AMD Radeon HD 7970: Promising Performance, Paper-Launched

12:00 AM - December 22, 2011 by Don Woligroski, Igor Wallossek Table of contents 1. Radeon HD 7970: A Holiday Surprise That You Can't Buy 2. Graphics Core Next: The Southern Islands Architecture 3. Bringing It All Together: The Tahiti GPU And Radeon HD 7970 4. PRTs, DirectX 11.1, Eyefinity, Stereoscopic 3D, And More 5. Test System And Benchmarks 6. Synthetic And Tessellation Benchmarks 7. Benchmark Results: Battlefield 3 8. Benchmark Results: Crysis 2 9. Benchmark Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim 10. Benchmark Results: DiRT 3 11. Benchmark Results: World Of Warcraft 12. Benchmark Results: Batman: Arkham City 13. Benchmark Results: Metro 2033 14. GPGPU Benchmarks: This Time, With A Preface 15. 2D Performance Benchmarks 16. Benchmark Results: Overclocking 17. Power, Temperature, And Noise Benchmarks 18. Radeon HD 7970: Fast, Forward-Looking, But Not Fully Baked

A sample of AMD's next-generation Radeon HD 7970 landed in our lab just before Santa. Don't cross your fingers for one of these in your stocking, though. It's not available yet. Is it fast, though? Our benchmarks suggest yes, but more testing remains!

Leading into December, we didn’t really expect to see a next-generation graphics card in the 31 days before 2012. In fact, even mid-month, after we’d already been briefed, the plan was to launch in January. Windows 8 and its accompanying DirectX 11.1 API update aren’t expected for months still, and today’s high-end graphics cards are well-equipped to handle modern games. Despite the fact that AMD purportedly stopped production of its Radeon HD 6990 months ago, we were worried that rumors of poor 28 nm yields at TSMC meant there was no way a new GPU could be readied in time.

When AMD moved its launch date up to today, we were even more bowled over. The official line from AMD was that

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