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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?
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?
...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.
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.
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.
Memory on consoles is a different baby completely than on PC. On a console you know exactly how quickly you can pull data in from the optical drive, and have a good idea about the hard drive. On the PC you figure most people have a couple of gigs of RAM, so you may as well use it, and you have no control over what else is using those resources on the system, so you're better to use RAM than to rely on disk access. You also have very different memory space requirements with the GPU (you might be mirroring your data between GPU and CPU memory, that sort of thing).
And yes, memory can matter a lot, that's usually textures. I always figured the easiest thing sony could have done to make the PS3 better was to swap the notebook hard drives for a desktop drive, and use the cost difference to put in 1 gig of memory rather than 512, which would have made developers have something they could point to as much easier to manage than the xbox.
But when you're actually developing on a console, you absolutely have to keep track of everything going into memory, and you are damn sure why it's there, but you also are 100% sure what every PS3 or Xbox2 will have for memory. On PC you have so much memory, and you might have been a nub and not set the right compiler options etc. but you just use the memory because it's there.
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.