This is Sapphire’s new HD 7970 video
card that is based on AMD’s reference design. Although it’s just a
reference designed card it does come with some features that are
exclusive to Sapphire. Before we get into those let’s first cover what
AMD has done to improve upon their previous generation of graphics
cards.
One of the most important improvements
over the previous generation is that these new GPUs are manufactured
with a whole new 28nm process. This is important because this new
process should not only reduce power consumption but it should also
reduce heat output. With a lower heat output these cards should run
quieter and cooler. We’ll be monitoring this throughout our testing to
see if this does actually make a difference in cooling and noise output.
AMD HD 7970 Features
These new GPUs also feature support for
PCIe 3.0 and 4k video processing. PCIe 3.0 isn’t really going to mean
much yet simply because the increased bandwidth isn’t going to be
utilized for some time. We still haven’t even fully utilized the
previous PCIe 2.0 bandwidth even with the most powerful graphics card
configurations. Now 4k video processing is a big deal. This means that
when the higher resolution monitors become commercially available these
cards will be fully able to take advantage of it. This will allow video
playback on these monitors to look just as good as they would at the
lower resolutions.
AMD has also made these cards more water
cooling friendly than their previous generation. Their previous
generation had the I/O port populated on both slots so that if you water
cooled the card you wouldn’t be able to get the card to run as a
single-slot card. This made many multiple card configurations very
difficult to work with. These cards only populate the top expansion slot
on the I/O panel. This will make water cooling these cads much easier
in a multi-card configuration. This shows that AMD have been paying
attention to what their customers have asking for.
With these new GPUs coming with 3 gigs
of memory right out of the box is amazing. This will be really useful
for multiple monitor configurations. This is what held back many of the
other cards from being able to take advantage of that technology. With
the extra memory to buffer the image there won’t be as much of a
performance decrease as you’d see with cards that had less memory.
Gaming and applications that can take advantage of the extra visual real
estate will really benefit from this extra memory. Enthusiasts will
certainly love the fact that they won’t have to worry so much about
finding a card that will be able to support this right out of the box.
This is exactly what AMD’s Eyefinity Technology needs in order for it to
be properly utilized. These cards also add support for their new stereo
3D technology.
Sapphire has been really great at
putting their own features on these cards in order to make them more
attractive to the enthusiast market. One of these features is their
TriXX Utility. This is a performance enhancing utility that will allow
you to get the best performance out of your graphics card. From this
utility you’ll be able to monitor your card’s temperature and tune its
performance. It uses a very nice GUI to adjust the settings on your card
and monitor its temperature.
These cards also feature Dolby TrueHD
and DTSHD Master Audio support. This will bring a fully immersive audio
experience to your system when you use this card in conjunction with an
HD capable monitor and a Blu-ray optical drive. I also highly recommend
that you get a good set of speakers to take full advantage of this
amazing audio technology. With the proper hardware you won’t need a
dedicated audio card to produce studio quality sound.
These cards are also fully Direct X 11
compliant and feature support for AMD’s CrossFire technology. These
cards can be used in conjunction with up to three other HD 7970 video
cards for incredible performance scaling. With full Direct X 11 support
this will ensure that these cards will be able to take full advantage of
hardware tessellation in the most demanding gaming titles. Hardware
tessellation it what enables extremely realistic textures and landscapes
in today’s games. Water effects are also greatly enhanced by the new
geometrical processing that this technology enables.
This is the part of the review where we
really get to find out how well these cards performed in real-world
applications. Most users are going to be using these cards for gaming
and we weren’t let down at all. These cards came out swinging and they
didn’t let up once against the hard-hitting GTX 580.
When this card was pushed though we did
notice that noise definitely increased substantially. It’s really too
bad that AMD didn’t work a little harder to come up with a different
reference design for these cards. We also noticed though that these
cards never got very hot though. In all of our gaming tests these cards
only hit a maximum temperature of 66 degrees Celsius. That’s extremely
cool for an enthusiast level card right at launch. With most vendors
also looking at producing their own proprietary cooling solutions, this
should help to reduce both noise and cooling performance.
In nearly all of our testing this card
also beat the GTX 580 by a good 15 to 20 percent. This is pretty amazing
and should only get better as new drivers are released to enhance
performance. We were hoping for a little better than this though. With a
current retail price of about 550 dollars, this sets these cards at
about 50 dollars more than the GTX 580. We were actually expecting about
25 to 30 percent better performance than the GTX 580. One that that we
didn’t really take into account though is that the 580 has had quite
some time now for their drivers to be tweaked and enhanced to get every
last bit of performance out of them. When you take this into account
though, you realize that the HD 7970 is just getting warmed up. NVidia’s
GTX 580 is about as powerful as it’s probably going to get and we have
some time now to see just how much more the HD 7970 is going to get.
We threw everything we had at this card
and even added several new gaming benchmarks just to get a better idea
of its performance. In order to get the best picture of this though we
had to bring some older cards back to the table and run them with their
latest drivers. This wasn’t an easy task and required many hours to
complete. With all of our testing done we now have a very complete
picture of just how well these cards stack up against their competition.
As you can see from our benchmark scores
these cards did do incredibly well and did beat every other single GPU
card without breaking a sweat. It even managed to nip at the heels of
some of our dual GPU cards like the GTX 590 and AMD HD 6990. That’s
amazing performance for a single GPU card. When you take into account
how much more expensive those cards are you really get an idea for the
value that this new card represents. AMD and Sapphire have given us the
very best single GPU graphics card on the market. Now it will be up to
Sapphire and other vendors to tweak this design and get even more
performance out of it.
Conclusion
This has been an amazing launch and
shows that AMD have come back from their lack luster launch of their FX
processors and given us something to be really excited about. It’s too
bad that their processors didn’t fare better because more competition is
always better for the consumer.
These reference designed cards do have
their issues though. AMD should have done more work on the noise that
these cards produce especially since they don’t run as hot as their
predecessors. It almost seems like all of the research and development
was put into the GPU and none was put into the thermal solution. They
essentially tacked on their previous generation of coolers and called it
a day. Many of us here were really hoping that AMD were going to take a
cue from nVidia and improve their noisy cooling solution.
Amazingly that really is my only gripe
about this card. It ran cool and performed amazingly. AMD do need to
work on their physics technology, but that’s something that will get
better with time and driver updates. Aside from these small gripes this
card met or surpassed many of our expectations and should only get
better with future driver updates and vendor tweaks. This is a product
that AMD can be proud of and should help to continue to establish them
as a force to be reckoned with in the GPU market. We now have a new
single GPU performance king and nVidia’s got its work cut out for it. We
consumers though are going to be pleased that this competition is still
going strong.
