# AMD Radeon HD 7970 official review thread



## nilgtx260 (Dec 22, 2011)

This is the 1st review of HD 7970 from German site, have fun 

AMD Radeon HD 7970 review | Hardware.Info Nederland

Hey, plz pay attention on the performance boost of HD 7970 with i7 965 to HD 7970 with i7 3960X.* So, it needs better CPU too to boost performance*


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## ico (Dec 22, 2011)

Another review - ixbt


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## nilgtx260 (Dec 22, 2011)

In some games it delivers good performance boost, but in some games it only manages to improve itself by a few margin over HD 6970. Overall it's faster than GTX 580 & wait for good driver support to mature itself & this card OC like hell


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## Skud (Dec 22, 2011)

Another one:-

AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB Review

And is this graph enough?

*images.hardwarecanucks.com/image//skymtl/GPU/HD7970/HD7970-73.jpg


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## rchi84 (Dec 22, 2011)

Another review here:

AMD Radeon HD 7970 Review [Part 3/3]: Overclocking, Benchmarks and Conclusion by VR-Zone.com

Good show by AMD. Priced higher than expected, but expect situation to change once Kepler arrives.

Good enough performance increase for Radeon 5xxx owners to consider an upgrade..


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Dec 22, 2011)

AnandTech - AMD Radeon HD 7970 Review: 28nm And Graphics Core Next, Together As One


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## Jripper (Dec 22, 2011)

Clearly better than the 580 (in 80% or more cases)  And yes,the fact about a good cpu fiving better frame rates seems to be true as well going by the benchmarks .


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Dec 22, 2011)

AMD Radeon HD 7970: Promising Performance, Paper-Launched : Radeon HD 7970: A Holiday Surprise That You Can't Buy


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## nilgtx260 (Dec 22, 2011)

AMD Radeon HD 7970 review

from trusted site  LOL only 3 watts in idle


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## ico (Dec 22, 2011)

Can't complain about the price. Yields are low and AMD need to recoup money. 20-30% faster than GTX 580 in 30% smaller die size? Very good gain.

This card is made for eyeinfinity.


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## Jripper (Dec 22, 2011)

Whats the price again?? Sorry net speed went down again to a crawl and can't open the links anymore :S


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Dec 22, 2011)

in simple terms - DEADLY!!! 

another thing its made for overclockers 



Jripper said:


> Whats the price again?? Sorry net speed went down again to a crawl and can't open the links anymore :S



549$ only


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## Jripper (Dec 22, 2011)

Holy underpants of merlin X_X

Need price cuts of huge proportions


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## ico (Dec 22, 2011)

AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB Video Card Review - Final Thoughts and Conclusions - Legit Reviews - was able to OC upto 1165 Mhz Core and 1625 Mhz memory.


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## Skud (Dec 22, 2011)

Actually the price is good for 6900 owners on a single monitor. Any sort of temptation to upgrade will go out of mind.


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## MegaMind (Dec 22, 2011)

I guess Price in India ~ 35K


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Dec 22, 2011)

HARDOCP - AMD Radeon HD 7970 - AMD Radeon HD 7970 Video Card Review


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## Skud (Dec 22, 2011)

What I like most is the tessellation performance, AMD finally get it right.


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## vickybat (Dec 22, 2011)

Man these days i'm joining the party pretty late. I'll read the reviews now.


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## Skud (Dec 22, 2011)

And here's the CFX performance:-

AMD Radeon HD 7970 CrossFire Performance Review - Introduction


Jaw-dropping numbers at Eyefinity res!



ico said:


> AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB Video Card Review - Final Thoughts and Conclusions - Legit Reviews - was able to OC upto 1165 Mhz Core and 1625 Mhz memory.




More importantly performance improves almost proportionately with increase in clocks. And talking about OC, hopefully someone will try these settings:- 

*www.legitreviews.com/images/reviews/1805/7970-newbios.jpg


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## Terabyte (Dec 22, 2011)

MegaMind said:


> I guess Price in India ~ 35K


I feel its more like ~32k


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## Jripper (Dec 22, 2011)

Dear lord. This card is epic win.


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## Cilus (Dec 22, 2011)

Thanks to all the members here for sharing the links. Now going through the reviews. As per my understanding till now, the true or full potential of the 7900 series cannot be achieved with the current reviews because of the lack of tweaks and feature supports in the drivers, deliberately by AMD. There is no software to use its Quicksync like feature for video encoding, no DX 3D 11.1 support. They will make available in the final version of Catalyst 12.2 driver in late February. But the enormous bandwidth and 3GB GDDR5 Ram...already starts bottlenecking the PCI-E 2.0 bus. A perfect solution for 3D, Eye-finity and HD3D Eyefiniy.


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## Skud (Dec 22, 2011)

Terabyte said:


> I feel its more like ~32k



Roughly cards are 1.2 times of US price here. So $550 -> $660 at present exchange rate of 53 - 34980 ~ 35k.


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## Terabyte (Dec 22, 2011)

Skud said:


> Roughly card are 1.2 times of US price here. So $550 -> $660 at present exchange rate of 53 - 34980 ~ 35k.


Hmmm...then lets hope it comes down by the time it arrives here 
Waiting for review by Anandtech!


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## ico (Dec 22, 2011)

Skud said:


> And here's the CFX performance:-
> 
> AMD Radeon HD 7970 CrossFire Performance Review - Introduction
> 
> ...


Crossfire scaling is impressive. (it isn't working in some games but will get fixed) GTX 580 3GB SLI gets absolutely annihilated by HD 7970 Crossfire.


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Dec 22, 2011)

Terabyte said:


> Hmmm...then lets hope it comes down by the time it arrives here
> Waiting for review by Anandtech!



post 6.


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## Jripper (Dec 22, 2011)

^ Yes 
was for the post by ico


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## ico (Dec 22, 2011)

AMD Video Codec Engine - AnandTech - AMD Radeon HD 7970 Review: 28nm And Graphics Core Next, Together As One - their reply to Quick Sync.

AMD is saying VCE will allow more options for transcoding compared to Quick Sync, which is good.


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## Skud (Dec 22, 2011)

So this may be another feature of their next next gen APU.


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## Cilus (Dec 22, 2011)

Just finished the Anandtech Review. Guys, you are concentrating only the gaming performance of these GCN based cards but not on the main purpose of it,computational power and Tessellation performance. And one word to describe it: *Its outstanding improvement.*

In all the cases it is suprassing GTX 580, sometimes by a light margin, sometimes by a huge margin. It is really good to see that with their 1st iteration of SIMD based design AMD is pulling really heavy weight. Here is the quote from Anandtech for the *SmallLuxGPU 2.0d4* benchmark:



> Again the 7970 does incredibly well here compared to AMD’s past architectures. AMD already did rather well here even with the limited compute performance of their VLIW4 architecture, and with GCN AMD once again puts their old architectures to shame, and puts NVIDIA to shame too in the process. Among single-GPU cards the GTX 580 is the closest competitor and even then the 7970 leads it by 72%. The story is much the same for the 7970 versus the 6970, where the 7970 leads by 74%. If AMD can continue to deliver on performance gains like these, the GCN is going to be a formidable force in the HPC market when it eventually makes its way there.



So it is clear now that AMD's new GCN architecture excels where it is targeted to do so: The Raw Computational Performace.
Lets wait and see what AMD can do with their next interations.


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## Terabyte (Dec 22, 2011)

Jaskanwar Singh said:


> post 6.


Oops!! Missed it somehow 
I must say the results are more than impressive


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## Joker (Dec 22, 2011)

not as much gain as we expected in gaming..still good enough.

but this is fermi done right....compute and tessellation performance is much higher than nvidia...!!!

hd 7970 runs cool and power efficient.


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## sukesh1090 (Dec 22, 2011)

hoohoo.....wow....at last AMD did it and this is just the begining.it stood right to the expectations.


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## nilgtx260 (Dec 22, 2011)

Look at this....HD 7970 completely destroyed 3dMark vantage 

*www.kitguru.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/3dmarkvantage1.png

Source


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## somulesnar (Dec 22, 2011)

ico said:


> Crossfire scaling is impressive. (it isn't working in some games but will get fixed) GTX 580 3GB SLI gets absolutely annihilated by HD 7970 Crossfire.


ico that was 1.5gb sli and not 3gb.


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## max_snyper (Dec 22, 2011)

read all the reviews...from that i have a doubt....
1.will the next release hd78xx too saturate the pci-e 2.0 or just the hd79xx will do

2.will these card support dx11.1 or after a driver release

3.exactly when will these cards (hd79xx,hd78xx) come to India & price,any speculation?


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## ico (Dec 22, 2011)

thx for the correction. 



max_snyper said:


> read all the reviews...from that i have a doubt....
> 1.will the next release hd78xx too saturate the pci-e 2.0 or just the hd79xx will do
> 
> 2.will these card support dx11.1 or after a driver release
> ...


1) Nope. HD 79xx isn't saturating PCIe 2.0 in any means. Except three or four handpicked situations where PCI 3.0 runs slightly faster.

2) Yes.

3) Mid January.


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## Skud (Dec 22, 2011)

nVIDIA responds, well sort of. 

nVidia slashes prices to help welcome Radeon 7970 | KitGuru


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## max_snyper (Dec 22, 2011)

Though we should not directly compare a high end card to a high end card of last generations
Performance is quite impressive...for a single card...!
Pricing will be deciding factor in India expect 30k upwards...

And we should not forget Nvidia's Kepler is about to release in Q2,that would be real competition to AMD's GCN....!

Are hd78xx too GCN or just a die shrink?


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## ico (Dec 22, 2011)

max_snyper said:


> Are hd78xx too GCN or just a die shrink?


People are saying HD 7770 is GCN. Can't confirm about HD 78xx though.


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## max_snyper (Dec 22, 2011)

GCN or not GCN if their top end card is performing this way then we can speculate that their mid high cards to perform quite well..!


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## ico (Dec 22, 2011)

Time to talk of the overclock potential:

*www.legitreviews.com/images/reviews/1805/jc2-overclock.jpg

AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB Video Card Review - Overclocked Benchmark Results - Legit Reviews


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## Piyush (Dec 22, 2011)

lolol
it can be summed up as

GTX 580's highest =HD 7970's lowest 
also it outperformed 590 in some benches too


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## asingh (Dec 22, 2011)

I think it is an excellent refresh.


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## Cilus (Dec 22, 2011)

^^ Anil, I think it is the perfect time for you to upgrade to HD 7970 from your existing HD 4890 CF. You always wanted a single GPU solution and I think it is the best option now.


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## rchi84 (Dec 23, 2011)

From my understanding of reviews, the biggest thing to take out from this gen of cards is the fact that tessellation is no longer an nvidia dominated zone. Like cilus said, this levels the playing field for now, even in games like crysis 2 which had to resort to invisible tessellation to show the 6xxx series weakness.

The other thing is that this card is running on what I would consider to be an alpha driver. the performance will definitely improve over six months with new catalyst releases.

Third, these cards respond much better to ocing than the 6xxx series. I expect that by the time kepler launches, we will have a 7980 with 1.2 ghz launch speed as amd seems to have the headroom for it.

These used to be amd's weak areas and looks like they have worked on all of them. That leaves nvidia fans grumbling because they have to wait for the green team to show up to the party.

Pricing is a bit of a sore spot but amd needs to make money so they are justified in charging what they want in a scenario where they can stay ahead of an oced 580 comfortably.

My expectations from die shrinks is more realistic. I don't expect new gen tech to trounce previous gen dual card tech  those days are long gone.

As a consumer I can't wait for kepler to launch as this will mean amd will reduce the prices which would be a win win scenario.

Some of the reviewers are not able to hide their bias. Techradar seems to be the worst. They find it difficult to pat amd for doing something right for once lol.



Cilus said:


> ^^ Anil, I think it is the perfect time for you to upgrade to HD 7970 from your existing HD 4890 CF. You always wanted a single GPU solution and I think it is the best option now.



You know, it's kind of funny no one mentions the 4870x2 anymore. If you look at toms gpu hierarchy, that card is right up there with the 570, 6970, 6950 in dx 10 games.


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## d6bmg (Dec 23, 2011)

Disappointing end to 7970. Hoped for better performance from it. :-/
Over to GTX 680.


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## Terabyte (Dec 23, 2011)

@d6bmg: Wait for couple of driver updates and the performance will improve


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Dec 23, 2011)

Radeon HD 7970 CPU scaling performance review


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## Skud (Dec 23, 2011)

Summary: any modern CPU (only quad cores and above tested) would do for a single card. Good to see those stuck with a Phenom II/Athlon II or get a BD early or sticking with the first gen i5 can upgrade their graphics card without bottlenecking the GPU as long as they game on and over 1080p (which majority of the gamers do).

AMD has a winner here for sure.


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## topgear (Dec 24, 2011)

With HD7970  AMD now holds the crown for Fastest Single GPU 

BTW, is there any review of HD7970 made by 3rd party manufactures with custom made pcb / cooler - just to see what's the OC potential this gpu has under the hoods with some necessary mods


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## Extreme Gamer (Dec 24, 2011)

7970 on 3rd party chips is a long way off. Let the cards hit even the US markets first lol.

The reviewed cards had gone straight from AMD to the reviewers.

AIB partners didnt send any GPUs yet.


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## Cilus (Dec 24, 2011)

^^ Probably you guy's are gonna see some advertisements in the Bazar section, selling some HD 6870 sooner. 

Man I want HD 7970, really.


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## sukesh1090 (Dec 24, 2011)

look at those performance numbers of oced 7970.they are above 590.its up to nvidia now.how it will answer with its kepler.but till that this 7970 gaint will rule the world for 6months.


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## Skud (Dec 24, 2011)

And by the time kepler comes, AMD can release a OCed (read 1GHz+) 7970 in the guise of 7980 or like. 

OC Guide:-

Radeon HD 7970 Overclock Guide


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Dec 24, 2011)

Skud said:


> And by the time kepler comes, AMD can release a OCed (read 1GHz+) 7970 in the guise of 7980 or like.



i read this somewhere. dont remember the link.


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## topgear (Dec 25, 2011)

I think this was not posted here 

AMD Radeon HD 7970 3 GB Review - Page 1/32 | techPowerUp

they have managed to OC the mem upto 1715 Mhz !!!


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## mohiuddin (Dec 25, 2011)

guru3d 7970hd overclock review

one word...awesome.


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## topgear (Dec 26, 2011)

here's some pricing infos 

AMD Radeon HD 7970 Launch in India, price, specs and features - iGyaan.in

*www.fudzilla.com/home/item/25314-amd-radeon-hd-7970-priced-at-us-$54999


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## Jaskanwar Singh (Dec 26, 2011)

AMD Is Ready With Huge Stocks Of Radeon HD 7970 | Maximum-Tech


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## abhinavmail1 (Dec 26, 2011)

Shall we expect 68XX prices will drop in near future ?


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## Skud (Dec 26, 2011)

Not unless the exchange rates cool down, and 7870 is out.


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## nilgtx260 (Dec 27, 2011)

damn, high dollar rate caused damages to gamers 

even 2x 6950 costs 32K & it beats HD 7970 easily


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