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

Batman: Arkham City

DirectX Gaming Performance

Batman: Arkham City

Batman: Arkham City is a sequel to 2009’s Game of the Year winning Batman: Arkham Asylum. This recently released sequel, however, lives up to and even surpasses the original. The story takes place 18 months after the original game. Quincy Sharp, the onetime administrator of Arkham Asylum, has become mayor and convinced Gotham to create "Arkham City" by walling off the worst, most crime-ridden areas of the city and turning the area into a giant open-air prison. The game has DirectX 9 and 11 rendering paths, with support for tessellation, multi-view soft shadows, and ambient occlusion. We tested in DX11 mode with all in-game graphical options set to their maximum values, at various resolutions.

Despite trying various drivers and application profiles, the Radeon HD 6990 wouldn't scale properly in this game in our test bed. As such, the Radeon HD 7970 proved to be the fasted AMD-powered graphics card in Batman: Arkham City by a wide margin.

AMD's latest flagship, single-GPU powered Radeon, however, was only able to skin the GeForce GTX 580 by about 15.9%. And the factory OC'd GeForce GTX 580 3GB card finished 8.5% behind at the highest resolution.

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