[Arty]

1. TechReport
2. Guru3D
3. Hardware.fr (French)
4. Vr-zone
5. HardOCP
6. TechPowerUp
7. ComputerBase
8. HardwareCanucks
9. 4Gamer (Japanese)
10. HardwareHeaven
11. Hexus
12. Lab501 (Russian)
13. Inpai (Chinese)
14. Zol (Chinese)
15. PCPerspective
16. HotHardware
17. Hardware.Info (Dutch)
18. HT4U.net (German)
19. PCGamesHardware (German)
20. HardwareSecrets
21. HardwareSecrets
22. HardwareLUXX (German)
23. KitGuru
24. ExpertReviews
25. ExpertReviews
26. Neoseeker
27. TechSpot
28. LegionHardware
29. TomsHardware
30. LegitReviews
31. ComputerShopper
32. TweakTown
33. TweakTown
34. TBreak
35. Les Numeriques (French)
36. Les Numeriques (French)
37. Clubic
38. PCMag
39. Bit-Tech
40. Bit-Tech
41. Rage3D
42. Anandtech

[Miksu]

Anandtech

[AnarchX]

212mm² for $349 .

Seems to be a nice future <$199 solution.

[Man from Atlantis]

default vid is pretty high ~1200mV.. H.fr does a nice job with undervolting again and 7870 just draws around ~95W most impressive

[Erinyes]

Originally Posted by AnarchX

212mm² for $349 .

Seems to be a nice future <$199 solution.

Kind of seems like the next RV670. Except for the price of course. $299 would have been a nice price point for it. At $349 its the same price as the outgoing 6970 (or higher if you consider that 6970's have been lower with rebate for a while) with barely higher performance.

In the RV670 days you could buy a HD 3850 for <$100 and even with RV770, towards the latter part of its life you could pick up HD 4850's for about $100 and 4870's for $140-150.

Anyways this has been discussed to death already, no point discussing it further i guess. Seems like higher prices are here to stay, and we have to live with it.

Originally Posted by Man from Atlantis

default vid is pretty high ~1200mV.. H.fr does a nice job with undervolting again and 7870 just draws around ~95W most impressive

Wow...95W and it almost matches GTX580. Thats close to a third of the power consumption for pretty much the same performance

[CarstenS]

Yeah, power efficiency wise Pitcairn is a real a beast. I hope for some good competition in the coming weeks and month in order for prices to go down.

If i may:
There are some very nice gains for GCN (and smaller ones for other Radeons) in Raytracing with the new launch driver for Pitcairn to be had. 30% in some cases, IIRC.
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,87...e/Test/?page=2
(pretty much at the bottom)

[Dr Evil]

The performance is better than I expected quite a bit actually. I wonder if the 7870 was always supposed to launch at 1GHZ? 349$ is a bit steep for it, but that was not unexpected and thanks to the high core speed it actually performs really good. I still think that OC'd 7850 is the best card out of the 7000-series.

[fellix]

Looks like the Pitcarin ASIC is pin-compatible with Barts and Cypress SKUs.

[Psycho]

Anyone who retested the 7900 with the same drivers as used for 7800? (and especially for BF3, which itself received 7000 series improvements (path changes) in the meantime).
7870 really seems too close to the 7950.

[AnarchX]

GCN vs VLIW4 (HD 6930): http://www.inpai.com.cn/doc/hard/168475_30.htm

[CarstenS]

Originally Posted by Psycho

Anyone who retested the 7900 with the same drivers as used for 7800? (and especially for BF3, which itself received 7000 series improvements (path changes) in the meantime).
7870 really seems too close to the 7950.

It is quite close, even when benched with the same set of drivers (8.95.5, see my link above), which again proofs that also with GCN AMDs scaling is better with frequency than with # of functional units. That's IMHO about the only thing that they need to adress in the future - everything else is just... price.

[trinibwoy]

Yeah I'm surprised by how fast the 7870/50 turned out. Power consumption is a nice touch too. It's well positioned to be the darling of this generation.

[CarstenS]

So, what do we even need Kepler for? Uhm... yeah! To drive prices down.

[Tridam]

Originally Posted by Psycho

Anyone who retested the 7900 with the same drivers as used for 7800? (and especially for BF3, which itself received 7000 series improvements (path changes) in the meantime).
7870 really seems too close to the 7950.

We always do

[Man from Atlantis]

Originally Posted by CarstenS

It is quite close, even when benched with the same set of drivers (8.95.5, see my link above), which again proofs that also with GCN AMDs scaling is better with frequency than with # of functional units. That's IMHO about the only thing that they need to adress in the future - everything else is just... price.

There is a pretty well Tahiti study here, it basically confirms what you are saying.. 7970 just starts to starve due to onchip and offchip bandwidth..

http://www.tomatolei.com/thread-20474-1-1.html


Matrix multiplication

Matrix transpose operation

Battlefield 3

[Dave Baumann]

Originally Posted by trinibwoy

Yeah I'm surprised by how fast the 7870/50 turned out. Power consumption is a nice touch too. It's well positioned to be the darling of this generation.

It is one of my favourites . HD 7870 running three 12x10 panels at work, and its very nicely behaved (HD 7970 is reserved for the home PC, of course!).

[Broken Hope]

I still don't understand AMD's reasoning behind this slide.



If I and other 5800 series owners didn't upgrade to the 6900 series, the 7800 series does nothing to make me want to upgrade either, a bit higher performance than the 6900 series for the same exact price, if not more expensive here in the UK.

Looks like I'll be skipping another generation again unless Keplar manages to drive prices down.

[psolord]

Originally Posted by Tridam

We always do

Hello. Are you the person responsible for the awesome reviews at Hardware.fr?

If you are, please allow me to extend my congratulations to you good sir. You are among of the top reviewers out there. Thanks a lot and keep it up!

PS I would just like some faster updates of your reviews, in Behardware, which is the English version of your site, if I am not gravely mistaken.

[Davros]

seems to be saying buy a new card its 25% faster
confidential nda required
what a load of nonsense seriously some of these companies want you to sign an nda before they tell you its tuesday

[mczak]

Originally Posted by CarstenS

There are some very nice gains for GCN (and smaller ones for other Radeons) in Raytracing with the new launch driver for Pitcairn to be had. 30% in some cases, IIRC.
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,87...e/Test/?page=2
(pretty much at the bottom)

Nice gains indeed. And pretty strange nvidia's newer driver is so much slower for compute (which is old news by now) without nvidia even commenting on it.

Originally Posted by Dr Evil

I wonder if the 7870 was always supposed to launch at 1GHZ?

Dunno what the clock target initially was, but the day amd came up with the ghz marketing stuff for hd7770 I was sure it would be 1Ghz or more.
I guess amd didn't quiet feel comfortable enough with 1Ghz for Tahiti (which I think is a missed opportunity) but the smaller (and later) chips didn't pose much of a problem.

Originally Posted by CarstenS

It is quite close, even when benched with the same set of drivers (8.95.5, see my link above), which again proofs that also with GCN AMDs scaling is better with frequency than with # of functional units. That's IMHO about the only thing that they need to adress in the future - everything else is just... price.

With nvidia supposedly beefing up shader capacity by a factor of 2 (and memory bw/rops staying at similar levels), I'd not be surprised if their so far fantastic SM scaling will drop too. Though I think the SMs take up more die area than amd's CUs hence you would actually expect better scaling there.
Also don't forget the 7950 has quite some significant disadvantage in some areas compared to 7870 due to clock difference - rop throughput, setup/rasterizer, etc. So it's a bit unfair saying it doesn't scale as well with CUs than clock (if you would get a performance increase of 5% for 10% more CUs that would still sort of be ok since CUs only take up half the die area). Frankly I would expect the 7950 to be most likely slightly slower on average than the 7870 would it not have a massive 54% memory bandwidth advantage.

[Dr Evil]

Originally Posted by mczak

Also don't forget the 7950 has quite some significant disadvantage in some areas compared to 7870 due to clock difference - rop throughput, setup/rasterizer, etc. So it's a bit unfair saying it doesn't scale as well with CUs than clock (if you would get a performance increase of 5% for 10% more CUs that would still sort of be ok since CUs only take up half the die area). Frankly I would expect the 7950 to be most likely slightly slower on average than the 7870 would it not have a massive 54% memory bandwidth advantage.

Can that explain this Or is there an error?

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...D_7870/13.html





edit: Hmm I quess there were some driver differences...

[Alexko]

Originally Posted by Broken Hope

I still don't understand AMD's reasoning behind this slide.



If I and other 5800 series owners didn't upgrade to the 6900 series, the 7800 series does nothing to make me want to upgrade either, a bit higher performance than the 6900 series for the same exact price, if not more expensive here in the UK.

Looks like I'll be skipping another generation again unless Keplar manages to drive prices down.

Better performance and tessellation, ZeroCore, low power even at full load, better GPGPU capabilities…

[leoneazzurro]

@dr. evil New drivers for 7870 and older for 7970.

[mczak]

Originally Posted by Dr Evil

Can that explain this Or is there an error?
edit: Hmm I quess there were some driver differences...

Indeed. I've seen other Crysis 2 numbers, (pcgh, ht4u for instance) and the 7950 was always faster than the 7870 (depending on the settings sometimes not by much, but certainly the 7870 could not even dream of challenging the 7970).

[caveman-jim]

Rage3D