Reviews - Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 in three-screen Eyefinity

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Originally Posted by HalloweenJack

hmmm AMD saying its a coding thing and needing an external patch to improve performance..... im sure i heard this before *cough*bulldozer*cough*

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Everytime in the last 20 years when desktop CPUs had major changes Windows throws a hissy fit.

1.)Pentium Pro. Used in-order execution and introduced various other innovations. Yet,Win95 and a lot of software at the time could not take full advantage of its new features and people were going on how the Pentium was a better bet. Guess what?? The Pentium Pro proved its worth with Win98 and was the basis of the Pentium 2 and Pentium 3. Its innovations live on in virtually every desktop CPU today.

2.)Athlon 64 - 64 bit extensions and integrated memory controller. At launch these were considered rather irrelevant at the time. 64 bit support by WinXP and applications was poor. Yet,look at how the situation changed in only a few years.

3.)Athlon X2. First production dual core for the desktop. WinXP had major hissy fits with this and so did many applications due to scheduling issues. It took software patches which revealed its true worth - people still use this CPU even today.

4.)SMT. Digital Research were to implement this with a version of the Alpha which never saw full production. Intel brought it to the market with the P4. SMT caused major issues with XP and multiple applications. Patches improved performance,but it took until Vista and Windows 7 for SMT to shows its true potential. Both IBM and Sun Microsystems use SMT in their server CPUs. The IBM CPU in the XBox360 uses SMT too.

5.)CMT. The first major architectural change for desktop since SMT was introduced with P4. Guess what?? Software support is immature just like in the previous examples.

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Originally Posted by Phage

Using the 580 as a benchline in DX10 (I can't get DX11 to appear) it scored 60.3 FPS in 2011 at 1920*1200, and 41.7 in 2012. A factor of 1.446, which I can't explain....
However, if we apply the same factor to the 75.2 FPS that the 5870CF achieved in 2011, we get an approx score of 52.0 FPS. This compares to the stated 7970 score of 50.3..

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Got the DX11 to work !

Unfortunately, BF3 wasn't available in both years.
Using Metro 2033 across 2011/12, at 1920*1200 and VHQ, a similar method to above, the 5870CF is better than a 580, but less than the 7970.
Anand's GPU Bench 2012 quotes 44 FPS for the 580, 54 for the 7970. On that basis the CF5870s should pull 50 FPS.

Its very nice but way to expensive to justify. I think I will stick with my duel 6950 until the next generation comes out or they start to struggle.

"for its the first single-GPU Radeon that makes a reasonable fist out of 5,760x1,080 gaming."

You mean reasonable first, right?

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Originally Posted by dcwt2010

"for its the first single-GPU Radeon that makes a reasonable fist out of 5,760x1,080 gaming."

You mean reasonable first, right?

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The phrase is make reasonable fist of it - ie have a good go at it.