AMD’s next flagship graphics card was only announced a few hours ago , and it won’t arrive at the gaming public’s plate until January, but already the tech punditry has tasted it, tested it and spat out a soggy little piece of paper that reads: “the fastest single-GPU card on the earth.” What we’re really searching for, though, is the kind of performance that beats older rivals like NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 580 without blowing the home up like a dual-GPU product . Because it seems, most reviewers agree that’s exactly what this new $549 Radeon delivers, albeit with the few caveats summarized after the break.
AnandTech found that the 7970′s power draw under load in Metro 2033 was 391W — that’s 34W lower than the GTX 580 despite a 20-30 percent performance lead, due to the 28nm process. That said, it was also the noisiest single-GPU card under heavy load, being only slightly quieter than the twin-GPU GTX 590 .
HotHardware , nevertheless, generally praised AMD’s redesigned cooling, saying that the 7970 was “somewhat quiet in real world use cases” and “all but silent” when idle.
Bit.tech noted that NVIDIA cards handled anti-aliasing better in Battlefield 3, making that the sole game within which AMD did not trump the GTX 580 by an important margin. Nevertheless, the 7970 showed 30 percent better performance than its rival in Arma II, and was also faster with Skyrim played at 2,560 x 1,600.
Hexus said the 7970 scored best in its ‘Bang4watt’ aggregate metric however the high launch price pushed it towards the base of the table relating to ‘Bang4buck’.
HardOCP reckoned that the 7970 was no less than 31 percent faster than the 0 Radeon HD 6970 0 and at the very least nine percent faster than the GTX 580, and concluded that “these percentage differences were enough to permit us to play at higher settings in each game.”
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