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

Luckily I do own a GTX 570 SLI setup and I also have the bad habit to make video recorded gameplay/benchmarks for my Youtube channel and I do pay attention to cpu usage, gpu usage, framebuffer usage and all technical info of the hardware, after the benchmark.

I do have seen framebuffer usage reaching its max in various cases on my 570s, but I have never witnessed frame drops or anything of the sort, related to high framebuffer load.

Actually being the PC fanboy I am, I also own some lower end cards (5850s,460 and a 4850) which I also include in my benchmarks. I have found out that even in games that I use the exact same settings as on the 570 system, the 460 for example may hit max framebuffer load, while the 570 will go even higher.

One such example is Battlefield 3 as you mentioned. My GTX 460 hit 1015MB framebuffer load, while my single 570 hit 1200MB framebuffer load, for the exact same part of the game with the same settings.

Both systems were showing 100% gpu load for the whole benchmark, so there shouldn't be any framebuffer shortages there. My best bet is that some games will load as much video information on the graphics board as possible, so they can have faster access. Although this is always preferable, it does not make games unplayable or the performance lackluster, at least not in the cases I have studied.

In any case, since the 1280MB of my 570s is enough for me and since I don't use the cards of my primary system for more than a year, I bet a 1.5GB card would be more than fine until the end of 2012. We need some new consoles in order for developers to start using higher textured/higher spec'ed games anyway. Unfortunately most of them are console ports, that even a mere 460 can play at 60fps.

 

Probably 7950?

I did a quick summary of HD 7970 performance vs GTX 580 based on the AMD's review guide numbers.

Single card numbers from the superior gaming table indicate an average advantage of 44%, while latest games point at an average of 40% (44% without Skyrim). That's pretty nice, imo.

The only questions is, how much cherrypicking was involved in selecting games to test.

 

It's 7950?

 

The complete briefing notes and review guide have been leaked on semiaccurate. Granted pretty much everything has been leaked.

http://semiaccurate.com/forums/showpost.php?p=145785&postcount=2261

 

Already posted

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1607365&postcount=1649

 

Well, this one is much better for die measurement. Now it says much below 400 mm² (~350 for a first try).

 

365 per press deck

 

Yep. Damn good job by AMD, considering the wider bus and high-speed GDDR5 controller. Some kudos to TSMC, too.

 

Do we have any word about yields yet ?

 

Cost-Effective Radeon HD 7900 PCB Already In The Works

 

What would be the power usage in idle -surfing the web,playing videos...- ( not long idle )?.

 

thats not idle........... im guessing it will be like it was previously, not much if running 1 screen a fair bit if running 3.

 

you mean, 2D mode?

 

I'm hoping that the latter will not be true though...

 

Yes, desktop mode.

 

And they most likely did, but cherry pick all you want, a Cayman scaled up by 50% would never do 60% better.

 

I idle at 130-145 W with an i7-2600k & 2x580 on 3 19x12 monitors. Be nice to get that down to <25 W

 

HD 7970 fan noise sample and comparison:

http://www.mediafire.com/?fffo903y6fgwyam

 

I'm in a similar situation, but previously, AMD GPUs would idle significantly higher in Eyefinity, because the GDDR can't clock down (due to refresh rate synchronization issues, Dave explained it in more detail). I'm not sure Tahiti changes that.

However, if you have a Llano (or Trinity) APU and connect your displays to it, I guess it might work since your system RAM would be used for video and the graphics card could be shut down almost completely. Of course that means making do with a mediocre (or somewhat decent) CPU instead of something from Intel. That's pretty much my dilemma for my 2012 upgrade at the moment.

I really hope Tahiti can idle at 3W even in an Eyefinity setup, but I doubt it.

 

http://www.semiaccurate.com/forums/showpost.php?p=145785&postcount=2261
You should better hope, that in Eyefinity with different displays, the card does not surpass 100W.

Too bad that there no hints, that ZeroCore can be used with Lucid Logix' Virtu.