AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition review

We tested all three cards here at the 30-inch panel resolution of 2560x1600 with all settings pushed right up to really stress the GPUs.

With a smaller 1080p screen you're not really going to be testing a high-end graphics card like any of these, and you're going to be far better off spending your money on a second tier GPU. These top-end cards are for the seriously high-res gamer.

The really interesting thing here, aside from the AMD card taking top honours almost across the board, is the compute performance of the AMD versus the Nvidia cards.

In the DirectCompute titles, DiRT Showdown and Sniper Elite V2, the AMD GPU has a strong lead over the Nvidia competition. If more games go down the compute route to improve post-processing and other effects then Nvidia's current top-GPU might be in trouble.

That said we all know the monstrous GK110 GPU is just begging to be dropped into a serious gaming rig. And that sounds like it would eat through computational tasks with abandon.

At the moment though, we tip our hat to AMD for making the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition a blazing-fast graphics card.

DirectX 11 synthetic tessellation performance

DirectX 11 gaming tessellation performance

DirectX 11 gaming performance

DirectX 10 gaming performance

OpenCL raytracing performance

OpenCL processing performance