AMD Radeon HD 7970 Reviewed - The fastest single-GPU graphics card for gaming!

[Arthur]

The reviews are up, but you won't be able to buy one until 09/01/2012. Even so, this looks like an awesome graphics card. Until nVidia release their GTX 780, the Radeon HD 7970 should remain the fastest (single GPU) graphics card you can buy.

 

Pricing is expected to be similar to that of a 3GB GTX 580 (~£380-£430).

 

Reviews

Anandtech, Bit-Tech, HardOCP, Hardware Heaven (CrossFire), Hexus, KitGuru, Overclockers, PC Perspective, TechPowerUp, Tom's Hardware

VR-Zone - Part One, Two, Three, Does PCIe 3.0 matter?

 

Specs

www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/7000/7970/Pages/radeon-7970.aspx

 

The Bottom Line

AMD has created an extremely efficient video card with the Radeon HD 7970, which is not surprising given the history of video cards the last couple of generations. What is surprising is the performance advantage compared to a Radeon HD 6970 in the power envelope it is operating. The AMD Radeon HD 7970 is eloquence and efficiency in design. It is not cheap, at $549 it will set you back a decent amount of cash. At this price it is more expensive than a standard GeForce GTX 580, as well Radeon HD 6970. Thankfully, the performance justifies the price, by producing greater real-world gameplay experience advantages and large framerate improvements. Our only real concern right now is quantity and availability. We should see full retail on these video cards around January 9th, so there is going to be a bit of waiting.

 

AMD has taken the performance crown back, and currently has the fastest single-GPU video card for PC gaming. We experienced dramatic improvements over the Radeon HD 6970, and consistent improvements over an overclocked GeForce GTX 580. In our experiences, it was the newest DX11 games that pushed Tessellation which received the most improvement. If future games use more Tessellation, we may see the Radeon HD 7970 separate itself in a greater degree from the Radeon HD 6970 and GeForce GTX 580.

 

Considering the performance advantages we experienced, the power efficiencies experienced, and the fact that we can finally play games with a single-GPU video card at 5760x1200 Eyefinity, we feel this video card deserves this award. (Source)

 

The ability to overclock it by ~20% is very impressive...

 

http://i.imgur.com/iWYtA.png

 

If you have two Radeon HD 7970s, the second card will power itself off completely when you are not gaming.

 

It is also worth noting once again that the 7970 has advanced power technology which is able to power down our second card completely when not gaming. This offers considerable power savings over competing architectures where the second (or additional cards) draw power, even when in desktop mode. (Source)

 

http://i.imgur.com/p3E7D.png

Edited December 22, 2011 by Arthur
Added more reviews

[Arthur]

TechReport's long-awaited review of the 7970 is up...

 

http://techreport.com/articles.x/22192

[Arthur]

AMD officially released the Radeon HD 7950 yesterday. I'm glad I didn't buy a 7970, because the 7950 isn't much slower and is around £100 less!

 

Tech Report

Any way you slice it, the Radeon HD 7950 does what it set out to do: undercut the GeForce GTX 580 in price while trumping it in performance. Since the 7950's power consumption is ridiculously, remarkably lower than the GTX 580's, there's little left to do but declare the 7950 the clear winner. That's before one even figures in the new bells and whistles built into the Tahiti GPU, including a hardware H.264 video encoding engine and support for PCI Express 3.0, neither of which the GTX 580 can match.

 

We are kind of left wondering why anyone would pony up for a Radeon HD 7970 now that cards like this XFX 7950 Black Edition will be selling for $499. This hot-clocked 7950 card performs very much like a stock-clocked 7970 but costs substantially less. I suppose those folks who want the very best will pay the premium for an up-clocked version of the 7970 like XFX's Black Edition, which really is the finest video card we've ever tested, with a much quieter cooling solution than AMD's reference design. Still, with all of the overclocking headroom in the 7950, paying more for the 7970 seems... unnecessary. (Source)

 

AnandTech

Ultimately it’s not a fair fight, not that AMD ever intended it to be one. Outside of a few corner cases the 7950 renders the GTX 580 irrelevant, and while it’s not quite as immense as what the 5850 did to the GTX 285 2 years ago the outcome is much the same. With the 7950 AMD can deliver performance similar to if not better than the GTX 580 while consuming significantly less power and enjoying all the temperature & noise benefits that provides, making it a very attractive card. (Source)

 

http://i.imgur.com/BTDM7.gif

 

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http://i.imgur.com/YFtRk.gif

 

http://i.imgur.com/cu4zt.gif

 

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http://i.imgur.com/YGbWs.png

 

http://i.imgur.com/lPAJF.png

 

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[mrbios]

Got myself a 7950 arriving today w00t (Powercolor PCS+ edition)

 

A silly purchase seeing as i own a GTX580 lol but while i've always bought the fastest card for my money rather than having brand loyalty, i've been wanting to go back to ATI(amd) for ages about damn time! That said i game at 2560x1440 so the extra 1.5gb memory is handy to have for all those chunky BF3 textures

[3s-gtech]

Overclock it! The gains are absolutely epic...

[sonofsanta]

Still slightly underwhelmed considering it's a new architecture and a new process, still only feels like an incremental improvement :/ but then it took nVidia another generation to get Fermi into shape so hopefully the 8xxx series should still be a significant improvement even without a process jump.

 

Not that I can afford/justify any new GPUs anyway!

[3s-gtech]

I get the impression AMD are holding these things back, looking at power draw, temps, clock speeds etc. At a guess they'll have some headroom if Kepler is faster, so as to catch it up. Will be an interesting few months for PC gamers, and we may start to see games taking more advantage (and getting prettier) as the gulf between PC and console graphics increases.