AMD has launched the eagerly awaited new Radeon HD 7970 graphics card and now claims it has the fastest PC GPU on the market.
The new Radeon HD 7970 is the successor to the powerful top-end graphics card Radeon HD 6970. AMD now claims that the new 7970 GPU is 150% faster than the previous AMD 3D champion – all this built on 28 nm silicon process. Also supported is the latest PCI-Express standard version 3.0.
Matt Skynner, Corporate VP and General Manager of the GPU Division, commented: “True to the maxim, ‘never settle’, AMD is once again aggressively advancing the state of the graphics industry – this time with the arrival of the world’s fastest single GPU graphics card, the AMD Radeon HD 7970.”
“This graphics card represents a revolution in the graphics industry. To put it bluntly, the AMD Radeon HD 7970 changes everything!”
The HD 7970 runs at 925 MHz for the core while the 3 GB on-board GDDR5 memory runs at 1375 MHz. All this rates the card at 3.79 TFLOPs of single-precision computing power while double-precision power sits at 947 GFLOPs. That compares to the reference HD 6970 figures of 2.7 TFLOPs of single precision computing power and 683 GFLOPs double precision computing power. Memory bandwidth reaches 264 GB/sec up from 176 GB/sec in Radeon HD 6970.
Other improvements include “App Acceleration” which enhances HD video playback and general performance, along with a new power management technology for greater efficiency. Also ZeroCore Power ensures a lower level of idle power consumption than any other card on the market.
Eyefinity technology also enjoys progress as users can now connect up to six displays to the card plus support for stereo 3D. The Radeon HD 7970 can also handle Quad HD, 4K video with full support for 3GHz HDMI 1.4a (with Stereoscopic 3D Frame Packing Format) and DisplayPort 1.2 HBR2.
Benchmarks so far confirm AMD’s claim for having the fastest GPU on the planet although there are rumors that the new video card is not doing too well in older games, most likely due to unpolished video drivers.
The new high-performance HD 7970 comes with a heavy price though. The card is expected to cost around 420 British pounds when it hits the market in early January. Soon after, the HD 7970 will be joined by HD 7950 – a more budget-oriented high end video solution. A bit later the HD 7990 is expected – it will actually be a doubled HD 7970 card that will offer the ultimate in 3D graphics and present stellar performance in games.
Source: Techwatch.co.uk