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Now that we’ve examined the GPU, let’s take a look at a reference-design example of the first videocard that will use it. We’ll start with power efficiency and noise, because AMD has made some notable advances on those fronts. The Radeon HD 6970 drew roughly 20 watts at idle, which was pretty good at the time. The Radeon HD 7970 card AMD provided for this evaluation, which is outfitted with one six-pin and one eight-pin PCIe power connector, idles at just 15 watts. AMD has also developed a new feature called ZeroPower that shuts puts the card into a deeper sleep state—including turning off its cooling fan—when Windows shuts off your display. In this state, the card draws just three watts. ZeroPower delivers benefits when you’re running two or more cards in CrossFire X mode, too. When your computer is simply running normal Windows stuff, the secondary cards will turn their fans off and reduce their power consumption to three watts, since they’re not driving displays. That means a multi-GPU system at idle will consume nearly the same amount of power as a single-GPU rig.
In our tests, a machine equipped with a reference-design Radeon HD 7970 card, a six-core CPU, 16GB of RAM, and two hard drives consumed just 109 watts at idle. That power consumption is incredibly modest for a machine that powerful. The 7970 draws more power under load than one equipped with AMD’s older high-end GPU, but it’s still more conservative than Nvidia’s maximum power consumption.
AMD will continue to use PowerTune technology to manage power consumption at all performance levels. One microcontroller monitors the thermal and power states of different parts of the card, and a second adjusts voltage and frequencies in real time. This allows AMD to set higher peak clock rates while remaining within the card’s 250-watt TDP rating.
AMD has also reengineered their reference-designing cooling mechanism. The fan has larger blades, and all monitor connections are on one half of the mounting bracket, leaving the entire other side free for ventilation slits. Based on our subjective evaluation, the 7970 card was substantially quieter than the 6970 card we compared it to.
AMD is improving its Eyefinity technology, and some of those changes will carry over to current-generation cards. One key feature that all Eyefinity capable cards will get is better bezel compensation and new configurations, including 5 x 1 support (in either landscape or portrait configurations), which should make driving and flying games incredibly immersive. Maximum supported resolution over multiple displays will be beefed up to 16K x 16K. That, my friend, is a lot of pixels.
AMD is also improving its stereoscopic 3D support, although it will continue to rely on third-party manufacturers to produce compatible glasses and displays. The Radeon HD 7970 will drive three displays in stereoscopic 3D mode using upcoming DisplayPort 3D monitors. Reference-design 7970 cards will be outfitted with one dual-link DVI, two mini DisplayPort, and one HDMI 1.4a. They’ll support up to six displays simultaneously, although you’ll need the right mix of adapters to do that.
AMD’s new Discrete Digital Multi-Point Audio (DDMA) is another interesting feature, which could be useful in online gaming, video-conferencing, and other situations. If you’re engaged in a video conference with several other participants displayed on discrete monitors equipped with speakers, it will enable directional audio, so that when a participant on a monitor to your left speaks, you’ll hear his or her voice on that left-hand monitor. AMD says DDMA will also be useful for multi-room audio setups, so you can play a game on the computer in one room, while music is piped into speakers in other rooms in the home.
We tested a reference-design Radeon HD 7970 card using beta drivers, so bear in mind that our benchmarks are based on a work in progress. This card did not, however, come with the telltale EMI warning labels that typically mark early engineering samples. We did encounter one glitch, although it happened only once during testing, and we were unable to replicate it: When we cold-booted the system, the GPU’s clock reset to 500MHz (instead of the usual 925MHz). We used AMD’s OverDrive feature, part of the Catalyst control panel, to reset the clock to the factory default.
We compared the 7970 to three other cards: an XFX Radeon HD 6970, running at 880MHz and paired with 2GB of GDDR5, an EVGA GTX 580 SC, which is slightly overclocked at the factory to 797MHz and is outfitted with 1.5GB of GDDR5 memory, and an aggressively overclocked (855MHz) EVGA GTX 580 Classified, which is equipped with 3GB of GDDR5. Unlike our standard tests, we brought the pain by benchmarking all four cards on a 30-inch display at 2560 x 1600 resolution, 4x AA, and all settings at their maximum values.
When the smoke had cleared, the two GTX 580 cards won just a single benchmark, the HAWX2 test, which tessellates just about everything in sight. There were a few effective ties between the 7970 and the EVGA Classified, including Metro 2033 and Just Cause 2; but when the 7970 won, it generally won big. It opened a substantial lead on the Unigine Heaven synthetic test, for instance, even when we cranked tessellation to “extreme.”
AMD suggests that the Radeon HD 7970 has some clock-speed headroom, so we can expect to see factory-overclocked cards pushing the core clock rate up to 1GHz and possibly higher. That 3GB of frame buffer will come in handy for GPU-compute applications. AMD’s expects retail cards based on the 7970 to sell for $549, which strikes us as a reasonable—but not exceptional—value. AMD will also ship a cost-reduced version of the 7970, in form of the Radeon HD 7950 in early 2012, but the company hasn’t released specs or pricing on that SKU.
| Radeon HD 7970 | Radeon HD 6970 | |
|---|---|---|
| Manufacturing Process | 28nm | 40nm |
| Transistor Count | 4.31 billion |
2.64 billion |
| Reference Core Clock | 925MHz | 880MHz |
| Frame Buffer | 3GB GDDR5 | 2GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Clock | 1,375MHz |
1,375MHz |
| Memory Data Rate | 5.5 gigapixels/sec | 5.5 gigapixels/sec |
| Memory Bandwidth | 264GB/sec | 176GB/sec |
| Memory Bus | 384-bit | 256-bit |
| Stream Processors | 2,048 | 1,536 |
| Compute Performance | 3.79 single-precision TFLOPs | 2.7 single-precision TFLOPs |
| Texture Units | 128 | 96 |
| Texture Fill Rate (peak) | 118.4 gigatexels/sec | 84.5 gigatexels/sec |
| ROPs | 32 | 32 |
| Z/Stencil | 128 | 128 |
| Maximum Board Power | 250W | 250W |
| Idle Power (active) | 15W | 20W |
| Idle Power (long dark) | 3W | 20W |
| AMD Radeon HD 7970 Reference | XFX Radeon HD 6970 | EVGA GTX 580 SC | EVGA GTX 580 Classified | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3DMark 2011 Perf | 7,985 | 5,750 | 6,747 | 7,321 |
| 3D Mark Vantage Perf | 31,873 | 24,453 | 26,936 | 28,559 |
| Unigine Heaven 2.5 (fps) | 28 | 17 | 22 | 23 |
| Shogun 2 (fps) | 28 | 19 | 22 | 24 |
| Far Cry 2 / Long (fps) | 96 | 75 | 85 | 92 |
| HAWX 2 DX11 (fps) | 113 | 73 | 120 | 128 |
| STALKER: CoP DX11 (fps) | 37 | 25 | 28 | 29 |
| Just Cause 2 (fps) | 48 | 31 | 41 | 48 |
| Batman: Arkham City (fps) | 51 | 36 | 45 | 47 |
| Metro 2033 (fps) | 17 | 14 | 15 | 17 |
| DiRT3 (fps) | 60 | 44 | 50 | 55 |
| Core /Memory Clock Speeds | 925 / 1375 | 880 / 1375 | 797 / 1013 | 855 / 1053 |
| Power @ idle (W) | 124 | 126 | 140 | 140 |
| Power @ full throttle (W) | 325* | 296 | 344 | 385 |
| Price | $549 | $350 | $550 | $600 |
* "Long dark" system power was 109W
Best scores are bolded. Our test bed is a 3.33GHz Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition in an Asus P979X Deluxe motherboard with 16GB of Corsair DDR3/1600 and an AX1200 Corsair PSU. The OS is 64-bit Windows Ultimate. All games are run at 2560 x 1600 with 4x AA, except for the 3DMark tests.
Comments are closed on this article
blackdog
December 30, 2011 at 12:28pm
Check this website by AMD and see what the estimated value of the card it says there, look for Jan. 3rd prize: https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1khomiLMw0uaTt1Hv7fJFAl0Wf96XgqJNvJKF5Xmktsc
Like this:
AMD Radeon 7970 GPU
Estimated Value: $329
blackdog
December 30, 2011 at 12:27pm
Check this website by AMD and see what the estimated value of the card it says there, look for Jan. 3rd prize: https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1khomiLMw0uaTt1Hv7fJFAl0Wf96XgqJNvJKF5Xmktsc
EthicSlave
December 30, 2011 at 10:47am
I think a PCI-e spec upgrade will become a large factor for those dealing with multi monitor setups.
To date this has been the only way to moderately saturate the current pci-e spec.
having trouble with super high resolutions/fps ... upgrade to pci-e 3.0 with enough lane bandwidth to support your current multi monitor setup, make sure each lane has enough bandwidth also
BLACKCELL
December 28, 2011 at 9:13am
none of these companies are building their hardware based on what we need, it's always a guess, I'm just saying, wtf am I going to actually do with 3GB of DDR5 memory? lol I don't need to be all maxed out to the point that I bow a fuse in the house, it's all pointless, you know there is such a thing as cloud gaming systems processing all this data and speed that we will just be able to streamline to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, soon it won't matter who the top dog is AMD, INTEL, or what video card will dish out spinning stars that pop off a supernova's ass cheeks!, pretty soon, it will all just come down to internet speed and how big of a screen that you want to play it on, THINK MMPC USERS, fan boying of anyone company is just stupid as well, hell I like AMD and Intel, I use them both, and so will my kids, the point is how can you call yourself a true IT guy/ girl If you just stick to one type of IT tree? that's like saying I only eat apples, but knowing I secretly also love grapes, but I won't eat them because their not the apples I grew up on, grow up, love it all because soon it will just be another things that we used to remind our kids about, " kids back in the days we used to enjoy records, and tapes" "dad that's old now we have mp3's and streaming movies and HD2000dpi and 4D screens"
but in the end I still love it all, so stop harping on each other, talk about hacking it or making that thing run naked on a bucket of ice water!!!!
JohnP
December 23, 2011 at 5:43pm
I donno. I broke out the calulator and I found that if I bumped the speed of the NVidia 580 up by the difference in clock speeds, the NVidia 580 matches the AMD 7970 benchmarks almost precisely. That means the new architecture from AMD MAKES NO DIFFERENCE to the card at all except for being a bit less power hungry. Now the power has everything to do with the shink in die size so that too is a wash once NVidia moves to a smaller die size.
Bottom Line: AMD's newest family of videocards is only (once again) matching what NVidia has had out in production for 2 years now. Man, first Bulldozer, now Radeon 7970. Both Intel and NVidia have no real reason to bump up thier production schedule of Ivy Bridge and Kepler if AMD continues on this way. I despair for AMD. They just HAVE TO DO BETTER and by a lot or they will continue to lose market share.
MastaGuy
December 27, 2011 at 10:22am
But what happens if you overclock the 7970?
Than it will be more powerful than a GTX 580
loyd
December 25, 2011 at 12:17pm
Unfortunately, Nvidia can't match the clock speeds with the current Fermi. And we haven't heard a whisper about Kepler, though it's always possible that Nvidia is sandbagging until they saw what AMD is doing. So AMD has the lead for the time being. And that 3W deep idle is something to think about, too.
Remember also that these are beta drivers on a brand new architecure, so we'll see some growth in future driver releases. Finally, AMD suggests that the reference 7970s have enough headroom to hit 1GHz, depending on chip yields and custom coolers.
JohnP
December 25, 2011 at 2:50pm
Lloyd, the power consumption decrease with the Radeon 7970 is mainly due to the die shrink to 28nm. NVidia is planning on a die shrink of their existing Fermi architecture before Kepler is released:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Nvidia-Kepler-Is-On-Track-Samples-Arrived-In-House-240284.shtml
Another effect of the die shrink is that clock speed usually increases as there is less heat created at the lower voltage needed with a smaller transistor.
The third change that is not revolutionary is the bump of AMD's 7970's memory bus from 384 bits (matching the 580) from the 6970's 256 bits along with 3GB DDR5 memory vs the GTX580's 1.5GB and the 6970's 2GB.
The final non revolutionary change is bumping the number of stream processors by 33% from 1,536 to 2,048.
Again, breaking out my calculator, the 35% bump in the number of stream processors ALONE causes the increase in the change in the benchmark differences between the 7970 and the 6970.
The higher benchmark, however, does not show ANY OTHER large speed bumps that SHOULD HAVE OCCURED due to the increase in the memory bus size, the higher amount of memory, compute performance, texture fill rate, or finally the NEW ARCHITECTURE.
If I add up all the increases in the technology, I would have expected benchmarks in excess of 50-60% over the previous generation. Perhaps I am naive in how much to expect but, hell, a doubling of transistor count should have produced a lot more than a 35% increase. Add the new architecture, smaller die size, and more memory and I am underwhelmed.
Yeah, I have seen some remarkable changes in certain benchmarks with driver updates, but expecting more that 10% is pretty unrealistic.
I would love to see AMD sucessful but there is not the gee whiz that I was expecting. I may be disappointed with NVidia's Kepler also, but having AMD being 1st out the door should be a dazzler, not an evolution. AMD needs a clear winner here and I just don't see it.
lordfirefox
December 24, 2011 at 12:01am
I'd like to know how you were able to benchmark an AMD card that doesn't exist yet in the wild. And synthetic benchmarks are a joke when compared to real-world usage data. So wherever you're getting your numbers baffles me.
Is an end user going to dispair missing .001 or .002 FPS just because he uses an AMD GPU over an nVidia one? Probably not. Because as long as the games run smoothly and play well they're not going to care.
I've been using ATI/AMD for years and I've never had any problems with their hardware. I can say the same for nVidia too but I like saving money and if that means I can get by with AMD with great performance then I'm going to continue to buy AMD.
Oh and I love how people, particularly young gamers, have this fantasy of nVidia and Intel teaming up especially when the two companies oppose each other on just about every front. In other words it's not going to happen.
JohnP
December 24, 2011 at 1:51am
Uhh, I used the data IN THIS ARTICLE called BENCHMARKS. I would assume that you missed this...
I have nothing against AMD and ATI. I have 4 computers in my family and two of them has an ATI Radeon graphics cards in them. None have AMD uP chips any longer as they are not performance chips no matter how low they price them.
For my HTPC, I do not care about raw speed in graphics as much as the capabilities of the card and have an ATI card in it. For my high end gaming machines, I surely do care about performance, esp if I move up to that 30" monitor that I am looking at from the two machines with 27" monitors. The capabilities of running multiple monitors for high end games is also in my future.
Looking at the beta BENCHMARKS of the 7970 (even though they are rough and ready ones), I just don't see the WOW factor in AMDs latest card. The only things it seems to have going for it is the high transistor count and faster clock speeds. Not only should it have trounced the 5870 in ALL of the benchmarks, it should have done so by a hell of a lot more than just the bump in clock speed (which it DOES NOT). There is no compelling reason to upgrade to a AMD Radeon 7970 from an NVidia 5870 and that is a shame.
This is ATI's LATEST GRAPHICS CARD using their NEXT GEN ARCHITECTURE. As such, the card should have at least a 20-30% edge on the current gen cards if it is to succeed for the next few years in stomping the competition (hell even keeping up). If it is a meh card priced about the same as the competition or only slightly faster as the opposition's current gen card (as this is), ATI is going to be very vunerable to ANY speed bump of NVidia next gen cards coming out in the next couple of months.
AMD/ATI has to be at the top of their game NOW in order to give credible evidence to their stockholders and buyers that they have a viable and strong future. They are losing market share, they have consistently not made their forecast numbers, and they have seemed to have boosted their profits only by decreasing their head count and selling off assets. This is a dangerous slope for them that may not turn out well.
Dang, IMHO this is a well reasoned and well written critique, Heh.
warptek2010
January 08, 2012 at 11:22pm
Sorry, John. A very unscientific way of going about your numbers, I have to say. For example, just using the math alone you left scaling issues out of the equation entirely. We're dealing with a completely new architecture that does away with something that would otherwise might be a bottleneck... namely VLIW, along with other enhancements. To test for geometric scaling increases you MUST have optimized drivers and optimized benchmarks that take advantage of the new architecture. Afterall, we're talking here about video cards, right? At it's most basic and fundamental function, i.e. displaying a 2d image, ANY modern video card can do that job from the lowest $35.00 bargain basement card to the currently most expensive.
What sets these higher end cards apart is their ability to render 3d images, as well as other higher functions like multiple monitors etc....
Do the REAL words test first, not on paper.
lordfirefox
December 23, 2011 at 4:13pm
Gonna wait on AMD still... Their cards have been too amazing for me to want to switch over now.
In otherwords it's all subjective opinion.
chipwatcher
December 22, 2011 at 8:11pm
Now that a consumer product (potentially a high volume production item) is being introduced that saturates the PCIe 3.0 x 16 bus, it might make sense to introduce a working PCIe x 32 bus on high end mother boards. The specifications for this have been in the PCIe specs since PCIe 1.0 yet to my knowledge no one has built such an interface. With SSD companies like FIO and OCZ producing products that are approaching the PCIe 3.0 x 16 bus limits as well as the need for higher bus through put for InfiniBand, 40Gb and 100Gb Ethernet, and PCIe switches, a quick (6 to 12 months) means to produce working hardware including cabling to double the through put of a PCIe 3.0 x 16 bus sounds intriguing.
Considering that working PCIe 4.0 buses are at least 2 and probable 3 years away from seeing limited production a short term solution to the need for additional through put should be seriously looked at. Of course if a x 32 bus is introduced using the PCIe 3.0 specifications there should be no over riding reason that the upcoming 4.0 specification shouldn’t increase the x 32 bus speed.
Keith E. Whisman
December 22, 2011 at 5:46pm
I wonder when will video cards require so much bandwidth that they take up two x16 slots using a daughter card and ribbon cable plugged into an adjacent x16 slot? That day will bring sli and crossfire to an end but I bet it will come eventually unless they devise another slot that mimics vesa local bus in its sheer size as VLB was huge.
Marthian
December 23, 2011 at 9:52am
considering this card is PCI Express 3.0 compatible and PCIe 4.0 already in the works, I don't really think so
Dexter243
December 22, 2011 at 5:16pm
i was looking at new 6790 i think ill wate a tad longer and see what thay have for $150 in a 7xxx card
can all ready play bf3 on high with my 5670 on a 22" with athlon 2 x4 3.3ghz
LatiosXT
December 22, 2011 at 10:23am
The real interesting battle will be for the midrange $200-$300 section. But let's just hope that Kepler doesn't become another Fermi.
The Corrupted One
December 22, 2011 at 11:11am
Yeah, but I hope the 6850's successor lives up to the mantle of having an insane cost to performance ratio
The Corrupted One
December 22, 2011 at 9:49am
I wonder how the architecture change will affect bitcoin mining?
The question is, can it run Cr..(gets shot)
ABouman
December 22, 2011 at 11:30am
*gets shot with an arrow to the knee (sorry, couldn't help myself)
chart2006
December 22, 2011 at 8:48am
I'm excited to see the final product and tweeked drivers. Makes me wonder what to expect with Nvidia as well. Most likely I'll eventually get the 7970 later next year over Nvidia just because of price/power/performance ratio. I like how the long idle drops to 3 watts which is very impressive.
FrancesTheMute
December 22, 2011 at 9:32am
They were using early beta drivers, probably doesn't support Eyefinity very well yet.
std error
December 23, 2011 at 12:24am
I browsed around... tom's, hardocp and hardware heaven have eyefinity testing.
Pretty good performance for the card actually: 35.5 fps on ultra at 5760x1200 for BF3, with SSAO only though.
win7fanboi
December 22, 2011 at 7:59am
Nice perf/power consumption ratio. Can't believe Shogun 2 is this brutal on the GPUs. I have a 6850 and had no idea it has such low frame rate.
praetor_alpha
December 22, 2011 at 6:14am
How long is the card? Looking at trends over the past few generations, I'd say it has to be at least 15 inches.
h e x e n
December 22, 2011 at 5:54am
Pretty impressive. It will be interesting to see how these cards scale after release.
The increse in performance is no more astounding than the last series change, but what's exciting to me is pushing the core clock over 1ghz... on air. It will be cool to see what kind of overhead the cards have out of the gate.
Gumby
December 22, 2011 at 12:37am
Seriously impressive performance per watt. And this is on early drivers. As the manufacturing proccess improves for these chips, drivers improve for this GPU, and the card builders improve the cooler and overclocking, this card has great potential to improve even over what we see right now. It could be a real game-changer, and I am not just talking about your frames-per-second. I would love to see a 6GB version down the road. Also, I would like to see some Crossfire benchmarks when more cards and more mature drivers are available. Even better, I would love to see Nvidia's response. Competition is great. Too bad AMD does not compete with Intel as well as they compete with Nvidia.
austin43
December 21, 2011 at 10:31pm
Gonna wait on Nvidia still...Their cards have been too amazing for me to want to switch over now.
