AMD Radeon HD 7970 Paper release in the US

[dugdiamond]

i still code in DX9

cos the consoles can understand it

until they start selling consoles that will be DX11 compliant - i will stick with what i know works best

BTW: it is not the DX architecture that governs FPSs, but shader-code-optimisation

 

[oneseraph]

i still code in DX9

cos the consoles can understand it

until they start selling consoles that will be DX11 compliant - i will stick with what i know works best

BTW: it is not the DX architecture that governs FPSs, but shader-code-optimisation

You said it man.

Oh! you don't have some irrational dislike for DX 10 or 11 do you? LOL!

 

[GamerGirlAlice]

i have to build a new system because my evga p55 ftw 200 is breaking down and less stable every day. i actly get get blue screen 2/3 of my shutdowns now. thanks to this forum, i deiced to get a ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z/GEN3 as my new platform. ill probably get a i5 2500k or a i7 2600k to power it till i can get a good ivy cpu.

anyways now to my question. if im reading it right the 7970 is pcie 3.0 right. so my question is with the 3.0 and the 3gb of vram, can it power a Samsung MD230X3 on a single card solution.

 

[alienware]

Usually I would be all up for fisticuffs over this but there's no point.

The 7970 is faster than the 580 even with the early drivers it has.

It's pointless upgrading to one, unless you need any of the features it has to offer that are like, you know?, worthwhile.

1. It is a single GPU card with enough power to run 1600p. The first one ever.

2. It does not have a 1.5gb vram bottleneck.

3. It can run three monitors from one card. Something that right now only the GTX 590 and dual PCB 295 can do. However, both of which are again held back by a lack of vram.

4. It fixes the total bodged way that Eyefinity and Surround run three screens. It centers the windows bar allowing you to go about business as usual without having to drag your mouse over all three screens all the time. It also allows you to snap windows to the centre screen.

Sadly most don't even know this, nor care. They will either buy it for bragging rights and never even bring any of the above into use, making it a complete waste of money.

After all, there are several cards on the market already that can run anything on the market already at perfectly respectable framerates at the resolution that 80% of gamers (according to Steam stats) are using, 1080p.

So, just like the 580 if you are running 1080p the 7970 is a waste of time, and money*

*Yup, you heard me. The 580 is a pointless card

Most notably because at 1080p the GTX 570 and 6970 can provide perfectly adequate FPS counts for far less money. Using the 2.5gb 570 as an example of course, because 1.2gb vram is no longer enough for all games.

Sadly however the 580 does not have the poke to get 1600p games running at acceptable levels, and so you would need to run something like a GTX 590 or 6990. Again, making the 580 an extravagant yet completely pointless card unless you like to boast.

 

[yassarikhan786]

^^You have some good points there, but a 580 is pretty good for folding

.

 

[oneseraph]

i have to build a new system because my evga p55 ftw 200 is breaking down and less stable every day. i actly get get blue screen 2/3 of my shutdowns now. thanks to this forum, i deiced to get a ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z/GEN3 as my new platform. ill probably get a i5 2500k or a i7 2600k to power it till i can get a good ivy cpu.

anyways now to my question. if im reading it right the 7970 is pcie 3.0 right. so my question is with the 3.0 and the 3gb of vram, can it power a Samsung MD230X3 on a single card solution.

The short answer is yes. The GPU is powerful enough and with 3GB of vram there is ample frame buffer for the Samsung MD230X3. This should be no problem even with a PCIe 2.0 16x slot.

 

[GamerGirlAlice]

Usually I would be all up for fisticuffs over this but there's no point.

The 7970 is faster than the 580 even with the early drivers it has.

It's pointless upgrading to one, unless you need any of the features it has to offer that are like, you know?, worthwhile.

1. It is a single GPU card with enough power to run 1600p. The first one ever.

2. It does not have a 1.5gb vram bottleneck.

3. It can run three monitors from one card. Something that right now only the GTX 590 and dual PCB 295 can do. However, both of which are again held back by a lack of vram.

4. It fixes the total bodged way that Eyefinity and Surround run three screens. It centers the windows bar allowing you to go about business as usual without having to drag your mouse over all three screens all the time. It also allows you to snap windows to the centre screen.

Sadly most don't even know this, nor care. They will either buy it for bragging rights and never even bring any of the above into use, making it a complete waste of money.

After all, there are several cards on the market already that can run anything on the market already at perfectly respectable framerates at the resolution that 80% of gamers (according to Steam stats) are using, 1080p.

So, just like the 580 if you are running 1080p the 7970 is a waste of time, and money*

*Yup, you heard me. The 580 is a pointless card

Most notably because at 1080p the GTX 570 and 6970 can provide perfectly adequate FPS counts for far less money. Using the 2.5gb 570 as an example of course, because 1.2gb vram is no longer enough for all games.

Sadly however the 580 does not have the poke to get 1600p games running at acceptable levels, and so you would need to run something like a GTX 590 or 6990. Again, making the 580 an extravagant yet completely pointless card unless you like to boast.

The short answer is yes. The GPU is powerful enough and with 3GB of vram there is ample frame buffer for the Samsung MD230X3. This should be no problem even with a PCIe 2.0 16x slot.

these awnser all the questions i wanted to know. for me it is a hell of a upgrade option for my pc repair build. my evga p55 ftw was a great board but its failing and obsolete. im thinking of getting the ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z/GEN3 with a i5 2500k till ivy is released. a single 7970 sounds way better then my existing dual sli gtx 280's

 

[oneseraph]

these awnser all the questions i wanted to know. for me it is a hell of a upgrade option for my pc repair build. my evga p55 ftw was a great board but its failing and obsolete. im thinking of getting the ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z/GEN3 with a i5 2500k till ivy is released. a single 7970 sounds way better then my existing dual sli gtx 280's

Ya, The Idea of multi card setups, weather SLI or CRFire is just less attractive all the time. They add a lot of cost to the system and not just the cards. By the time you add in the bigger power supply, bigger case, more cooling and wondering weather sli/CF are supported in all the games you play, it hardly seems worth the hassle.

 

[GamerGirlAlice]

my curent build is dual gtx 280s and i have isues constantly. id replace with my hd 4850 card but my evga p55 ftw 200 dosent support ati or amd cards.

 

[kevink82]

Strange its a paper launch in the states, cause i bought one and its up and running. Though the price is a little bit high.....

 

[MaXiMiZe]

I'm actually dissappointed with the performance of the 7970. Obviously it's the better card, seeing as it's a new architecture and uses a 28nm manufacturing process. It does'nt really beat the 580 by much and a gigabyte gtx 580 soc probably matches it in terms of performance. However, the overclocking potential on the card is huge and it's going to be interesting to see how far it can be pushed.

 

[Ya93sin]

At the end of the day, it's not really a contest, the 7970 is a better card, but if you have a 560Ti/570/580/6950/6970 then there is very little point upgrading except for e-peen.

As far as DirectX 11 to 11.1 is concerned, it doesn't seem like a major change to me, just looking at it. But I disagree with the OP saying the changes are extensive, I think numerous is a better suited word for it.

Onto Windows 8, I'm not sure how many gamers would switch to it as their primary OS, playing around on the Developer Preview felt like a step backwards, or sideways because the whole thing was tablet optimised and dumbed down, I like Windows 7 as I can access all the things I want very easily and quickly. There wasn't even a proper start menu on the developer preview, let's hope they fix that, or at least release separate desktop versions of the OS.

When it comes to OCing, the GTX 580 isn't exactly poor, with the Gigabyte SOC versions then the liquid cooled versions you can get pretty ample overclocking results, and it isn't a hot card either, I've never seen above 72 or 73 degrees Celsius when it's overclocked. Granted, it's only been reference 7970s tested so far but hey.

And I don't think the 7970 would be bottlenecked by PCIe 2.0 motherboards as opposed to PCIe 3.0 surely?

What I plan to do anyway is wait until nVidia come out with their 28nm alternative, see how that performs, it's probably going to be close. There's no point in a 7970 for now except for a new build, and even then you should probably wait for the better cooled versions to come out. I don't see many games coming this year which will cause a lot of people to need to upgrade from the current midrange to high end GPUs (i.e. AMD 6xxx series and nVidia GTX 5xx series)

 

[hmmblah]

my curent build is dual gtx 280s and i have isues constantly. id replace with my hd 4850 card but my evga p55 ftw 200 dosent support ati or amd cards.

Have you tried the 4850 in it? That board should most definitely allow an AMD card. It should even have Crossfire support as it's the Intel P55 chipset. I've never heard of a board that only allowed one manufacturer of a GPU.

 

[GiantKiwi]

hmm the power increase might actually make games playable at 6048x1080 (bezel corrected eyefinity) would be glad to be finally rid of constant CF issues with every new game

 

[blair]

you can change the windows developer preview to resemble windows 8 by turning the tablet features off google it.

 

[WARedpath]

Sounds like ATI trying to overtake the GTX 500 series cards when really they should be thinking bigger than that. Let's not forget nvidia have still to show there hand and I'm pretty sure they will do better than there own GTX500 series so the question is how much better? If it's as significant an improvement on what is already a very good range of cards then I fear for ATI. That's not me being a fan boy because I'd like to see the competition much closer as it gives everybody more of a choice of what to buy.

 

[joner]

The 79s are looking sweet.

 

[WiganflightsimSteve]

Been looking at these cards for a few weeks even though i wasn't really planning on upgrading yet. The 6990 and 7970 are serious cards and i could stretch to one if it was the best choice, but the simulator Rig running X-Plane 10 can only use one card. I have two XFX HD 4890's that are usually crossfired but crossfire is disabled. I am though looking at the 6970, what do you reckon?