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AMD Radeon HD 7970: Promising Performance, Paper-Launched

AMD Radeon HD 7970: Promising Performance, Paper-Launched
By , Igor Wallossek

A sample of AMD's next-generation Radeon HD 7970 landed in our lab just before Santa. Don't cross your fingers for one of these in your stocking, though. It's not available yet. Is it fast, though? Our benchmarks suggest yes, but more testing remains!

Leading into December, we didn’t really expect to see a next-generation graphics card in the 31 days before 2012. In fact, even mid-month, after we’d already been briefed, the plan was to launch in January. Windows 8 and its accompanying DirectX 11.1 API update aren’t expected for months still, and today’s high-end graphics cards are well-equipped to handle modern games. Despite the fact that AMD purportedly stopped production of its Radeon HD 6990 months ago, we were worried that rumours of poor 28 nm yields at TSMC meant there was no way a new GPU could be readied in time.

When AMD moved its launch date up to today, we were even more bowled over. The official line from AMD was that “After collecting feedback from our partners and evaluating our overall readiness…we believe this new date allows us to get ahead of the Christmas season rush and CES.” Getting ahead of the Christmas rush by launching 72 hours before the big day is a tough line to swallow, especially after a follow-up confirming that cards won't be shipping until January 9th. The unfortunate result is that a lot of AMD’s software partners were unprepared to provide us with the applications needed to properly test the GPU’s new features. So, this article officially goes down as a preview, rather than a review. We will, of course, follow up when all of the proper tools are available for testing.

Meet Radeon HD 7970

Regardless of whether or not it’s ready for the world, or the world is ready for it, AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 is up and running in the Tom’s Hardware lab. This card is no minor revision of the Radeon HD 6000 series. The company’s ”Southern Islands” architecture was re-designed from the ground up with a long list of new features and capabilities, including DirectX 11.1 compatibility. Composed of 4.31 billion transistors etched on a 28 nm process, the flagship Tahiti GPU sports about 160% of the Cayman design’s reported transistor count. However, adopting the latest lithography node allows AMD to cram that extra complexity into a 365 mm² die, which is smaller than its predecessor’s 389 mm² surface area.

Before we delve into the major architectural redesign, let’s have a closer look at the new card’s specifications compared to its competition.


Radeon HD 7970
Radeon HD 6970
Radeon HD 6990
GeForce GTX 580
Stream processors
20481536
3072
512
Texture Units
128
9619264
Full Colour ROPs
32
3264
48
Graphics (Shdr) Clock
925 MHz880 MHz830 MHz772 (1544) MHz
Texture Fillrate
118.4 Gtex/s
84.5 Gtex/s159.4 Gtex/s49.4 Gtex/s
Memory Clock
1375 MHz1375 MHz1250 MHz
1002 MHz
Memory Bus
384-bit256-bit2x 256-bit
384-bit
Memory Bandwidth264 GB/s
160 GB/s160 GB/s192.4 GB/s
Graphics RAM
3 GB GDDR5
2 GB GDDR52 GB GDDR51.5-3 GB GDDR5
Die Size
365 mm2
389 mm22 x 389 mm2520 mm2
Transistors (Billion)
4.31
2.645.283
Process Technology
28 nm40 nm
40 nm40 nm
Power Connectors
1 x 8-pin, 1 x 6-pin1 x 8-pin, 1 x 6-pin
2 x 8-pin1 x 8-pin, 1 x 6-pin
Maximum power (TDP)
250 W
250 W
375 W244 W
Price
$549 MSRP (UK price not yet known)
£250-£300
£550-£580 (EOL)
£370-£380 (1.5 GB)
£420-and-up (3 GB)


This product boasts notable advantages over the Radeon HD 6970, with 33% more stream processors and texture units, and a 65% net memory bandwidth increase thanks to its 384-bit memory bus. The only specifications that these cards share are 32 ROPs and a 250 W TDP. Based on those figures alone (and the fact that this is apparently going to be a $550 card), we’d expect the Radeon HD 7970 to decimate the 6970, edge past the GeForce GTX 580, and fall behind AMD’s Radeon HD 6990. There’s frankly a lot more to this story than gaming performance, though, and we’ll get to that in an in-depth exploration of AMD’s new Graphics Core Next architecture.

But first, we’ll share what we know about the Radeon HD 7000 series. Despite rumours to the contrary, all of the 28 nm Radeon 7000 series GPUs, previously code-named Southern Islands, are based on the Graphics Core Next architecture. That includes the Radeon HD 7700 series (Cape Verde Core), 7800 series (Pitcairn), and 7900 series (Tahiti), at the very least. AMD may include some 40 nm products under the 7000-series umbrella, and those would employ rebranded VLIW4/5 architectures.

The Southern Islands-based cards share the same features and abilities, which is good news. Here is a slide showing the placement of new product families relative to the Radeon HD 6000 series:

As you’ll see in our tests, the Radeon HD 7900 series appears to perform as its position in the deck would suggest. Note the Q1, 2012 expected date and the unnamed dual-GPU product at the top of the food chain.

With the relative performance of Radeon HD 7000-series cards established by AMD’s marketing department, let’s have a look at the family’s unique features. We’ll start with the basics: the Southern Islands architecture.

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  • -3 Hide
    dizzy_davidh , 22 December 2011 12:19
    Why not compare this card against the nVidia 590 rather than the 580?

    There have been several reviews\tests\price & value for money comparisons now at TomsHardware where the best that AMD has to offer has been compared\benchmarked against nVidia products that aren't their best offerings (it could be perceived that TomsHardware is bias in it's reviews as a result!).
  • -1 Hide
    dizzy_davidh , 22 December 2011 12:41
    dizzy_davidhWhy not compare this card against the nVidia 590 rather than...


    I should have read the whole article before commenting. I assumed wrongly that as you hadn't broken down the spec of the 590 on the first page along with the other cards being used in the test, that it wasn't being included.

    That being said, I still have serious doubts over the validity of your benchmarks as I personally average well over 110fps in Battlefield3 with a 4x AA configuration @1080p and ultra video settings so how you managed to get so much lower in your results is beyond me.

    As for my configuration it is all stock setup with no tweaks or overclocking and is comparable to your test setup except for the processor being a non-clocked Intel Core i7 965 @3.20Ghz (Nehalem) Extreme Edition and not the overclocked to 4Ghz Intel Core i5-2500K (Sandy Bridge) used in your testing.

    Perhaps the processor is making a difference (standard extreme i7 bests an overclocked i5 perhaps) but by such a large amount (roughly 29% better in my case) over the results you saw in a similar test is very odd to say the least.

    Perhaps your tweaking is flawed or possibley even causing detrimental effects to your results.
  • 3 Hide
    doive1231 , 22 December 2011 14:09
    The pain of the Bulldozer fiasco must still hurt at AMD but nobody's going to be complaining about this launch (except perhaps your wallet).
  • 0 Hide
    9_breaker , 22 December 2011 16:30
    i cant believe it compares to the 590 and 6990 .
  • 1 Hide
    FinneousPJ , 22 December 2011 18:10
    Impressive preview results, wow!
  • 1 Hide
    dillyflump , 23 December 2011 01:31
    These are going to be some sweet performing cards. Hard to believe this single card has almost as much grunt as the dual gpu 6990 or 590GTX, imagine running a pair or even quadfire. I think anything more than two of these running and even the latest intel cpu's will bottleneck these cards.
  • 0 Hide
    9_breaker , 29 December 2011 22:27
    hardwear heaven has a crossfire review
  • 0 Hide
    Anonymous , 17 January 2012 16:55
    In my subjective opinion, a little unfair on the noise issue. Graphing a visual difference in 1 decibel, or 0.5 decibel is kinda stretching it. The quietest card in that list is the 580 with 42 idle / 43.5 bf3 load, whereas the 7970 is 42.5 idle (0.5 decibel difference) / 46.5 (3 decibel difference). With such small differences it could be stated that all cards are relatively noisy, except we are comparing a new production card with Stock Cooler with an Aftermarket Cooler. To have such small differences graphed out so significantly, is perhaps just unnecessary squeezing.
  • 0 Hide
    Anonymous , 21 March 2012 13:55
    bitmining performance for 7970 is 550mh/s (Diablominer, cgminer)
    Reviewer used outdated miner. :D