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AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition: Taking Back the Crown
An anonymous reader writes "The benchmarks are in for the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. Starting at $500, AMD's new single-GPU flagship boosts the original 7970's clock speed from 925 MHz to 1 GHz (1050 MHz with Boost). The GHz Edition also sports 3 GB of faster 1500 MHz GDDR5 memory, pushing 288 GB/s as opposed to 264 GB/s. While the AMD reference board runs hot and loud, retail boards will use different cooling solutions. A simple test of aftermarket GPU coolers shows that any other option will shave degrees and slash decibels. But it's the Catalyst 12.7 beta driver that really steals the show for AMD, pushing FPS scores into overdrive. With the new Catalyst, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 670 can no longer beat the original Radeon HD 7970, and the GHz Edition outmaneuvers the GeForce GTX 680 in most cases. However, when factoring price and possible overclocking into the equation, the original Radeon HD 7970 and GeForce GTX 670 remain the high-end graphics cards to beat."
Where's my X2 edition?
I am John Hurt.
So, are ATI* cards competitive** again, or is this simply reframing the debate in their favor? I don't really have any idea.
** Please don't talk to me about AMD, they suck and the graphics division is still basically independent.
** Both in terms of top performance, and cost for given performance levels.
Now, I'm an ATI man who's been using TV out since 1995, non-stop. But I'm not willing to throw them so much money, especially when I have to change my entire operating system to accommodate their abandonment of "old" OSes like XP. Man, that jump to 64bit required updating so many scripts, and replacing so many utilities. Don't force change on me and I might give you more money, ATI.
I like stories.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
All of my expensive fancy video cards have died, usually right after any kind of warranty and I'm squeeking by on some horribly low res, limited palette and no hardware acceleration for graphics. But at least it's reliable!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
They need to add a benchmark for BirCoin, since it makes a lot of the market of high end graphic card buyers, and AMD is way faster per Whatt than Nvidia.
Regardless Torvalds recently getting his feathers ruffled with Nvidia.... In most cases Nvidia just works on Linux. I swore off AMD/ATI loooong back because JUST about time they finally get a decent proprietary linux driver support for one of their chipsets, it drops off the back side of support. I DESPISE forced upgrades and won't get caught in that trap again. All of our perfectly working AMD video laptops still work great but no proprietary driver support and the open source driver is waaaay worse. Nvidia proprietary drivers still support VERY old chipsets.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
This cycle, the latest nvidia GPUs have a lot going for them. The Kepler series really is impressive, and generally has much lower power consumption than the AMD parts. (This was flipped last gen funny enough. Those first fermi cards were heat machines)
I picked up a factory OC'd version of the 670 and It's shocking how fast it is. (And how quiet and cool it is) Remember that moment your system became good enough to run Oblivion at fully maxed settings with really high framerates? Or morrowind? Yeah, that just happened with Skyrim.
Seriously, I can't even directly compare Radeon to GeForce cards because they're functionally crippled due to the fact that game developers are ignoring them in Windows and the binary driver is completely borked in Linux so no kudos THERE either. Then there is that issue that every single time I buy one of these cards they spontaneously flame-out. Speed isn't everything and they've been stomped in the drivers and support by NVidia for years. Radeon's all fail to render graphics properly even to this day and it is especially noticeable in side-by-side comparisons. They have some nerve charging $500 for what is likely as much a piece of turd as the rest of their offerings.
I have an ancient x1650 card with a Q6600 cpu running windows 7 and 1080p video uses minimal cpu. Your card is not the bottleneck. I'd like a newer card but when you look at the numbers the lowest end Fermi card is still slower than the old 9800GT series.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Comment removed based on user account deletion
WHY DON't you GO fuck YOUSELF, Steve.
... will work just fine in my Apple Mac Pro! Oh wait.....
Seriously, this is the kind of boost Apple *should* have been after, since they're now stretching out the upgrade of the Mac Pro until some time in 2013..... They could at least update OS X with an incremental release and start offering this card for the now 2 year old Mac Pro they did a slight CPU speed bump to and called "updated", so there'd be SOME sane reason for people to order one.
My GOD, I could run a Matrix in that!
OMG, does this mean I can now run Crysis at 80fps instead of 75? F**k me sideways with a spastic badger, my life is now complete.
Why does anyone care that the two major card makers are still in their dick-waving war? Is it just to keep the review sites in business? Hey, look, another new top-of-the-range GFX card, not totally dis-similar to the one we reviewed last month, only we got it for free, and you'll have to part with some serious wedge if you want to have the same toys as the cool kids!
There have been no real, serious differences between any of the last dozen iterations of hardware. Anything made in the last couple of years should run any game on the market at full shiniez at decent resolution. It won't, sadly, make the gameplay any better.
But how many bitcoin hashes per second can it do???
Because some of us want to see what it's like to play a game with maximum bling enabled?
My machine still chokes on Alice: Madness Returns, and that's with a 6970.
I am John Hurt.
Considering that a 680 outclasses the living hell out of a 280, to the point where a 680 is able to turn up graphics higher than a pair of 280's in SLI, your blanket comparison (involving anything, including stuff down at the 640 level, which is still significantly weaker than a single 280) seems unfounded.
Why would the "reference board [run] hot and loud" ? AMD has the engineers to develop this stunning achievement, but not the engineers or the time or money to indicate a recommended cooling solution?
You are fucking something up, most likely your cooling or power. Or I suppose you could just be really unlucky. Regardless, just get a card that has a lifetime warranty. eVGA will sell you one.
Not buying ultra high end cards because they cost too much is a good reason not to buy them. You can get near their performance for much less money. Not buying them because you can't be bothered to build a system with proper power and cooling and do a bit of research to get a longer warranty is a silly reason not to buy them.
> Anything made in the last couple of years should run any game on the market at full shiniez at decent resolution.
Sigh. Clearly your video games diet is fairly bland. Try one of the DCS combat simulators (A-10C, Ka-50, P-51D), or even Armed Assault II and you'll quickly notice the difference between a high end video card and a run-of-the-mill one. Just because the 'mainstream' is designed as twitch games that fight on maps the size of postage stamps doesn't mean all games/simulations are like this. I guarantee if you look outside the BF3, MW3, Halo, Gears of War, Diabolo3 and other such stuff you will find games less widely known to Joe Sixpack that have a lot more interesting aspects (eg. buddy lasing coordinated laser-guided-bomb drops) than run, gun, collect new hat/badge/unlock.
I think many of these miners need to L2math. So one of these cards will run you $500. Running it full bore will take around 250 watts so 1kWh for ever 4 hours it runs. Also have to factor in cooling, if you live in a warmer area. Also factor in computer power (and cooling for that) if it would normally be off during that time.
Well you need to run the numbers for your own power costs and so on, but that is a lot of mining you have to do to break even depending on what price you can get per bitcoin at a particular time.
So if the idea is to buy these to "make money" or something, you probably should throw some math at it first to see what it'll take to make anything, all presuming the price on bitcoins holds. "Easy money" usually isn't.
Wake me up when their drivers are fast AND correct.
I agree, and $500? wow. It is nice to run games at a decent frame rate, unfortunately for Radeon users their driver support seems to be falling behind their hardware by quite a lot. My Nvidia 560ti runs my favorite game Tribes Ascend with full bling, while Radeon users of higher end cards report all sorts of issues.
BTW the new Tribes is FTP..Join me https://account.hirezstudios.com/tribesascend/?referral=1207516&utm_campaign=email for anyone who remembers tribes 1 and tribes 2, you know why you should give it a shot, for anyone who has never tried a tribes game...well, you are missing out.
I Need someone to rebuild a Digitech Digital Delay pedal for me....for me...for me...for me.
Yes, but does it run Linux?
I didn't think so.
I enjoy reading the articles posted on SemiAccurate.com about AMD, nVidia, Intel, etc. Most of the articles are by two writers, and the most entertainingly acerbic ones are by Charlie Demerjian (I'll call him "CD").
Five months ago, CD thought nVidia was going to crush AMD on the high end:
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/01/19/nvidia-kepler-vs-amd-gcn-has-a-clear-winner/
However, nVidia seemingly can't produce their high-end chips in any useful quantity. So, CD snipes at nVidia about that in his comments about the new Radeon HD 7970:
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/06/21/amd-launches-tahiti-2-aka-hd7970ghz-edition/
Executive summary (aka TL;DR): AMD has production of high-end chips running smoothly and they are now able to produce, in quantity, chips that are reliable at higher clock rates. AMD is actually shipping a graphics card that performs better than what nVidia is actually shipping.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
How does this compare to the multi-thousand dollar CAD video cards?
It's embarrassing to see comments about how you should never use ATI-badged video cards in a Linux box, only to go home and watch my creaky-old 4550 run not only just fine, but also play 1080p video, and render 3D, while driving two monitors. Let me rephrase that: YOU should be embarrassed to say comments about how you should never use ATI-badged video cards yada yada yada...
Ditto for the "but I need proprietary drivers for Nvidia" crap. Nouveau drivers are getting just as good. Have a POS AGP FX5200? Notice how everyone in the room winced when I mentioned that model? But guess what, it runs great when not using Nvidia's crappy drivers.
Stop feeding AMD/ATI and Nvidia with "we want your drivers", and start to realize that the real solution is to pressure both of them to release the prior generation's hardware spec under NDA to the Xorg crew.
Why does anyone care that the two major card makers are still in their dick-waving war?
Because people buy the stuff they make (I dunno who, but their top-line stuff makes money somehow), and because, once they've replaced it with something newer and better, the price drops fast so the rest of us can build a nice, inexpensive gaming machine.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
Mostly but not entirely. I currently run an old hand-me-down Geforce 8800 GTS and while its processor is certainly powerful enough to calculate the scene in my native resolution it has an entirely different problem that makes newer games (say, Far Cry 2) run horribly on higher settings: 320 megabytes of RAM. You can have all the power you want in your GPU core but it all amounts to nothing if anything but the lowest settings induce noticeable pumping as the core spends most of its time mobing around data because the working set just doesn't fit in the memory.
If they sold an 8800 with one or even two gigs of RAM I'm fairly certain that I could play just about anything on high settings without any problems.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I swear, the article summary sounds like it was written by AMD's marketing department and just cut and pasted from an email into the front page.
Thanks, Soulskill, you total fucking douchebag, for helping ruin what was once an awesome tech site.
Continuos 5% more dick waving of the time means upgrades are worth it after 3 or so years. Assuming the drivers aren't tweaked. It keeps the industry healthy.
My machine still chokes on Alice: Madness Returns, and that's with a 6970.
There's something wrong with your machine, then. My machine has a 6870, and that game runs perfectly at 1920x1080 max graphics settings. (CPU is an i5 2500k oc'd to 4.7GHz, with 16GB of RAM). Aside from some idiotic load cues triggering hard drive access in the middle of some of the puzzles (and the game not caching the loaded results so if you turn around and attempt the puzzle again the cues triggers again), no problems at all, but that's bad game design not bad graphics support, and the problem went away when I switched the hard drive for an SSD.
best bang of buck should be the geforce gtx 560 for now. About 180$ and lots faster than the 7770.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
I just follow to know what hardware I'm going to be buying in 5 years :)
real niggas dont just dont run games at 1600 x 900 w/ max settings, they run'em at 2560 x 1600 w/ max settings + forced MSAA & TSS AA + modifed .ini + mods if applicable
gtx 280 cant do it. yields more than 5% greater shiniez