AMD Announces Radeon HD 7970; Promises to be Faster than HD 6970

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
It'd be a huge understatement to say that AMD's Radeon HD 7970 launch came out of nowhere, because we were given the card just last week and told that the embargo has been changed from January 9th to December 22. Wee. Those are not the kind of e-mails a tech writer likes to receive when so many other things are going on. But despite all that, the card is here, it should be in stores soon, and it looks awesome.

amd_radeon_hd_7970_122211_thumb.jpg

Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!
 

Doomsday

Tech Junkie
Awesome! :D
And I just bought the HD6970 two months ago, damn, lol!
Lets see what Nvidia comes out with!
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator

That's no surprise... GPUs can't even take full advantage of PCIe 2.0, so it'd be hard to expect things to improve with 3.0. For a proper test though, I do believe CrossFireX tests should have been done, because you have no chance of pushing that sort of bandwidth with just one card. And even then, I am sure 2.0 for a 4x7970 configuration is still going to be sufficient. Until Intel or AMD release chipsets that give us a lot more lanes to work with in those configurations perhaps.
 

DarkStarr

Tech Monkey
Sadly..... Nvidia is going to be late again and AMD early. Grab one at launch because like with the 5k series the prices will start to rise if they have no competition. AMD is doing the opposite of Nvidia since AMD is dropping mainstream and highend working down and Nvidia is dropping low end and working up. Also Nvidia isn't supposed to be ready till next year 3 months out or something and not to have top end cards ready till almost midyear if rumors are right.
 

Doomsday

Tech Junkie
Sadly..... Nvidia is going to be late again and AMD early. Grab one at launch because like with the 5k series the prices will start to rise if they have no competition. AMD is doing the opposite of Nvidia since AMD is dropping mainstream and highend working down and Nvidia is dropping low end and working up. Also Nvidia isn't supposed to be ready till next year 3 months out or something and not to have top end cards ready till almost midyear if rumors are right.
No way!! :eek:

Remember when it was Nvidia coming out with the top end cards and AMD trying to keep up! lol!
 

RainMotorsports

Partition Master
That's no surprise... GPUs can't even take full advantage of PCIe 2.0, so it'd be hard to expect things to improve with 3.0. For a proper test though, I do believe CrossFireX tests should have been done, because you have no chance of pushing that sort of bandwidth with just one card. And even then, I am sure 2.0 for a 4x7970 configuration is still going to be sufficient. Until Intel or AMD release chipsets that give us a lot more lanes to work with in those configurations perhaps.

Huge incentive to use 3.0 though for multi GPU. x8 3.0 = x16 2.0

You no longer have to worry about crossfire/sli performance and everyone is ready to overlook that. They mention it in the article but most people rather just point out what we already knew.
 
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