AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Review

Lost Planet 2
DirectX 11 Gaming Performance


Lost Planet 2

A follow-up to Capcom’s Lost Planet : Extreme Condition, Lost Planet 2 is a third person shooter that takes place again on E.D.N. III ten years after the story line of the first title. We ran the game’s DX11 mode which makes heavy use of DX11 Tessellation and Displacement mapping and soft shadows. There are also areas of the game that make use of DX11 DirectCompute for things like wave simulation in areas with water. This is one game engine that looks significantly different in DX11 mode when you compare certain environmental elements and character rendering in its DX9 mode versus DX11. We used the Test B option built into the benchmark tool with all graphics options set to their High Quality values.

Lost Planet 2 is almost a clean sweep for NVIDIA. The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition performs about 10% better than a stock Radeon HD 7970, but it still trails even the GeForce GTX 670 at the 1920x1200. With the resolution cranked up to 256x1600 though, the 7970GHz Edition beats the GTX 670 by a small margin. The GeForce GTX 680s, however, continue to rule the roost.
 

Just Cause 2
DX10.1 Gaming Performance


Just Cause 2

Just Cause 2 was released in March '10, from developers Avalanche Studios and Eidos Interactive. The game makes use of the Avalanche Engine 2.0, an updated version of the similarly named original. It is set on the fictional island of Panau in southeast Asia, and you play the role of Rico Rodriquez. We benchmarked the graphics cards in this article using one of the built-in demo runs called Concrete Jungle. The test results shown here were run at various resolutions and settings. This game also supports a few CUDA-enabled features, but they were left disabled to keep the playing field level, since AMD's cards can't use them.

The Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition was able to pull ahead of the GeForce GTX 680 at both resolutions and managed to outpace the factory-overclocked GTX 680 as well when running at 1920x1200. Not a clear win, but at least the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition is able to pull ahead of the GeForce GTX 680 here, whereas the stock 7970 could not.
 


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