AMD Radeon HD 7970: 28nm Tahiti GPU Review

Name: AMD Radeon HD 7970
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, December 22, 2011, 12:01 AM EDT

Dirt 3

DirectX 11 Gaming Performance

Dirt 3

Dirt 3 is the latest in a string of great racing games from Codemasters. Like is predecessor, 2009's Dirt 2, this game sports impressive visuals with DX11 support. “Ultra” settings for shadow effects, tessellation, and post processing elements, like depth of field, then become available to the gamer, and in turn, crank up the workload on the graphics subsystem. The game engine also makes use of multi-core processors for higher performance on top-end systems. We tested the game configured with its Ultra graphics options with 4X anti-aliasing at resolutions with of 1920x1200 and 2560x1600.

At this point, we must be sounding like a broken record. In the Dirt 3 benchmark, the new Radeon HD 7970 was once again the fasted single-GPU we have tested to date. In this game the 7970 outpaces the Radeon HD 6970, GeForce GTX 580, and 3GB OC'd GeForce GTX 580 by margins of 38.2%, 25.5%, and 11.4%, respectively.

Tags: AMD, Radeon, Gaming, graphics, GPU, Tahiti, 7970, DX11.1

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com