Tried it out: AMD GCN - Introducing the Radeon HD 7970 and HD 7950

test Results

Synthetic measurements:

As we can see, the new Radeons and GCN architecture are not averse to Vantage, despite talking about a multi-year metering application. Even the base clock HD 7950 has a definite advantage over the HD 6970, and when tuned, it gets a new boost and gets quite close to the base clock HD 7970. Of course, the king is king, with tuning the Tahiti-XT managed to go over 30 points thickly. Of the GeFors, only the GTX 000 holds its own, even the HD 590 confidently beat the GTX 7950. Although CrossFireX worked, its efficiency was far from perfect.

Let's see 3DMark11 that meets today's requirements! We see almost the same as in the case of the Vantage. The Radeons show a nice cascading difference, with the HD 7950 hitting nearly 1000 points on the King of the previous generation in Performance Run. Tuning has also proven to be effective, but on top of that, of course, is the HD 7970, which, when overrun, almost knocks down the two-GPU GTX 590 as well. When running in Xtreme mode, the same is true, but the GCN cards show even more power, overall neither the Radeon-Cayman nor the GeForce cards kick a ball against the HD 7950 and HD 7970. CrossFireX is very nicely scaled here.

At Unigine Heaven Benchmark, the brilliance of brand new Radeons continues. In terms of scores, the base clock HD 7950 is more than 50% faster than the HD 6970, and the GTX 580 and confidently crushes. The 100 MHz GPU tuning boosted unexpectedly heavily on the already ugly production, all the more interesting as the result is higher than the HD 7970’s overdrive score and GTX 590 numbers as well. CrossFireX showed unprecedented heights in this test program.

In MediaEspresso, the number of clocks and shaders matters less, rather the architecture and the technologies in it determine the speed of the encodings. Once again, we transcoded our standard 1080p TOD file into 720p h.264 format. The results show that the hardware decoding is still better for GeFors, the GCN architecture shows a very significant improvement over VLIW4.