14 replies to this topic

[Vulpesveritas]

Looking at this made me think it again.

So without overclocking the 78xx series outperforms the 79xx series despite the 79xx series having more cores and a larger amount of memory...
This makes sense how? lol.
The only thing I can think of is drivers.

Edited by Vulpesveritas, 12 March 2012 - 07:11 AM.

[Catamount]

If true, it would mean we're really seeing a neutered 7900 series, and it still performs extremely well. If that ends up meaning huge performance increases in future driver releases, well that'd be pretty cool.

[Vulpesveritas]

Well... the 7970 has 1.3 teraflops more processing power than the 7870, and is about five to six times better than the 7870 at double precision floating point calculations, has a 128bit larger memory bus, 1 gigabyte more memory, and nearly twice as many transistors, 750 more cores, yet is only 75mhz lower clock speed on the cores and a 175mhz higher memory speed.

Can anyone think of anything other than drivers for as why we're seeing what we are as far as performance?

Edited by Vulpesveritas, 12 March 2012 - 08:37 AM.

[Oderint dum Metuant]

Market play.
If anything the 78** is probably over performing, and i think perhaps AMD has kept its 79** performance down on purpose (thats not saying i think they intended the 78** to do what it is doing.).
They'll wait and see Kepler's top end then release a "driver fix" that boosts 7970 performance to either in line or above Kepler.
Looking at the benchmarks i think there is a fair amount more to come from the 79** series.

[Vulpesveritas]

DV^McKenna, on 12 March 2012 - 10:40 AM, said:

Market play.
If anything the 78** is probably over performing, and i think perhaps AMD has kept its 79** performance down on purpose (thats not saying i think they intended the 78** to do what it is doing.).
They'll wait and see Kepler's top end then release a "driver fix" that boosts 7970 performance to either in line or above Kepler.
Looking at the benchmarks i think there is a fair amount more to come from the 79** series.

Agreed.
I think the performance has been kept down perhaps to sell our the 6xxx series chips as they would appear to many people to be a better choice / $$$. Then driver updates come and the 7xxx series sells like nuts.

Or it may be AMD is having issues with the larger memory bus?... I wouldn't think so but eh it might be possible?...
It might also be a psychological ploy in a sense, Nvidea releases the gk104 as the 680, holds out on their higher end chips that would be uber $$$ and then... AMD releases a driver update, and kils the 680 on performance.

Now if Nvidia wants to release a higher end chip, What'll they call it? Even if they called it "680ti or 680se" then there will still be buyer confusion to some extent and therefore AMD has an upper hand, holding a card that falls in between the two cards and the ability to say it outperforms the base numeric naming scheme causes an average, not reading every tech review out there consumer to think that AMD has the better card for more of the time. Albeit at that price point such a thing wouldn't make sense.

At the same time, it would give AMD Fanbois (such as myself) a chance to laugh at Nvidia. "Kepler unbeatable? 7970 lol u mad?" type things.

[Catamount]

It sounds a little too conspiracyish for me, in a sense, but I have to admit, there is a certain logic to this notion of AMD, in a sense, getting the 79xx series out to be marketed, but simultaneously not showing their hand to Nvidia. It would be very clever, though I wonder how fans would react. I could see some anger over AMD hampering their cards, but they agreed to put down X money for A performance, so if, in a couple months, they get more for their buck than they expected... hell that'd make me happy

[Vulpesveritas]

Catamount, on 12 March 2012 - 11:10 AM, said:

It sounds a little too conspiracyish for me, in a sense, but I have to admit, there is a certain logic to this notion of AMD, in a sense, getting the 79xx series out to be marketed, but simultaneously not showing their hand to Nvidia. It would be very clever, though I wonder how fans would react. I could see some anger over AMD hampering their cards, but they agreed to put down X money for A performance, so if, in a couple months, they get more for their buck than they expected... hell that'd make me happy

yeah it does seem to consiracyish to me too, so I will -assume- for the time being that it is just that they're having trouble with the drivers.
But if a driver update comes out right after kepler is released with a sizeable performance increase, then I'll be like "Lol seriously AMD?" followed by my having heavy urges to go troll some nvidia forums just to be... and proclaim to the world how awesome AMD is in coming out with something that performs that well while using that little power as the complete fanboi I am.

[HeroicTofu]

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. Kepler needs to come out already >.o

[Barbaric Soul]

it's only two games in that review that the 7870 out performed the 7970, crysis 2 and starcraft 2.

[Catamount]

The market really does need to having a strong showing from Nvida, much stronger than the past 2-3 generations. I hate to say it, but AMD's virtual gaming monopoly has lasted long enough. Nvidia as a company is safe in their GPGPU/professional graphics niche, but AMD will stop pushing so hard to lambast Nvidia if they don't actually become a threat at some point. Besides, if Nvidia can make another Geforce 8 series, and blow us all away, so much the better.

[Vulpesveritas]

Barbaric Soul, on 12 March 2012 - 02:10 PM, said:

it's only two games in that review that the 7870 out performed the 7970, crysis 2 and starcraft 2.

Even still, the 7870 performs so closely to the 79xx series that it shows that there should still be some power not being tapped in the architecture of the 79xx series compared to the 78xx.

Catamount, on 12 March 2012 - 02:23 PM, said:

The market really does need to having a strong showing from Nvida, much stronger than the past 2-3 generations. I hate to say it, but AMD's virtual gaming monopoly has lasted long enough. Nvidia as a company is safe in their GPGPU/professional graphics niche, but AMD will stop pushing so hard to lambast Nvidia if they don't actually become a threat at some point. Besides, if Nvidia can make another Geforce 8 series, and blow us all away, so much the better.

Eh but at the same time, when was the last time AMD had the single GPU crown for a generation? Nvidia and AMD at the moment are more or less balanced in the market of discrete cards about 50/50. However, it's been a couple years since AMD won performance king. Shouldn't it be time for them to have their turn with that? XD

Edited by Vulpesveritas, 12 March 2012 - 03:23 PM.

[Barbaric Soul]

Vulpesveritas, on 12 March 2012 - 03:23 PM, said:

Even still, the 7870 performs so closely to the 79xx series that it shows that there should still be some power not being tapped in the architecture of the 79xx series compared to the 78xx.

Given the OC'ability of the 7970, I would think it would be pretty obvious that the 7970 has plenty of unlocked potential. I mean the dang thing can out perform the 6990 with some good OC'ing. That's how I've felt about them since thier paper lanch when true benchmarks and testing results were released for the 7970. They are known for being able to OC from thier stock reference speed of 925mhz to well beyond the 1ghz barrier. Don't ask me why AMD decided to clock them so low. But on the same count, look at newegg and see how many 7970's are available now factory OC'ed to 1 ghz and more.

Edited by Barbaric Soul, 12 March 2012 - 03:43 PM.

[Vulpesveritas]

Hey look an AMD driver update two days before Kepler's NDA is lifted. And it supports MLAA 2.0 with higher performance (up to ~80% faster) and quality over older MLAA as well as performance tweaks for the 7xxx seires.

Wait.... So higher AA performance as well as performance tweaks right before Kepler's release.

Oh and some new rumored tomshardware benches are showing kepler up to 10% faster in games at 1080p than the 7970 but with GPGPU performance only on par with the 69xx series. And no sign of any higher resolutions in the rumored leaks.

http://support.amd.c...007Support.aspx
http://www.techpower...ad.php?t=162709

[Rufus Landale]

Another thing to remember is at least by the reports I have read the 7900 series requires a bit less power to run wattage wise which is ALWAYS a good thing. I can feel safe replacing my 5770 for a 7950. A ATI 7800 series or an Nvidia 570 is a much different proposition.

Even moreso for those of you moneybags who like to Crossfire/SLI.

[Catamount]

At this point, the 7870 seems like it'd make a heck of a lot more sense than the 7950, though, as this thread was created to discuss, we'll see if driver updates yield more performance.