AMD: Southern Islands (7*** series) Speculation/ Rumour Thread

[Raqia]

Sorry for the OT; I use Chrome and release drivers. There's too many places where something could go wrong in the modern computer, but the reason I blame AMD is because the vid driver crashes before the BSOD, and there's a documented flaw for multiple accelerated contexts in the first Catalyst release to support Flash hardware acceleration that never was addressed in the any of the release notes of subsequent Cats. Now I just reboot the machine right after the first driver crash which happens haphazardly.

It seems like some kind of poorly handled buffer overflow, and maybe when the GPU is finally treated as a first class citizen by the OS as where the trend seems to be going, these issues will get resolved more gracefully. I never got these issues w/ software only Flash after all, so support for the unified memory space supported by GCN will be a great boon (once we get past the requisite teething issues).

 

[swaaye]

I have a notebook with M5870 and with drivers back in the 10.x range I used to occasionally have Flash cause BSODs. I haven't seen that for a long long time though. M5870 was a problem chip from the start, to say the least, particularly with the ASUS G73 notebooks.

Didn't the godly Radeon 9700 PRO(Not sarcasm. I know I bash AMD a lot on the forums, but damn that was a good card. I'd put it in the top three ever made with regards to its time frame) launch with DX 8.1 drivers as well?

Yup. Also, 8800 launched without DX10 drivers.

 

[Alexko]

I have a notebook with M5870 and with drivers back in the 10.x range I used to occasionally have Flash cause BSODs. I haven't seen that for a long long time though. M5870 was a problem chip from the start though to say the least, particularly with the ASUS G73 notebooks.


Yup. Also, 8800 launched without DX10 drivers.

And Intel is launching the latest Atom without DX10 drivers as well. Err… wait, no, bad example.

 

[OpenGL guy]

I have a notebook with M5870 and with drivers back in the 10.x range I used to occasionally have Flash cause BSODs. I haven't seen that for a long long time though. M5870 was a problem chip from the start, to say the least, particularly with the ASUS G73 notebooks.

I haven't any problems with my G73 and I've done some serious gaming on it.

 

[DieH@rd]

http://lenzfire.com/2011/12/entire-gcn-lineup-hd-7000-series-specs-and-price-revealed-60538/

Can anyone tell me how big performance difference will be between 6870 and 7870?

 

[AlphaWolf]

Looking at those charts, if they're real I'd think the 7870 will be right around 6970 performance (more for newer titles, less for older).

 

[Man from Atlantis]

judging by memory bandwidth it seems like ~30%.. additionaly about 7950 1.5GB @march '12 i think they expect GK104 to appear by that time so they launch it just before GK104 hit the market.. think like what happened 6950 1GB and 560Ti

 

[Lux_]

Funny they specify the clocks of the 7990 so early.

 

[AnarchX]

Nice tables, but where was Cape Verde hiding these ~30mm², when it was photographed.

 

[swaaye]

I haven't any problems with my G73 and I've done some serious gaming on it.

The PSOD/GSOD issue was apparently caused by a driver/VBIOS incompatibility with one or more M5870 board revision. AMD and ASUS eventually released a new VBIOS that seemed to at least partially solve the issue. Over 9 months after release! Not everyone was affected by this problem because some of the M5870 boards were not problematic. The problematic boards did work fine with the old ASUS 9.12 beta driver pack but you could not use anything newer from AMD.

But there are still massive threads that are alive over on notebookforums. GSOD/PSOD still comes up among other things.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus-gaming-notebook-forum/

I actually went through 4 RMAs. My first G73JH had the PSOD problem and I wasn't going to accept that and hope for a magic driver so I returned it. The replacement had RAM detection problems. The next replacement had a bad LCD. Finally got one that was perfect though.

 

[LordEC911]

Wow, that chart almost lines up perfectly with what I was thinking back in July, other than the Tahiti LE slotting in where I hoped a 7870 would go but that makes more sense to keep the second tier ASIC under the $300 mark.

Edit- Something is wrong with that... the die size estimates here were under 140mm2... unless the chip we thought was Cape Verde was something else, maybe for mobile?
Both Cape Verde and Pitcairn have weird CU counts.

 

[Kaotik]

Wow, that chart almost lines up perfectly with what I was thinking back in July, other than the Tahiti LE slotting in where I hoped a 7870 would go but that makes more sense to keep the second tier ASIC under the $300 mark.

Edit- Something is wrong with that... the die size estimates here were under 140mm2... unless the chip we thought was Cape Verde was something else, maybe for mobile?
Both Cape Verde and Pitcairn have weird CU counts.

No, it was Cape Verde, it's been confirmed by board photo already

 

[Mize]

If 7950 can hit for <$400 ($350 ideally) it will reign supreme.

 

[I.S.T.]

I wonder, how much does that 6 gigs of RAM on the 7990 cost? That's a hell of a lot of RAM for a single card. The RAM itself has got to cost at least $100...

 

[mczak]

Looking at those charts, if they're real I'd think the 7870 will be right around 6970 performance (more for newer titles, less for older).

These charts are obvious fake, not plausible, pulled-out-from-ass, more fake.
If you read that interview with Eric Demers at rage3d you can easily see it would be impossible for anyone to know the clock rates and such for products release in Feb 2012 (especially for the tier 2 products), since the decision is done pretty late.
btw I think it's a bit unlikely a potential 7890 (or 7930 whatever the potential third Tahiti product would be called) would still feature 384bit bus. Not impossible though.
However, the unit count on Pitcairn seems impossible. I'd expect this to still feature CU groups of 4, hence it needs to be 1536 or 1280 ALUs.
Not quite sure how that will work out for Cape Verde, since CU groups of 4 would be too coarse grained for disabling units on lower-end parts (8 or 12 CUs is quite a large gap).

 

[fehu]

pitcairn and capoverde are GCN?

 

[neliz]

pitcairn and capoverde are GCN?

Any reason they wouldn't be?

 

[Arty]

Any reason they wouldn't be?

But BS News said so!

 

[WaltC]

The point is that the 7970 is using quite a bit less power than the 580 (30 watts or so in most reviews), while still outperforming by around 20% in most reviews. (and the die is like 30% smaller than the 580)

Merry Christmas all! Spiked eggnog? Thanks, don't mind if I do! Get your hands out of my--oh, sorry! You better be, jerk! Hic....

I don't know where the ~20% faster number came from as any kind of upward limit number. It surely is not that! Performance differences will depend very much on the resolution you are running, the software you are running, and of course the settings you are running and comparing. I've slogged through maybe 15 reviews so far and I've seen deltas over the GTX 580 of highs of between ~40%-50% faster, and lows of ~5% faster in some cases. The 7970 seems to really take off and stretch its legs @2560x1600 and up.

I think it is really cool that Eyefinity resolutions are actually *playable,* like Batman runs on this card *sans* Crossfire! The stock GTX 580 doesn't support Eyefinity resolutions--but in the [H] review the 7970 running completely stock beats a more expensive *custom* GTX 580 ($599) made to support triple-monitor gaming and which is factory overclocked to boot! A few interesting pages from the [H] review (I liked the [H] review best for a number of reasons):

Battlefield 3

Only the AMD cards would run Skyrim at 5760x1200. Skyrim did not allow the customized, $600 GTX 580 to run it at all at that resolution. [H] said about that:

The Galaxy MDT GeForce GTX 580 isn't much of a comparison here, unfortuntely, due to the resolution limitation talked about above. We could only achieve 3840x800 resolution, thanks to Skyrim limiting us. Since this resolution is actually a million pixels less than 2560x1600, we were able to run at higher settings, thus 8X AA + FXAA + 4X TR SSAA. Though it is a smaller resolution, it was at least spread out on three displays which looked good.

Deus Ex

Dirt 3

On this next page you'll find the deltas between the 7970 and the 6970 and the Galaxy MDT GTX 580 expressed in percentages as [H] found them. Highest delta between 7970 and Galaxy was 38%. So far I love this card! Best thing since sliced R300 hardehar, har, har...

 

[Mize]

Best thing since sliced R300 hardehar, har, har...

Definitely AMD's best showing since the 9700 Pro.