AMD Radeon HD 7900 Reviews

I bet they will unless the competition is not turning up at all or really bad...
Sounds about right, 550$ for HD7970, 450$ for the 7950 and 400$ for the 1.5GB 7950 makes sense to me (not that I'd buy in that price range but compared to GTX 580 sounds like a good deal).

 

First "real" review I've found:
http://tbreak.com/tech/2012/01/amd-hd-7950-review/

Not very informative but with some OC scores. Just like with last gen Tahiti performance scaling with more shaders looks pretty pathetic (in games, something like 5% for 14% more shader units) - good for everyone trying to save some bucks for not going with the most high-end option .

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5476/amd-radeon-7950-review
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Radeon-HD-7950-3GB-Graphics-Card-Review
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/grafikkarten/2012/test-amd-radeon-hd-7950-crossfire/
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7950/
http://hothardware.com/News/AMD-Radeon-HD-7950-Tahiti-Pro-DirectX-11-GPU-Review/

 

Computerbase has also tested the custom-design Powercolor PCS+. 10% overclocked but only whispering @ 38,5db under load (crysis2). one word: WOW!!

http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/...hd-7950-crossfire/9/#abschnitt_sonstige_tests

 

It looks they have finally knocked off the 5450 as the performance per watt champion.

 

Given that AMD has pointed out massive driver improvements in their Jan-20-RC11-driver, you should be aware of reviews mixing-n-matching performance numbers with different driver revisions between 7970 and 7950.

All-fresh-benchies:
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,8...-besser-als-Nvidias-GTX-580/Grafikkarte/Test/

 

AMD definitely has to think that current Kepler rumors are bunk if they feel comfortable pricing the 7950 for $449. That's a $50 discount for last years performance. They must be pretty confident that GK104 in April won't threaten Tahiti's perf/$.

 

Its faster than a 3GB geforce gtx 580 in the majority of prices and till december that gtx 580 would have fetched around $600 bucks . $450 for last years $600 performance and 70w less at load its not bad at all.

Heck the gtx 580 3 gig is still going for $550

 

While possible - and it's something I had also assumed up till now - they can always point to the 580's price as proof that they were faster and cheaper at the time. Plus a 3-month gap isn't quite as damning as what happened with G200 and rv770 a week later.

 

TPU, hexus, and techreport got ~45% increase in core clocks with a small voltage increase. Very Very Impressive. Easily bests getting 890 on my 4850.(and the power and temp deltas are waaaay better)

Hexus puts in rightly:

 

A design flaw in XFX's custom double-fan cooler for their 7900 boards could lead to overheating VRM: http://www.hardware.fr/focus/59/xfx-radeon-hd-7970-overclocking.html

 

Looks like I'll be waiting a little longer to upgrade my 5870, these cards are still around £50 too much, I know AMD want to make money and such, but surely if they had cheaper cards more people would buy them hence greater profit overall?

At the moment they seem to be pricing themselves just a tad too high and a lot of people are waiting on upgrading to see what Nvidia bring to the table, or waiting for the eventual price drops which I can see happening.

I've yet to see a single retailer in the UK sell out completely on the 7900 series, now this is either because yields are great and they have tons and tons of cards, or because prices are too high and they aren't selling as well as they could, I'm currently guessing it's the 2nd option.

Though wondering where the rest of the cards are going to fit into the lineup if the 7970 and 7980 are priced the way they are, that leaves the 7800 series being equal to or slightly better than the current 6970/6950 and yet being more expensive.

 

For the 2 PC games that I play, BF3 and Skyrim, the 7900's just don't provide much of a benefit to upgrade over my GTX580 I was really hoping the drivers would show big boosts in those game.

Mainly BF3. Skyim is fine actually, esp with Skyboost or 1.4beta

 

They seem to be selling out on regular basis atm, so no.
(Based on the fact that while most shops start to have some stock of some brand, the brand in stock keeps changing all the time since the last one in stock gets sold out quite quick

 

That's true though I think for this time at least most sites got it, some even discussing performance improvements due to driver separately (anandtech, ht4u for instance).

 

It's a pretty big bump over other cards in BF3 without deferred MSAA, but with it the ROP performance holds the AMD cards back (I theorize via some of my own targeted testing) vs NVIDIA. They simply take too longer to render the initial MSAA'd G-buffer. It's a bit of a shame since they have tons of memory bandwidth to throw at it, just not enough ROP power to write all the render targets quickly enough.

Skyrim is just massively CPU-limited in any situations where it actually slows down. You can go to a location where it drops to the mid-30s and get the exact same performance at 720p as 1600p for instance. Not even worth benchmarking in GPU reviews IMHO. Just not very well optimized rendering submission, especially compared to BF3.

 

In the fillrate tests I've seen a HD7950 is easily faster than the GTX 580 (depending on the format sometimes a lot, even if only because the GeForce cards are limited by shader export), http://www.hardware.fr/articles/852-6/performances-theoriques-pixels.html.
So what's so special about the G-buffer that it would be slower? Or does MSAA make a difference here (need new tests if that's the case...)?

There are also a couple of other games where the HD79xx aren't all that fast, but I've no idea why (FarCry2, CoD:MW2, HAWX2 (but no it's not the overdone tesselation which is the problem there...)).

 

Thanks for the insight regarding BF3.

Skyim shouldn't be issue for any high end machine after patch 1.4. The performance was held back by CPU optimizations as proven by Readyboost mod. Now Bethesda added those and other optimizations.

 

In many games using deferred rendering, Radeon suffer more with MSAA than GeForce. It seems MSAA performance is reduced for some reasons with MRTs (compression not working? not enough cache/buffering to ensure efficient memory writes/reads and blending ?)

 

Compression not working with MRT doesn't really make sense imho, as the specific on-chip buffers for storing hiearchical-z data and such are long gone. Though if the caches aren't robust enough things like cache thrashing are probably more likely to happen with MRT (that should affect non-msaa too though possibly to a lesser degree). Not sure blending is really used a lot with these algorithms. I guess we'd need some new fillrate tests with msaa and mrt.