard. So while you may play first person shooters with 300 meter horizons that don't stress your card out, when you get up in the air and have a 20 km horizon your card will be working its guts out.
That's what happens though. Expect that the Xbox 3, PS4 will have something on par with a 7000 series Radeon or 600 series (not yet commercial) nvidia card, at which point, to keep up with a console you'll need something new ( I don't have any insider information here, but that would be consistent with the projected timelines and everything that has happened in the past).
That's how the market has worked for a long time. The consoles come in and converge performance parity to PC's by being sold at a loss for a while, then the price of parts drop, the PC moves on technology wise, but only a few titles that are really invested in the PC take advantage of it, eventually enough stuff comes out on the PC that makes the tech in consoles show its limitations (and this is where GPGPU comes in handy, for things like cloth and smoke it's much easier to do gpgpu than to do cell work) and then the console guys have to play catch up for a while.
Off the top of my head nothing jumps out at me that's mainstream that you just could not do on a console right now (performance wise). Some of the more complex strategy games, and obviously the controls for MMO's that kind of thing, but I could pretty easily spit out a demo on a 7000 series GPU that just plain could not be done on consoles, AMD actually has a professional quality demo, called "leo.mov" (which I seem to have lost the link for) that's about 400 mb that shows of stuff you can't do on a console but it's more of a marketing tool for the 7000 series than a great tech demo. The problem is, that wouldn't work on just about anything else on the market either.
Steams hardware survey is illustrative of the market. About 48% of gaming pc's have dual core, another 43% quad core, and then 'other' (which are probably going to be largely developers or people with rigs for something else that happen to also be used for gaming at 6 and 8 core, and the 5% of the market on single core are likely laptops or people with old and broken pcs). So we're a long ways off from the 'mainstream' PC market being way better than a console. Which is why all you get are console ports.
Well that and AMD nVIDIA and Intel have been working on more cores and not radically new tech lately. Sure, you could, for not a lot of money, easily get a card 4x the performance of your 4850 (a decent 6000 series) or better, but there's only so much visual fidelity to be added compared to being able to supply your little display vs a 2560x1600 (or triple monitor or the like).
With the plummeting prices on monitors(at least for those of us blessed enough to have undemanding taste for the finer details of color reproduction and perfectly uniform luminosity, I can't speak for the poor fellows who have to buy the good stuff), I am appreciating the increasing number of video outputs that some of AMD's newer cards offer. When you can get a 1920 x 1080 panel in the 21ish inch range for ~$120, more video outputs means more sweet, sweet, screen area without the hassle of accommodating multiple video cards or the substantial expense and lousy performance of specialty Matrox gear.
My graphical demands go about as far as Oblivion(mid 2006, nothing exciting) at 1920x1080, draw distances maxed; but the fact that I can buy enough monitors to cover central and peripheral vision, and a card to drive them, for what a single top-of-range card would cost, makes day to day computing very much more pleasant(on the minus side, it has utterly spoiled me for mobile computing, as I've become used to having a massive work area; but so it goes...)
really what is the point of this any more? 90+ % of your games are optimised for consoles first giving you at best a geforce8800GT, computer monitors are not getting any higher resolution and they still have not come up with a cooling system that doesnt clog with dust in a month!
nevermind the absolute shit drivers ati ships
I won't buy an ATI card until the Linux driver situation is fixed.
The last ATI card I bought was an HD5970 shortly after it was released. The card worked... fairly well... Performance on some games was pretty good but others were full of artifacts and/or crashed outright. Various driver releases alleviated some problems but not nearly all of them. Most problems required some "creative" solutions on my part to get my programs to work correctly. After finally getting fed up with the whole situation, I finally caved in and bought an NVidia card. Performance increased and I never had any problems with it. As long as both card companies stay roughly on par, I'll stick with NVidia.
There are console first person shooters, and then there are PC first person shooters.
Try running BF3 on high/ultra in high resolution. My reasonably overclocked GTX 560Ti can just barely handle high in 1080p, ultra utterly murders it with clear jerkiness present in many situations. On the other hand, it eats MW3 for breakfast in pretty much any resolution/quality I could throw at it. You don't need to crank out a "20 km horizon" to overload a modern card.
And frankly, if a game makes your card render 20km of ground in level of detail that actually affects it, of which you will literally see only a few hundred meters, it's doing it wrong. Badly wrong.
You want distance pal try Just cause II. You can climb on top of a mountain and....wow, the view is just stunning, with the snow whipping, and you can then jump and free fall alllllll the way through the different climate zones all the way down to the jungle floor. I actually tied a bike to the back of a 707, let the 707 pull me up to about 25,000 feet and then cut the line and did the wickedest free fall bike stunt you'd ever seen...played just fine on my HD4850 BTW.
Now as for the poster thinking the next consoles with be 7000 series? Sorry to burst your bubble but from reports they've already been in development for over a year, more likely a year and a half, so you are looking at a mid 5xxx series card MAX. See that is the problem, it takes such a long turnaround because these things are so complex now that there are probably 4 generations of GPU out by the time the thing hits the market. the ONLY reason it will look better initially is because of heavier optimization, with only one CPU and GPU to write for they optimize the hell out of it whereas I've noticed with PC games they tend to be of the "Meh we'll throw more cycles at it" mindset. Frankly if they did half the optimization on the PC they did on the consoles we'd have smoked the X360 a year after it came out.
In the end I can't complain TOO much about the consoles, after all they have helped to usher in what I call a "golden age" of PC gaming. Why is that? Simple because I can build a $550 PC for a customer that hooks right into his 1080P set and gives him sweet graphics and he'll be able to play for fricking years. Later on he can slap a $100 GPU upgrade and get even more years out of that same system. When i first started PC gaming you were damned lucky and had probably bought state of the art if you got a year and a half out of the system, then you had to chunk and start all over. The PC I'm typing this on cost $800 if you count the upgrades but the actual cost would be more like $600 since i was able to use the quad and motherboard in a new Xmas PC for my GF. This PC has 6 cores, 8Gb of RAM, 3Tb HDD, and an HD4850. When the price drops I can just swap that HD4850 for a new 5xxx or 6xxx and get another 2 or 3 years out of that GPU and frankly I'd be amazed if I need to build another PC for the rest of the decade as I don't see games hitting 6 cores for several years yet.
SO I say enjoy it, my kids have been gaming on HD4850s and Pentium Ds and just now am I needing to upgrade their systems, I'll slap them an AMD quad and 4Gb of RAM and they'll get another 2 years out of those HD4850s I paid a whole $60 for, just you watch. In the old days you were lucky if a card even lasted a year before there were games that wouldn't run, now a $100 card can play damned near everything without chugging. Good times friends, good times.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You mean the horrible digusting view because they locked off a certain view distance and applied a nauseating blur despite the fact my machine should decimate the graphics.
All in the name of consoles... 360 was crap before it came out.
I'm tired of having my experience dumbed down and made uglier than the previous generation of games all so they can pander to the idiots like you. Not just equal to the previous two generations, but actually worse. They are taking away options from the graphics screens, giving pc's the console texture packs.
Take any shooter or MMO with really large maps and corresponding memory requirements.
For instance, "All Points Bulletin" comes to mind. After a few minutes, it always brought my PC (AMD dual core, 2GByte RAM, NVidia 8600 GT) to its knees due to requiring 2GByte of memory or more for itself.
CPU and GPU seemed to have no problem, as the game ran fine until the memory limitation kicked in. So I guess the CPU and GPU in current-gen consoles might be able to handle the load as well. But memory-wise, they would run into problems even sooner.
C - the footgun of programming languages
So far, 3D acceleration is also significantly slower than in the closed sorce Catalyst driver. Some of that technology may also be owned by 3rd parties, but it is not as clear-cut as in the case of HDCP.
I suspect AMD's reasons for not releasing that stuff are part legal and part not wanting to give away the latest know-how.
But the latter seems a bit silly, as NVidia drivers already have the better reputation and probably the better code. AMDs advantage seems to be on the hardware side, with their chips cranking out more (theoretical) GFlops/watt.
C - the footgun of programming languages
when the the 5xxx series came out, i thought about the getting the 4xxx series at the discount. In looking at the IDLE POWER, the price difference (over a couple years expected life) made the 5xxx series cheaper
Having said that, the 5xxx series is when they started tackling the idle power issues a bit better.
Actually, when at altitude the horizon is far more than 20 km distant. Of course it is not rendered at the same level of detail as the close terrain, but the polygons etc for mountains, lakes etc do need to be processed as you can see them 50 nautical miles away from 50 thousand feet. Also remember that the rendering area goes as the square of the distance: double the range means four times the rendering area (yes, you often look behind you when in an aircraft - TrackIR is wonderful). Incidentally, what is probably causing your stuttering is not the processing power of your card, it is the amount of video memory. When textures need to be swapped between main memory and video memory you can see stuttering. Higher levels of anti-aliasing and an-isotropic filtering also gobble memory (in addition to the texture size/quality). GPUZ is a free tool that has graphs/plots that can help diagnose when you run out of video memory. My point still stands, even if the original poster doesn't need a more powerful card for his uses, some of is do.
Actually, what really matters to performance these days is the amount of video ram you have. It is good you are content with low-end graphics. Many of us are not (if you get the right game it is easy to tell the difference between a low end and high end performing PC gaming system).
5 years of GPU development hasn't been nearly enough; this thing still gets like 20 fps in Crysis.
Which APU platform is this a part of?
Again, if your game renders background the way you suggest it does, it does it TERRIBLY WRONG. I once again present the case study, battlefield 3. It often renders huge backgrounds without the catastrophically increasing impact on either video memory or GPU load (i.e. view from a plane looking over entire map vs view of a foot soldier looking at his spawn).
This is done using various LOD techniques and is called "optimization". Notably end result looks worlds better then any of the games you presented as examples.
I know my basement isn't that clean - I hardly sweep my office room; but clogging with dust in a month? Holy hell.
Karnal
lol. The maps in BF3 are *tiny*, just a few km by a few km. The backgrounds are merely animated 'sky domes'.
The equivalent sky dome in a flight simulation is much much more distant than that. nb: BF3 is a 'game', and doesn't cut the mustard in *simulation* terms (that's ok, it's not trying to be a sim, but let's call it what it is). Even Arma2, which is a vastly better in terms of simulation than BF3 of ground combat (which is ok, since Arma2 is a sim and BF3 is merely a game) is weak when it comes to aircraft, the maps are around 10 km by 10 km. In LockOn:Flaming Cliffs 2 the maps span the Black Sea from the Ukraine to Turkey. A game that handles several hundred kilometers in width and length, and it works on machines with as little as 0.5 GB memory, so the developers do know what they are doing in regard to this.
I know *exactly* what LOD is (having written graphics optimization algorithms like this myself, and are in the process of writing my own cross-platform flight simulator for commercial release). That still doesn't address my original response, some of us simply need more GPU horsepower and old cards don't have the memory or bandwidth to handle our needs. Even Battlefield 3 with textures on Ultra requires more than 1 GB of video memory or it will start stuttering after 15 minutes (swapping textures between RAM and VRAM) - I know, since my Radeon 5970 (2 GPU each with 1GB VRAM) does exactly this and I have profiled it with GPUZ. An older card simply can't cope at anti-aliased 1920x1080 ("1080p") or higher resolutions (which is a minimum for the majority of PC gamers these days), mostly because they have such little VRAM compared to newer cards.
No offence, but the way graphics are handled in most simulators nowadays is afterthought at best. And it shows. BF3 can produce a beautiful scenery for several kilometers, while utterly ugly (both aesthetically and graphically) simulator graphics in most modern simulators can eat almost as much of both GPU and memory and end result will look like something utterly horrible in comparison to BF3.
Has it ever occurred to you that most of graphics engine design is not about looking as realistic as possible, but about making the result as good as possible while cutting as many corners as possible? BF3, as you yourself admit, has been very successful in this endeavour.
Finally, 1080p as a "minimum" for PC users shows your utter ignorance in the subject. 1080p is a reasonable maximum at the moment, with less then 5% of users actually having a higher resolution (if you count its 16:10 big brother, 1920:1200 in the same category). Source: steam hardware survey.
Uhhh...I didn't say there wouldn't be ANY guys that could use this, I'd said there would be very little because frankly most are playing BF3 and not a hardcore FS. Have you LOOKED at the Steam hardware survey lately? I mean you may have triple 2500 resolution monitors but that just makes you 0.01 percent of the population. The biggest settings are 12x10, 16x9, and 16x10 last i checked, the majority were dual cores but quads were climbing while we 6 core players are still a tiny minority (which when you can get a full AMD 6 core barebone for $299 at tiger i have no idea why more don't jump on, but that's another story) and the VAST majority are on single cards in the $100-$150 range.
So while you might want to spend the bones on a card that fast because you have a niche case, just like those guys that buy triple 5xxx cards for bitcoin mining that doesn't change the fact its a niche case. Frankly at the resolutions the majority of gamers (myself included at 1600x900) are playing at even my $60 HD4850 can go high to max on most games and not stutter.
BTW if you are doing a commercial FS on your own do me a favor, could you add the armed version of the Loach chopper? you never see anybody do those cool fast and light choppers, always the big bitches that are complex as fuck like the Blackshark or Hind or Apache, but there is something to be said about a fast and light run and gun that's just plain fun. Oh and if you can have an arcade mode for those of us that don't have time to go to virtual flight school that would be nice, thanks.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
> No offence, but the way graphics are handled in most simulators nowadays is afterthought at best. And it shows.
No offense taken. You are wrong, however. Graphics are not an afterthought at all in sims (assuming you have actually used anything modern - oops that's right, your card can't handle them, which was my point). Go and check out the in-cockpit shadows on the A-10C or the Ka-50. BF3's cockpits are lame in comparison (they have nice textures but are essentially static). The soldiers, foliage and environment on BF3 is awesome, but it is still postage stamp sized.
> Has it ever occurred to you that most of graphics engine design is not about looking as realistic as possible, but about making the result as good as possible while cutting as many corners as possible? BF3, as you yourself admit, has been very successful in this endeavour.
Actually this has occurred to me. In case you didn't read my previous post, I'm not just talking about this stuff, I'm implementing it myself. Is this debate theory or practice for you?
> Finally, 1080p as a "minimum" for PC users shows your utter ignorance in the subject. 1080p is a reasonable maximum at the moment, with less then 5% of users actually having a higher resolution (if you count its 16:10 big brother, 1920:1200 in the same category). Source: steam hardware survey. :) ).
Fair call. I was going to use the words "hardcore gamers" but I thought it too wanky - so wanted to avoid it. Yes, there are a lot of laptop weenies out there. They are not a factor in my calculations. I care about the people who actually have decent hardware and want a decent experience (eg. the same strategy Apple uses: don't aim for the masses, cherry-pick the high value customers). Many of the people in my circle of gamers have multiple monitors, only a few have less than 1080p. This may not be representative of the gamer population as a whole, but is very representative of my segment (just as you could say that small VGA-like resolutions is typical of the handheld/phone market). We need the power of decent video cards to drive all those pixels (the 'fill rate' becomes even more important than the processing rate with multi-monitors). This was my original point. *You* may not need a decent graphics card, *joe iPad(tm)* doesn't need a decent graphics card, but there are some of *us* out there who do. Hear us roar (meow!
These are the circles I move in, here is someone talking about their setup:
http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?p=1390782#post1390782
It is good lots of people like BF3, it is a good game. However, the original argument was not a lame "Is BF3 the bestest game out there" debate but was an assertion that an old video card is good enough. I said that there are people out there (eg. myself and the other folks playing in my genre, as with the person listed above) for which video cards can't ever have enough power. I never said we were the majority of gamers, I simply said that we have needs that an old video card simply cannot meet - which mean I considered the original post about old video cards being good enough as bunk for some of us.
For your loach fix try Armed Assault II (btw, you'll need a decent video card for the post-processing effects and push visibility out to 10 km :) ). The DCS:Ka-50 is a light attack chopper with full realism (it is derived from a simulator delivered to the Russian Air Force to train their pilots). Oh, and check out IL-2 Cliffs of Dover sometime - the graphics and sim are fantastic, but again you need a good rig to run it well.