Radeon HD 7950 benchmarked, pitted against several other cards

[zanzabar]

Im not really sure which type of 4890 you had but I can't remember them being faster than the GTX 285 at all... they were good cards don't get me wrong but it was like the GTX 580 compared to the 6970 is now. a small handful of games puts the 6970 on top but the vast majority the GTX 580 was faster. thats how I remember things playing out anyways I remember the GTX 275 and the 4890 trading blows pretty good.

now im not sure what 285 u were looking at, when both cards were current they were about even and the 4890 is xfire did alot better than the 285 in sli, and the 4890 oced better and scalled better with the OC. now once the 285 was outdated there was the image quality nerf that made it quicker but u always needed more AA with the 285 and the 285 did not do proper MSAA so it was costly were the 4890 did dx10.1 so it was free 4x and low cost 8x.

[[XC] Oj101]

Just a heads up, I'll have some percentage based performance graphs for two or three tests up very soon. Unfortunately I can't give exact figures, but you can work out very accurate approximate performance via the ratios. I can also say that the 7950 is much much quieter than the 7970. Unfortunately, it won't come near the 7970 due to its castrated core, 6+1 VRMs and two 6-pin PCI-e connectors. However, stock vs stock it's an average of only 14% slower than the 7970 so it'll still offer meaty performance. My information is not via the grape-vine, but first hand.

[[XC] Oj101]

Instead of posting another thread, I'll build on this one. This is exclusive to FlyingSuicide and out of respect for the wishes of the person who showed me I won't publish the exact figures.

While many crave for Radeon HD 7970 performance but can’t afford it, AMD has the answer with the Radeon HD 7950 which offers slightly lower performance at the lower price point of US $449 which should soon drop to US $399. With the unified shader count dropped from 2048 to 1792, the TMU (Texture Mapping Unit) dropped from 128 to 112 and the ROP (Render OutPut unit) count staying at 32, the HD 7950 is a moderately crippled HD 7970...

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[Lanek]

Interesting only 14-15% under... this can let some good headroom for higher clocked models.... Just curious to see the difference in particular game and clock to clock

Baah as this thread still alive i post this here:

http://developer.amd.com/samples/dem...TimeDemos.aspx

AMD have put online the realtime demo "Leo" ...

The video link is broken for now, but i hope it will be fixed soon.

For 7970 owners, download the exe and enjoy.

( thanks D. Baumann on Beyond3D for the info )

Leo Demo

The Leo demo showcases a real-time, DirectX® 11 based lighting pipeline that is designed to allow for rendering scenes made of arbitrarily complex materials (including transparencies), multiple lighting models, and minimal restrictions on the number of lights that can be used -- all while supporting hardware MSAA and efficient memory usage.

Specifically, this demo uses DirectCompute to cull and manage lights in a scene. The end result is a per-pixel or per-tile list of lights that forward-render based shaders use for lighting each pixel. This technique also allows for adding one bounce global illumination effects by spawning virtual point light sources where light strikes a surface. Finally, the lighting in this demo is physically based in that it is fully HDR and the material and reflection models take advantage of the ALU power of the AMD Radeon HD 7900 GPU to calculate physically accurate light and surface interactions (multiple BRDF equations, realistic use of index of refraction, absorption based on wavelength for metals, etc).

Ptex and PRT Technology Preview

This technology preview, using OpenGL, demonstrates a way to implement Ptex (http://ptex.us/) in real time, making one of the latest film industry techniques practical for use in games. Ptex greatly simplifies the process of texture mapping and is already supported in a number of industry standard tools. Because Ptex also naturally eliminates seams, techniques such as vector displacement are easily enabled without need for manual seam fixup. Real-time Ptex per-primitive resolution control and the more efficient packing relative to traditional methods allow for higher quality textures, yet with very little computational overhead. Partially resident textures (PRT), accessible through an OpenGL extension, also allow for simpler Ptex addressing methods by enabling variable-sized slices in texture arrays, an addressing method which would otherwise be far too costly in memory usage.

I add a Youtube link i have find http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gIq-XD5uA8

( huum little hint, look the shadows and what this system of lights give )

[mAJORD]

what's the clockspeed? 800?

[AliG]

Just a heads up, I'll have some percentage based performance graphs for two or three tests up very soon. Unfortunately I can't give exact figures, but you can work out very accurate approximate performance via the ratios. I can also say that the 7950 is much much quieter than the 7970. Unfortunately, it won't come near the 7970 due to its castrated core, 6+1 VRMs and two 6-pin PCI-e connectors. However, stock vs stock it's an average of only 14% slower than the 7970 so it'll still offer meaty performance. My information is not via the grape-vine, but first hand.

Any word on being able to unlock the other cores?

[Lanek]

what's the clockspeed? 800?

yes ....

[mAJORD]

A lot of sites pre-listing it say its 830Mhz

[[XC] Oj101]

Any word on being able to unlock the other cores?

I did cover it I'm 98% sure it's locked at a silicon level unfortunately

A lot of sites pre-listing it say its 830Mhz

Regardless of what other sites may or may not show, this sample was 800 MHz. Remember, there will be factory overclocked versions ranging from probably around 820 MHz to around 900 MHz - factory overclocks are normally small, just enough to give the edge over a stock card.

[GoldenTiger]

yes ....

Not bad then, the difference isn't really that big if you take into account clockspeeds (800 vs. 925).

[Zloyd]

Lets see what the pricing is gonna be like on this ..... could be a real performance/$ king.

[[XC] Oj101]

MSRP is stated in the link

[Olivon]

Not bad then, the difference isn't really that big if you take into account clockspeeds (800 vs. 925).

The HD 7950 got 1792 shaders instead of 2048 for HD 7970, so ~ -14% for shaders and ~ -15% for frequency :



http://www.hardware.fr/articles/848-...rclocking.html

edit :





http://www.chiphell.com/thread-350613-1-1.html

edit2 : New driver + OC 925/1350

[PatRaceTin]

price war again

[kaktus1907]

The HD 7950 got 1792 shaders instead of 2048 for HD 7970, so ~ -14% for shaders and ~ -15% for frequency :

edit :



http://www.chiphell.com/thread-350613-1-1.html

wow that's quite a cheapo cooler + no vrm cooler.. i thought heatsink covers the entire board..

[initialised]

It's ok you aren't the only one.

Same here. 4870x2 showing it's age in BF3

BTW. I'm expecting ~200% scaling in CFX with dual 16x

[Zloyd]

Ok this will be a real performance/$ king after nvidia release there e .... Im thinking GTX660 will take this on and they will both sit around 350$. Well nvidia will prolly sit at 370.

[labs23]

wow that's quite a cheapo cooler + no vrm cooler.. i thought heatsink covers the entire board..

W/o the shroud it just looks like an entry level card.

[EniGmA1987]

If this was $400 instead it would be a better deal and worth the cost.

Ok this will be a real performance/$ king after nvidia release there e .... Im thinking GTX660 will take this on and they will both sit around 350$. Well nvidia will prolly sit at 370.

MSRB says $450.

[MrEs]

$465 - $500 on newegg...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...ription=hd7950

[GoldenTiger]

$465 - $500 on newegg...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...ription=hd7950

Seems a bit bad positioning compared to the 7970, stock hsf isn't worth a damn and the good versions are reeeeeeaaaallllyyyy close to price of 7970. They have around 12 models if you search 7950.

[Lanek]

Say thanks to NewEgg, normally should be around 449$ and may quickly go down to 400$ ... I believe they want to charge on first orders ....

Note the second, is a DirectCU II with 900mhz instead of 800.

[GoldenTiger]

Say thanks to NewEgg, normally should be around 449$ and may quickly go down to 400$ ... I believe they want to charge on first orders ....

Note the second, is a DirectCU II with 900mhz instead of 800.

All of em are high... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...7950&x=21&y=28 If they drop quickly that wouldn't be so bad.

[cold2010]

review

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon...ew-2-and-3way/

http://www.guru3d.com/article/his-ra...d-7950-review/

http://www.guru3d.com/article/powerc...50-pcs-review/

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/P...7950_PCS_Plus/

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/A...950_CrossFire/

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7950/

http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphi...ics-processor/

[SKYMTL]

May as well add ours too...

Reference design + HIS Tech "V2" Review: http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...o-arrives.html


XFX HD 7950 Black Edition Double Dissipation Review: http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...on-review.html


Sapphire HD 7950 Dual Fan OC Review: http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...oc-review.html