Reviews - Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 OC Dual-X 3GB

[Badbonji]

So its the fastest single GPU on the market but you think its a midrange card....

The 680 is a good indication to what the midrange 660 will bring.. I think Nvidia will come in for the kill on this and price it way under the 7850 and perform alot better. Much like the 6600gt did in its day.

I think AMD will have to clearly reduce prices now and go in for price/performance power.

It's not the fastest single gpu on the market though, it's merely the fastest at 1080p.

Think back on every fastest gpu in the past. How many of them were only fastest at 1080p yet fell behind at higher resolutions? None that I can think of.

Granted you really need to push the cards in order to see it, but the fact is the 7970 is a more powerful card when both cards are pushed to their limits. This never happened with any other top card in history.

Looks like poor drivers limiting the scaling rather than being weaker. By itself the GTX 680 is faster than the HD 7970 overall at every resolution (sure it loses some, but wins more than it loses).

The fact that it doesn't scale well in multi-gpu seems to be more like a driver issue rather than anything else. Which is likely why the 4-way sli scales negatively in many of those benchmarks. There are cases in that review where adding AMD cards doesn't scale and the GTX 680 wins... The most optimised scaling benchmark is going to be synthetic anyway, like 3dmark 11:



You say it has never happened before? When the 8800 ultra went tri-sli, at first the scaling was abominable like the GTX 680 here (which meant any card configuration which did scale on the high end would catch up/overtake). It doesn't mean that the 8800 ultra was weaker than other competition at the time, because it was still the most powerful GPU.

[Terbinator]

If the 680 is truly RAM limited then the 4GB model should alleviate that, in which case, the super-res results should also jump ahead you'd have thought.

[Jimbo75]

The 3dmark 11 extreme preset is only 1080p though, that's why it's winning.

I disagree that it's drivers in BF3 though, the scaling is there to be seen it's just very poor with 4 cards. I also find it pretty unlikely that the BF3 wouldn't be working pretty well out of the box. Sure there will be gains, but not the 50% that's needed.

It is drivers with the 7970's though. Substitute those TWIMTBP games for something else (AMD doesn't bother with drivers for certain TWIMTBP games as the complete lack of scaling shows) and it would probably win them as well.

[Jimbo75]

If the 680 is truly RAM limited then the 4GB model should alleviate that, in which case, the super-res results should also jump ahead you'd have thought.

It's not RAM limited in most of those games. The only game where RAM appears to be a deciding factor is Metro 2033.



Those 3 blue lines so close together almost certainly means it has run completely out of it's 2GB framebuffer. Metro hits these cards very hard that's why the 7970 wins single-card as well.

There's something else wrong with the 7970 though - it really shouldn't be so slow at 1080p and I've read lots of stuff from people who are pretty much experts but still can't put their finger on why it's happening.

[Roobubba]

Horrible cliche, but the real winner is.... the consumer! Much like the arrival of the 5870/5850, the GTX680 has really pushed the envelope of what we, as consumers, can expect from recent graphics cards.

Now if only games designers would stop giving us poor quality console ports and start really making use of all this graphical grunt properly, we would be in for a real treat!

[kalniel]

Horrible cliche, but the real winner is.... the shareholder! Much like the arrival of the 7970, the GTX680 has really pushed the envelope of what we, as consumers, can expect to pay for recent graphics cards.

(no offence)

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

(no offence)

I agree. If you look at the time the HD5000 series was launched,a few review websites were complaining that the HD5870 was expensive at £300. Some even said that the HD5850 1GB was expensive at £200 too.

[davesom555]

They need to drop the price below the 680, otherwise it doesn't make sense to buy this. Uses slighlty more power too, so you may have an added cost there.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Interesting commentary from HC why HD7970 prices have not dropped yet in the US:

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/news/...t-count-on-it/

[Terbinator]

Interesting commentary from HC why HD7970 prices have not dropped yet in the US:

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/news/...t-count-on-it/

Its nothing more than what the general consensus is, anyway.

The last line is lost on me as well. I can understand how the 78xx and 77xx may be selling like "gangbusters" but the 79xx? I don't see why, especially given their own article is essentially saying they're priced high.

[alisonally]

Really very stunning information!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[mojothejester]

I found this card on Amazon.co.uk for £307. I wish I had the money for one now...