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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?
"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?
When Kepler comes out expect all these cards to significantly drop in price.
GCN was a huge cost on AMDs part, and Kepler will be a refinement of Fermi, so Nvidia will aggressively price the 600 series (especially since they won't launch for another 2 months) and make profit on them. And expect AMD to take a loss on the investment but not on the returns from fabrication on the 7900 series (assuming they fab the 7800 and lower cards on their old VLIW architecture like the roadmap from last years aid they would).
So when Kepler comes out, it will probably be aggressively priced, and AMD will drop prices to match. For now they are exclusively the only maker of "next gen" gpus after 2010s 500 and 6000 series, and Kepler is 2 months away, so AMD is milking it.
...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.