VGA Reviews by stefan @ 2012-07-31
Thanks to the new price reductions, the vanilla RADEON HD 7970 from AMD still remains attractive, can deliver quite good performances even at high resolutions as 2560x1440 and when overclocked it becomes a serious competitor even for the Nvidias' flagship, the GTX 680.
At first I would like to thank AMD for supplying a sample of their Radeon HD 7970 3GB video cards for testing and reviewing.
"AMD (NYSE: AMD) is a semiconductor design innovator leading the next era of vivid digital experiences with its ground-breaking AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Units (APUs). AMD’s graphics and computing technologies power a variety of solutions including PCs, game consoles and the servers that drive the Internet and businesses.
Our Mission
Lead through innovative, customer-centric solutions that empower businesses, enhance the digital lifestyle and accelerate global digital inclusion."
We should all remember the 22th of December when the latest AMD Radeon HD 7900 series has been launched, starting with the HD 7970 card. The GPU takes part from the Southern Islands family made on 28nm process: Tahiti, Pitcairn and Cape Verde, each aimed at a different performance segment.
The new architecture is called GCN (Graphics Core Next) and is a step forward regarding graphics and computing capabilities.
The Tahiti series is aimed at high end enthusiasts, packed with compute units and a 384-bit memory interface, enough to drive the latest games at high resolutions.
The RADEON HD 7970 GPU has 32 compute units, for a total of 2048 individual stream processors. Each board comes with 3GB of high-speed 5.5Gbps GDDR5, hooked up to the 384-bit memory bus to offer an outstanding 264GB/s bandwidth. This kind of engine and memory bandwidth calls for a lot of data, and this is where the PCI-Express 3.0 interface becomes important.
The PowerTune feature puts the GPU in control and it can push its clock to fill up that thermal headroom when it is available. This technology was introduced at the Radeon HD 6900 series and became a standard on the 28nm lineup.
PowerTune is a integrated on-die system of two microcontrollers by which the GPU can calculate its power consumption at any given time and adjust its clock speeds up or down if it detects power headroom (or lack thereof).
The Southern Islands family is the first to use a Zero Power Long Idle state, which we have also described in the previous HD 7770 and HD 7750 reviews. Long Idle is what your system does when you leave it on and walk away, if we leave our system overnight, or even if you go to the bathroom and Windows turns your display off after a few minutes.
When the driver has got the signal that the display has gone black, voltage to the 3D core is cut and also to the memory controller; AMD puts the GDDR5 into a self-refresh mode, they cut voltage to all the display engine and gets us down to a GPU power of less than one Watt or about 2-3W at the board.
The only thing that is kept alive is the PCI-Express interface, used to jump-in and out of this state in milliseconds. This system is also perfect from CrossFire configurations; with Zero power, in a 4-way multi-GPU system, each of the slave cards will drop into a BACO state and go to sleep until they are needed; this means that we can have our 4-card system idling at about 20W of GPU power, less than a single Cayman.
At default, the Radeon HD 7970 will run at 925MHz for the core and 5.5Gbps on the memory. Recently, the higher clocked GHz versions made their way to the market, named GHz editions, meant to blow away the competition.
Up to 925MHz Engine Clock
3GB GDDR5 Memory
1375MHz Memory Clock (5.5Gbps GDDR5)
264GB/s memory bandwidth (maximum)
3.79 TFLOPS Single Precision compute power
947 GFLOPS Double Precision compute power
GCN Architecture
32 compute units (2048 Stream Processors)
128 Texture Units
128 Z/Stencil ROP Units
32 Color ROP Units
Dual Geometry Engines
Dual Asynchronous Compute Engines (ACE)
PCI Express 3.0 x16 bus interface
DirectX® 11-capable graphics
9th generation programmable hardware tessellation units
Shader Model 5.0
DirectCompute 11
Accelerated multi-threading
HDR texture compression
Order-independent transparency
OpenGL 4.2 support
Partially Resident Textures (PRT)
Ultra-high resolution texture streaming
Image quality enhancement technology
Up to 24x multi-sample and super-sample anti-aliasing modes
Adaptive anti-aliasing
Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA)
16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering
128-bit floating point HDR rendering
AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology
Up to 6 displays supported with DisplayPort 1.2 Multi-Stream Transport
Independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls, and video overlays
Display grouping
Combine multiple displays to behave like a single large display
AMD App Acceleration
OpenCL 1.2 Support
Microsoft C++ AMP
DirectCompute 11
Double Precision Floating Point
AMD HD Media Accelerator
Unified Video Decoder (UVD)
H.264
VC-1
MPEG-2 (SD & HD)
MVC (Blu-ray 3D)
MPEG-4 Part 2 (DivX/Xvid)
Adobe Flash
DXVA 1.0 & 2.0 support
Enhanced Video Quality features
Advanced post-processing and scaling
Deblocking
Denoising
Automatic deinterlacing
Mosquito noise reduction
Edge enhancement
3:2 pulldown detection
Advanced video color correction
Brighter whites processing (Blue Stretch)
Independent video gamma control
Flesh tone correction
Color vibrance control
Dynamic contrast
Dynamic video range control
AMD HD3D technology3
Stereoscopic 3D display/glasses support
Blu-ray 3D support
Stereoscopic 3D gaming
3rd party Stereoscopic 3D middleware software support
AMD CrossFire™ multi-GPU technology
Dual, triple or quad-GPU scaling
Cutting-edge integrated display support
DisplayPort 1.2
Max resolution: 4096x2160 per display
Multi-Stream Transport
21.6 Gbps bandwidth
High bit-rate audio
2560x1600p60 Stereoscopic 3D
Quad HD/4k video support
HDMI® (With 4K, 3D, Deep Color and x.v.Color™)
Max resolution: 4096x2160
1080p60 Stereoscopic 3D
Quad HD/4k video support
Dual-link DVI with HDCP
Max resolution: 2560x1600
VGA
Max resolution: 2048x1536
Integrated HD audio controller
Output protected high bit rate 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI with no additional cables required
Supports AC-3, AAC, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio formats
AMD PowerPlay™ power management technology
Automatic power management with low power idle states
AMD PowerTune technology
Intelligent TDP management technology
Dynamic clockspeed/performance enhancement for games
AMD ZeroCore Power
Ultra-low idle power when the system’s display is off
Secondary GPUs in an AMD CrossFire™ configuration power down when unneeded
AMD Catalyst™ graphics and HD video configuration software
Software support for Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP
AMD Catalyst™ Control Center - AMD Catalyst™ software application and user interface for setup, configuration, and accessing features of AMD Radeon products
Unified Graphics display driver - AMD Catalyst™ software enabling other PC programs and devices to use advanced graphics, video, and features of AMD Radeon™ products
The Radeon HD 7970 sample card has arrived in a plain white cardboard box, fully protected on both top and bottom with a sponge-like material; the board itself was wrapped in an anti-static bag:
Since the top plastic shroud of the card is made of shiny plastic, AMD had to cover it with a transparent plastic film, to avoid scratches during transit:
The card PCB is fully covered with a nice black/red themed top cover:
The RADEON logo is debossed onto the central red line:
On the lateral we will locate the product serial number, along with a “Hot! Do not touch!” warning sign:
Moving on, we will find two additional ventilation holes:
The card features a new fan design with larger, wider blades for better airflow, optimized for lower fan speeds and acoustics. The fan blows air onto the 6th generation vapor chamber heatsink and it gets evacuated outside the case:
Nearby we will also find the PCI-Express 6-pin and 8-pin power connectors:
The board features two Crossfire fingers, along with the dual BIOS toggle switch:
The card features a clean design on the back side of the PCB and it’s total length is 27.5cm:
The card features one DVI port, a single HDMI port and two mini-DisplayPorts. The ports are placed on a single slot so the second one is used only for evacuating hot air:
CPU: Intel I5 3570K Retail @ 4.5GHz
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14
Motherboard: ECS Z77H2-AX Black Extreme
RAM: GeIL Black Dragon 2x4GB DDR2133 (@1600)
Video: AMD RADEON HD 7970
Power Supply: Cooler Master 850W
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 320GB 7200.10
Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840
With the help of the GPU-Z 0.6.3 utility, we could extract lots of information regarding the video card clocks,memory type, pixel and texture fill rate and so on:
To extract even more information, we have used the AIDA64 utility:
Here are the CAL capabilities of the RADEON HD 7970:
For finding out the temperatures in both IDLE and Full Load with the fan set on Auto, we left the computer IDLE for about 25 minutes and then started monitoring with HWINFO32 and logged the values obtained while running Heaven 3.0 at 2560x1440 resolution, with details at maximum and Tesselation set to Extreme:
Before finding out the noise the video card was producing, I have first measured the noise inside the room the tests took place and I found out it was 29.7dBA (with everything turned off).
At all times, the sound meter was placed 20cm near the video card.
The GPU fan was controlled by the latest version of Catalyst Control Center:
In 3DMark 2003, the Radeon HD 7970 succeeds to detach itself from both regular GTX 580 and the overclocked edition from Sparkle.
3DMark Vantage follows the same trend, with the 7970 on top, at the three available presets.
In the latest 3DMark version, the difference between the cards shrinks as we raise the resolution along with the detail levels.
In Heaven 3.0, 7970 succeeds to keep a noticeable difference from the overclocked GTX 580, at all resolutions, with or without filtering
AvP is one of the games where HD 7970 really shines in most of the test resolutions, besides 2560x1440 with 4AA filtering, where it is producing less than 60FPS.
In Warhead, the Radeon HD 7970 works fine util we get to 2560x1440, where lower than recommended FPS are produced.
Radeon HD 7970 has nothing on Dirt3; the card impresses at all resolutions, with or without filtering.
In Far Cry 2 we had a few surprises, mostly in the cases where filtering was applied and was surpassed by the GTX 580.
LP2 is also smooth sailing for the 7970 until 2560x1440.
In all tested resolutions and game scenes, the Radeon HD 7970 succeeded to provide playable framerates.
SF4 produced more than good framerates with all tested cards but again the Radeon HD 7970 fails to impress when 8xAA filtering is applied.
World in Conflict was no sweat for the 7970.
In Crysis 2, the 7970 hits FPS very near to 60 at 1920x1200, but fails to do so at 2560x1440.
Just Cause 2 worked fine until we have enabled filtering at 2560x1440, where it has produced only 49.96 FPS.
F1 2011 is a game where the Radeon HD 7970 goes neck-to-neck with the GTX580.
In Batman AC, the Radeon HD 7970 succeeded to produce playable framerates until we have set 2560x1440 with 8xAA.
Metro 2033 always proves hardware demanding and at the highest resolution we have seen a low average of 26.33FPS.
Dirt Showdown performance boost compared to the overclocked GTX 580 is impressive.
Thanks to the more recent dropped prices for the Radeon HD 7000 series (which includes the regular non-GHz edition), the Radeon HD 7970 has become an attractive card for the ones that want to upgrade from the previous generation. Compared to the stock GTX 580 and the overclocked version from Sparkle, the card shines in most tests and in some cases the FPS difference is unbelievable; most non-GHz cards can be overclocked to 1GHz and over, right through Catalyst Control Center. Without raising the GPU voltage, our sample was capable of hitting 1115MHz on the GPU and maxed out the slider for the memory, at 1575MHz.
Here is a comparison table with the scores in 3DMark 11:
There are still boards on the market that sport the OEM cooling system from AMD and are only rebranded; the system is quiet in 2D mode, but in 3D we may hear the “woosh” when the fan ramps up. Surely, there are custom designs available on the market, some taking even 3 slots with 3 fans installed; the stock cooling though seems to be efficient when bringing into discussion VRM cooling and average regarding GPU temperatures in full load. One other thing regarding the stock cooling: the hot air is evacuated to the back of the case and is not recycled so we may experience somehow lower temps inside the closed computer case.
The Radeon HD 7970 non-Ghz edition is available online for about 350 Euros, while a GTX 680 can be found for 485 Euros.
I would like to thank again to AMD for making this review possible!
