It has been a year since AMD released the Radeon HD 6970 which has since served as their flagship single-GPU graphics card. With an MSRP of $369 it was only slightly more expensive than the GeForce GTX 570, while at times could be found challenging the much more expensive GTX 580.

Although the Radeon HD 6970 did present gamers with a pretty good bang for their buck and it did support the latest rendering technologies, such as DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.2 and OpenCL 1.2, it was based on an aging architecture. That architecture was of course VLIW, the Radeon HD 6000 series used the VLIW4 revision.

It has been many years since AMD has made the kind of changes that they have with the Radeon HD 7000 series, namely the high-end models. AMD has implemented their GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture which can handle graphical and computing tasks with a high level of efficiency.

Not only has AMD made significant design changes with the Radeon HD 7970, but it is also the first graphics card to utilize the 28nm design process as well as offer PCI Express 3.0 support. Both are noteworthy features, however the move to the 28nm process means that AMD were able to develop by far their most complex GPU yet, in fact the Radeon HD 7970 architecture, which has been codenamed Tahiti XT, is the most complex we have seen yet.

Comprised of an incredible 4.3 billion transistors, the Tahiti XT boasts over 40% more transistors than the GeForce GTX 580. Perhaps even more impressive than that is the fact that there are 1.7 billion or 65% more transistors than that of the Radeon HD 6970 and yet the die size is 6% smaller.

Whereas the Radeon HD 6970 featured 1536 SPUs, 96 TAUs, and 32 ROPs, the new Radeon HD 7970 boasts 2048 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and the same 32 ROPs. That means it has 33% more SPUs and TAUs, while the amount of ROPs remains the same.

The GPU core is clocked at 925MHz, 5% higher than the Radeon HD 6970. The GDDR5 memory on the other hand operates at the same frequency of 1375MHz (5.5GHz DDR). Still, pairing that frequency with a 384-bit wide memory bus gives the Radeon HD 7970 264GB/s of theoretical bandwidth, a 50% advantage over the HD 6970.

Furthermore, while the Radeon HD 6970 came loaded with a 2GB frame buffer, the 7970 has been upgraded to a larger 3GB buffer. All this sounds great, as it should make for one very fast high-end graphics card. However unlike previous generations AMD will not be as aggressive on pricing and at this point they might not need to be if the Radeon HD 7970 performs as expected.

Therefore the MSRP has been set at $549, making the Radeon HD 7970 almost $200 more expensive than the Radeon HD 6970 when it launched. This is roughly the same price early adopters paid for the GeForce GTX 580, so already that says to us that AMD is very confident in what they have created. With that said, let’s move on to check out the performance results...

Hardware - Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition (3.30GHz) - x4 2GB G.Skill DDR3-1600(CAS 8-8-8-20) - Crucial m4 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s) - AMD Radeon HD 7970 (3072MB) - Gigabyte Radeon HD 6970 (2048MB) Crossfire - Gigabyte Radeon HD 6990 (4096MB) - Gigabyte Radeon HD 6970 (2048MB) - VisionTek Radeon HD 6950 (2048MB) - Asus Radeon HD 6870 (1024MB) - HIS Radeon HD 5870 (1024MB) - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 (3072MB) SLI - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 590 (3072MB) - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB) - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 570 (1280MB) - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1024MB) - Inno3D GeForce GTX 480 (1536MB) - Palit GeForce GTX 470 (1280MB) - Gigabyte G1.Assassin2 (Intel X79) - OCZ ZX Series (1250w) Software - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit - Nvidia Forceware 285.62 - AMD Catalyst 11.12

According to 3Dmark 11 the Radeon HD 7970 is 39% faster than the GeForce GTX 580 and 50% faster than the Radeon HD 6970. Those are some pretty amazing results, so let’s move on to the games to confirm their accuracy.

The Radeon HD 7970 rendered 37fps at 2560x1600, making it 23% faster than the old Radeon HD 6970. When compared to the GeForce GTX 580 it was still 16% faster, though this did equate to just a 5fps gain. The Radeon HD 7970 faired reasonably well against the multi-GPU setups, as it was just 18% slower than the GeForce GTX 590 and 26% slower than the Radeon HD 6990.

The Metro 2033 performance was also quite impressive as the Radeon HD 7970 averaged 42fps, making it 35% faster than the Radeon HD 6970 and 24% faster than the GeForce GTX 580. Moreover it was just 9% slower than the GeForce GTX 590, while it trailed the Radeon HD 6990 by a 24% margin.

The Radeon HD 7970 averaged 42fps at 2560x1600 when testing with Battlefield 3, making it a whopping 56% faster than the Radeon HD 6970 and 24% faster than the GeForce GTX 580. Even more impressive was the fact that this single GPU graphics card was just 11% slower than the Radeon HD 6990.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 and its aging game engine didn’t provide much of a challenge for the Radeon HD 7970, even at 2560x1600 where it averaged 77fps. Still this meant that the Radeon HD 7970 was 35% faster than the 6970 and 18% faster than the GeForce GTX 580.

The Radeon HD 7970 managed an average of just 32fps at 2560x1600 when playing Crysis 2. Despite being a relatively low frame rate, it did mean that it was 78% faster than the Radeon HD 6970 and 39% faster than the GeForce GTX 580. Meanwhile it was also 3% faster than the Radeon HD 6990 and just 11% slower than the GeForce GTX 590.

The Radeon HD 7970 averaged 36fps at 2560x1600 when playing Dragon Age II, making it 20% faster than the Radeon HD 6970 and 9% faster than the GeForce GTX 580.

An average of 66fps in Deus Ex: Human Revolution at 2560x1600 meant that the Radeon HD 7970 was 43% faster than the GeForce GTX 580 and 35% faster than the Radeon HD 6970. Meanwhile it was just 12% slower than the GeForce GTX 590 and 16% slower than the Radeon HD 6990.

When testing with Hard Reset at 2560x1600 the Radeon HD 7970 averaged 44fps, making it 42% faster than the Radeon HD 6970 and 16% faster than the GeForce GTX 580. Furthermore it was also 5% faster than the Radeon HD 6990 and just 10% slower than the GeForce GTX 590.

The Radeon HD 7970 was a whopping 48% faster than the Radeon HD 6970 when testing with Dirt 3 at 2560x1600. It was also 24% faster than the GeForce GTX 580 and just 13% slower than the GeForce GTX 590.

With an average of 47fps at 2560x1600 when testing with Just Cause 2, the Radeon HD 7970 was able to match the performance of the GeForce GTX 590. Moreover it was 62% faster than the Radeon HD 6970 and 18% faster than the GeForce GTX 580.

The Radeon HD 7970 rendered an average of 51fps at 2560x1600, making it 34% faster than the Radeon HD 6970 and 28% faster than the GeForce GTX 580. Meanwhile it was just 16% slower than the GeForce GTX 590 and 25% slower than the Radeon HD 6990.

Finally when testing with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim the Radeon HD 7970 averaged 55fps, making it 34% faster than the Radeon HD 6970 and 8% faster than the GeForce GTX 580.

The power consumption figures are excellent, as the Radeon HD 7970 was found to consume slightly less power than the 6970 while delivering on average over 40% more performance. The idle system consumption of 141watts is also the lowest we have seen from a mid-range to high-end graphics card.

Given the modest power consumption figures we were not surprised to learn that the Radeon HD 7970 remains relatively cool when gaming. More importantly the card doesn’t generate much noise when gaming, so we can expect good things from retail products.

Using the Catalyst control center we were able to overclock the Radeon HD 7970 to 1055MHz for the core and 1450MHz (5.8GHz) for the memory. This resulted in a 4fps boost at 2560x1600 in the three games that we tested with, which included Crysis 2, Aliens vs. Predator and Battlefield 3.

Even more impressive was how the Radeon HD 7970 disposed of the GeForce GTX 580, putting it away with an average performance gain of 22%. Again this is made even more impressive by the fact that the previous generation Radeon HD 6970 was 15% slower than the GeForce GTX 580.

Although the percentages are important we should point out that on average the Radeon HD 7970 was just 9fps faster than the GeForce GTX 580 and 14fps faster than the Radeon HD 6970.

When compared to the Radeon HD 6990 the Radeon HD 7970 was 17% slower, while it was just 9% slower than the GeForce GTX 590. Although the Radeon HD 7970 was 26% slower than the GeForce GTX 580 SLI duo, we were actually amazed by that result as it places the 7970 in good light.

It is especially impressive when you consider that on average the Radeon HD 7970 was just 20fps slower than the GeForce GTX 580 SLI cards. While 20fps is quite a lot, when you consider the comparison that is being made it is an incredible result for AMD.

However what puts all these numbers into perspective is the price, and as we mentioned earlier in the review, the Radeon HD 7970 is expected to come with a rather large one. Again, at $549 it is roughly $200 more expensive than the Radeon HD 6970, this is almost a 60% price premium. This makes it harder to justify the 42% increase in performance.

Compared to the GeForce GTX 580 on the other hand the Radeon HD 7970 is just 10% more expensive, while gamers stand to gain on average more than twice that in performance gains. This makes the Radeon HD 7970 over the GeForce GTX 580 a no brainer, the 7970 also consumes considerably less power.

As far as single-GPU high performance graphics cards go the Radeon HD 7970 is the new king. This won’t change until the GeForce GTX 600 series arrives early next year, and even then we will have to wait and see what Nvidia can fire back with. The only issue with AMD returning to the top is that gamers will not see the kind of bargains they did with the Radeon HD 5870.