AMD's Pixel-Crunching Extravaganza: Radeon HD 7970 Review

Dividebyzero said"

ROFL, I did forget I was on sacred ground there for a minute.
(I am now picturing Chuck Heston's tablet with an # 11 on it now.)

*Wipes egg from face.*

How come you didn't test the 5970 though?

It's simply AMD's reference design. Once AMD allows their vendors to change the design, shrouds like these are hardly used, except maybe when keeping the core and memory clocks at stock and adding nothing to the PCB to aid in overclocking.

another person who last checked in around 2008. if you can agree that triple/quad GPU makes no sense at 1080P or less, I get scaling to all four cards at 5760 x 1080, and significant at that. what more important is what it allows you to do with the graphic settings such as DOF, AA, etc,etc.

Hey, why not? Chuck's acting dial also goes to eleven

/unfortunately the acting scale is 0 - 100

As for the argument against tri/quad SLI/CFX, I would have thought that there were enough articles on the net to dispel any myths.


What is often mistaken for no increase in scaling performance is usually a product of CPU limitation.

Dividebyzero said"

1. Amazing upgrade for GTX2xx or HD48xx users who have been holding out all this time.

2. GTX570 and HD6950 @ 6970 users will probably have to skip this generation (unless they feel like paying $300 more) if they planned to get a much faster GPU at the $300 level. It doesn't look like $299 HD7870 will be much of an upgrade for these users since the flagship 7970 is barely 42% faster.

3. For GTX580 users who are gaming at 2560x1600, this card changes nothing though. They are probably the disappointed group. 22% more performance isn't that amazing. NV's 28nm GPU should probably add 40-50% over this.

4. Looking forward to see if HD7950 unclocks and overclocks as well as the 7970.

Great review Steve. Would have loved to see noise levels measured among the cards.

Not quite. Do you see a 7990 on newegg yet?

Mighty 5970! Still a kick *** card

Only a window onto the card's RAM is mapped into the CPU's memory map. A 3GB card will look no different than a 512MB card.

5970 is still beast and still relevant imo. And it didn't get much attention even a year ago in bencmarks. Not sure if DX11 performance has anything to do with that though.

Before the 7000 series saw the light of day, I hazarded a guess that dollar to percentage point ratio would remain 1:1 and you would still be paying for what you get. It's actually a lower value at this point when you compare 7000 and 6000 series. The 7970 is king for now , but it will be up to Nvidia to match it blow for blow or hopefully surpass AMD to get prices to come down across the board. I think maybe I'm just being a little too naive to expect an encore of the hd 4000 series.

I'm planning on building a new PC this year. I've currently got a 4850 and want a considerable performance increase but want to spend less than $200, should I wait for a 7000 series to come out in that price range or get something currently available? I don't want to wait longer than the beginning of summer.

The Radeon HD 7850 should cost around $200 and if the rumors are correct it will perform like a 6950 in most games. It should also be out within the next month or so.

Awesome, thanks for the info. Looks like I'm on the right buy cycle since this generation looks much better than the last just as the 4000 generation was much better than the preceding generation.

I am currently running a single 5870 with EyeFinity (6024x1080 with bezel correction) for playing SWTOR. I have been getting between 30-45fps most of the time with some stuttering here and there, but nothing major although I do have some of the graphics tuned back a bit. What do you guys think is the better option, should I upgrade to a single 7970, or would it be better to put in a second 5870, or some other option?

I'd have liked to see the 5970 in there myself, but pretty much just because that's what I am upgrading from. Just from eyeballing the charts, it looks like I'll get some improvement all around, and much better Tesselation to boot.

I don't know about that two generations back argument though, since the 5870 is present.

As others have said the Radeon HD 5000 series is getting too old now. The Radeon HD 5870 is included as a representative of that series but will be dropped later this year. We favored it over the 5970 because far more people invested in the 5870 than the 5970.

If we included the 5970 then we might as well have included the 5850 and then why not the 5770, that was the most popular card from the series after all especially for Crossfire builds.

Also you should be able to work out where the Radeon HD 5970 stands in relation to other graphics cards such as the Radeon HD 5870 and 6990.

Using the 6970 price of $369 cited on page 1 and the price of $549 for the 7970 your price difference of 60% in your wrap up is off.

The price difference is 49% (369 * 1.49 = 549).