AMD Radeon HD 7970 review

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

AMD Radeon HD 7970
Speedy graphics, crazy pricing

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AMD radeon hd 7970

We've put the AMD Radeon HD 7970 through its paces in a raft of different benchmarks to see how it stands up against the competition.

The competition comes in the shape of the previous fastest single-GPU card available, the Nvidia GTX 580, and the previous generation of AMD's top single-GPU card, the Radeon HD 6970.

As these are the top of their respective lines we've pushed them to the max running all our benchmarks at the ultra-high, 30-inch panel resolution of 2560x1600 and all with 4x anti-aliasing too.

The results show a definite gaming win for the new AMD card, with the HD 7970 coming out on top in every single one of our gaming tests.

The two compute tests we used though don't really show up the enhanced computing power of the new architecture, though that's maybe more to do with the software not utilising the new silicon effectively.

Still, the GTX 580 seriously outperforms the new AMD card in the HD H.264 GPU encoding benchmark, though the HD 7970 has it beat in the Open CL-based GPU Caps Viewer test.

DirectX 11 tessellation performance

AMD radeon hd 7970 benchmarks

DirectX 11 gaming performance

AMD radeon hd 7970 benchmarks

AMD radeon hd 7970 benchmarks

AMD radeon hd 7970 benchmarks

AMD radeon hd 7970 benchmarks

DirectX 10 gaming performance

AMD radeon hd 7970 benchmarks

Open CL performance

AMD radeon hd 7970 benchmarks

AMD radeon hd 7970 benchmarks

Platform power performance

AMD radeon hd 7970 benchmarks

AMD radeon hd 7970 benchmarks

AMD radeon hd 7970 benchmarks