AMD Radeon HD 7970 Launched, Fastest GPU Tested [Slashdot]

[DP ServBot]

MojoKid writes "Rumors of AMD's Southern Island family of graphics processors have circulated for some time, though today AMD is officially announcing their latest flagship single-GPU graphics card, the Radeon HD 7970. AMD's new Tahiti GPU is outfitted with 2,048 stream processors with a 925MHz engine clock, featuring AMD's Graphics Core Next architecture, paired to 3GB of GDDR5 memory connected over a 384-bit wide memory bus. And yes, it's crazy fast as you'd expect and supports DX11.1 rendering. In the benchmarks, the new Radeon HD 7970 bests NVIDIA's fastest single GPU GeForce GTX 580 card by a comfortable margin of 15 — 20 percent and can even approach some dual GPU configurations in certain tests." PC Perspective has a similarly positive writeup. There are people who will pay $549 for a video card, and others who are just glad that the technology drags along the low-end offerings, too.

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[Gamevet]

It's quite an impressive card for the price. Here's a solid review, with gaming benchmarks.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/a...-7970-review/1

[Graham Mitchell]

I just bought 2 Nvidia GeForce 580 cards, and they are impressive. The fact that this is getting 15-35% faster speeds than those cards is amazing. I'm not in the market for a new video card right now, but it's nice to know options like this will be available when I am.

[NayusDante]

I'm skipping the HD 7000 series, I haven't even had my 6870 a year yet.

Besides, I can't see spending more than $200 on a video card. I can wait another year and a half to pick up an HD 8850 or whatever, if anything. PC gaming isn't what it used to be, and there's not much that interests me on the horizon. If I can run Skyrim, Deus Ex, and Shogun 2, I'm happy.

[BetaWolf47]

I'll probably be picking up a 7850 or 7870 a while after they come out. Just got a 1080p monitor and my 5770 is starting to show its limits. Good to see AMD still doing well in the GPU department. We all know they need all the luck they can get after the Bulldozer launch.

[Graham Mitchell]

This is kind of a question that will reveal how little I understand about this stuff, but...

Dolphin (Wii emulator) seems to run a bit slow for me (despite having an Intel i7 CPU and 2 GeForce 580's linked via SLI). Would a card with more GPU computing power possibly improve the speed of that emulator?

[substantial_snake]

This looks good but it definitely falls into: wait for the next BIG card, then snatch up when it hits 200 bucks. I just bought my 6950 and unnecessary computer upgrades are in about two year cycles for me.