AMD Radeon HD 7970 review

The first Southern Island graphics card is here, and it's expensive

By Dave JamesDecember 22nd 2011

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So here it is, the AMD Radeon HD 7970 and, for the time being, it's the fastest graphics card around.

AMD has blinked first and opted to release its brand new graphics card architecture before Nvidia, and just before the new year.

It's a brave move by AMD though. Bringing out a radically different graphics design spec, compared with its previous vector processors, in the same year as it brought us a brand new CPU architecture.

Especially given the depressing failure of the AMD FX chips.

We've seen little bits from AMD about its new architecture, the plainly-named Graphics Core Next, before, but now it's humming away in our test bench and throwing pixels and polygons around our high-res screens without a care in the world.

Well, maybe the AMD Radeon HD 7970 does have some cause for concern considering Nvidia is set to launch its newest graphics architecture, code-named Kepler, in the early Spring of 2012.

Maybe that's why the timing of this release is so odd.

AMD has decided to effectively launch the Radeon HD 7970 just three days before Christmas, a notorious deadspot in technology news. We'll see the 'true' launch of the card, with the manufacturer's versions, coming early in the new year.

Though speaking with AMD board partners they're not allowed to release overclocked cards until well after launch.

So all they will be releasing are these reference Radeon HD 7970 cards with new stickers.

That means much of their thunder will be stolen by this here unveiling. And even that thunder will be deadened by the deafening silence of the holiday period.

So, like a junior cabinet minister in a time of crisis, is AMD trying to bury the launch of the Radeon HD 7970?

Maybe it realises the market for a £450 graphics cards is absolutely minute. Maybe the forthcoming Radeon HD 7950 is the card that it wants to really concentrate on. Maybe it just wanted to make sure us tech journos had to work right up to Christmas this year.

Whatever the real reason for this staggered launch is, it's time we took a proper look at what makes this here AMD Radeon HD 7970 tick
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AMD Radeon HD 7950 review

The best HD 7000 series card so far

AMD is really putting the pressure on Nvidia now with its second release of the new AMD HD 7000 graphics card generation, the AMD Radeon HD 7950.

Nvidia is still sitting back waiting for the right moment to strike back, but can it recover from these two quick blows?

Well, we say quick - it's been well over a month since AMD launched its first card of this generation, the AMD Radeon HD 7970.

That was a surprise given that, pre-Christmas, we were expecting both cards to hit the streets at the same time in the first week of January with a possible dual-GPU iteration coming around now.

AMD though decided to give its top-of-the-line, £500 AMD HD 7000 card a bit of breathing space at the start of its life, and now that the AMD Radeon HD 7950 is sat here in our labs it's easy to see why its release was delayed.

Essentially it's almost as good a card for over £100 less.

So AMD's claims to be delaying so it could wait for AMD Radeon HD 7950 units to be in the market (despite launching its big brother, the AMD Radeon HD 7970 well before you could even lay eyes on one) seem to be rather thin.

We think it's more likely AMD realised even fewer people would pick up a £500 graphics card when there was one for £350 that could do the same job practically as well.

To be fair though this isn't the first time this has happened; the previous generation had exactly the same problem in the two top-end Cayman cards – the Radeon HD 6950 and Radeon HD 6970.

There was precious little difference between the two cards in benchmarking terms, and with some judicious use of BIOS tweakery and ROM flashing fun, there ended up being precious little difference between them architecturally too.

But there must be some differentiating factors, some reason for the £150 price difference.

So, what has AMD chopped out of the AMD Radeon HD 7950 Graphics Core Next GPU to make the grade
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AMD Radeon HD 7770 review

Southern Islands architecture with a friendly price tag

By Phil IwaniukFebruary 15th

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AMD showed its hand first in this year's GPU arms race with Nvidia... by turning it into last year's arms race.

While Nvidia has kept shtum about its upcoming new 'Kepler' architecture and looks to do so until Spring, AMD stole the march and released the first of its new 7-series cards, the AMD HD 7970, a few days before Christmas 2011.

That sure was odd timing, but it taught us a lot about AMD's new Southern Islands architecture, specifically the 'Tahiti' chip. It's fully PCIe 3.0-supported, uses a 28nm manufacturing process to pack more transistors onto a PCB than ever before, and apart from offering very quick DX11 game frame rates, it's a highly energy efficient beast.

When your system drifts off into standby, the Tahiti card switches itself all but off too, minimising power draw.

The HD 7970's whopping £440 price made all those neat features all but irrelevant to the gaming masses though, so we're putting our hopes on this HD 7770 to deliver the best bits of the new AMD architecture for a more palatable price.

The 'Cape Verde' chip that this HD 7770 is built around makes full use of the new Graphics Core Next architecture like its big bro, with ZeroCore power efficiency in tow and a solid 1,000 MHz core clock. If it can offer a slice of the HD 7970's performance for this price, it's on to a winner
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AMD Radeon HD 7750 review

AMD's next-gen arrives in budget trim

If AMD's HD 7970 debut Southern Islands card arrived in a fancy tux heralding a bunch of world firsts (first PCIe 3.0 card, first DirectX 11.1-compatible), this HD 7750 turns up to little fanfare in a Burton polo shirt and trainers.

The new Graphics Core Next's architecture has already been shown off by the HD 7970 and those 4.3 billion transistors pack quite a punch, as it turns out, trouncing the very best of last generations' GPUs by around 20-30% at mega-high res.

The HD 7970 is also excruciatingly pricey though. At £440 its staggering performance and overclocking capability are out of reach to most gamers.

The HD 7750 should arrive hitting the right side of £80, making it an altogether friendlier proposal, and these new-gen AMD cards boast some excellent power efficiency by shutting off all but one core when your system enters power save mode.

But what's this HD 7750 missing out on to hit that price point? Does it still make high-res screens sing
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AMD Radeon HD 7870 review

An unassuming graphics card... 'til you unleash the beast within

At long last the line up is complete, with the AMD Radeon HD 7870 andAMD Radeon HD 7850 finishing things off for AMD's next generation graphics family.

Yes, we've seen the (almost) very top-end of AMD's graphics stack, with theAMD Radeon HD 7970 and Radeon HD 7950, and recently we've seen the bottom end of its Graphics Core Next (GCN), 28nm Southern Islands set with the AMD Radeon HD 7770 and Radeon HD 7750.

Why do we say almost the very top-end?

Well, so long as AMD stays true to form we should expect to see a dual-GPU card based on the Tahiti GPU of the HD 7900 series cards before too long. That AMD Radeon HD 7990 (it's not much of a stretch to think it'll follow the naming conventions of the AMD Radeon HD 6990) will represent the pinnacle of AMD graphics.

And is likely to be sitting somewhere in the region of £600-£700. Eek.

But that ridiculous end of the graphics market is not what we're looking at with the AMD Radeon HD 7800. This here represents the start of its enthusiast range of cards; serious gaming starts here, according to AMD.

These are, according to AMD, the cards for gamers wanting to hit the highest graphics settings in-game without having to spend £300 on a GPU.

That's a very laudable position, but not something that's necessarily that new.

At the top end of the graphics market the air is rarefied and there's not the wealth of competition there is around the same sort of price-points that exist lower down the GPU ladder.

At the point where AMD is aiming the Radeon HD 7870 and Radeon HD 7850 there is already a host of enthusiast-class graphics cards they're going to have to do battle with. And typically not all of them are made by the competition.

The Radeon HD 7800 series, code-named Pitcairn after the wee south pacific island with a population of three rather mangy cows, a dachshund named Colin, and a small hen in its late forties, is meant to sit in the gap made by the Tahiti-class and Cape Verde-class cards.

That's a price range to hit between £120 and £350; a rather wide, and GPU-packed expanse to fill with two cards.

So there's a lot of competition out there for the AMD Radeon HD 7870 to cope with, what tricks does it have up its sleeve to combat the best of the rest
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AMD Radeon HD 7850 review

AMD Radeon HD 7850 review

Pint-sized pixel-pusher with performance to burn

The Pitcairn little lad has arrived in the shape of the AMD Radeon HD 7850 and it could well be a pint-sized powerhouse.

The HD 7850 pretty much finalises AMD's current plans for the Southern Islands line up, bar the crazy-expensive dual-GPU New Zealand card which is likely waiting on Nvidia's new cards.

We may see some other odd little revisions once Nvidia's Kepler cards start trickling out, just to fill some gaps, but this is going to be the last standard card for a while.

The AMD Radeon HD 7850 is also the card that's arguably got the most chance of being successful out of this family. At the price it looks likely to retail at, the sub-£200 mark, it could well be the highest-selling of AMD's enthusiast-class cards.

Like the AMD Radeon HD 7870 that we've already seen, the HD 7850 is though going to face a lot of stiff competition at this price-point.

Can it make a name for itself in the face of the opposition?