For a trip to the tropics, what better time than winter? In December AMD unveiled the first of its new "Southern Islands" video cards, the Radeon HD 7970 (part of the new "Tahiti" high-end enthusiast family), promising to release it at the start of the year. Now AMD is presenting its follow-up model, the Radeon HD 7950, which ports the earlier card's innovations to a piece of hardware that will still appeal to hard-core gamers, but won't be quite as expensive ($449 list versus $549 list). Like its predecessor, the 7950 takes on competing Nvidia cards such as the GeForce GTX 570 and GeForce GTX 580 with aplomb. Diehards will want to spring for the extra speed the 7970 produces, but few other gaming-oriented builders will feel cheated by the power the 7950 marshals.
With the 7950 you'll find all the same advancements and benefits present on the 7970. Chief among these is the new Graphics Core Next architecture, which improves each compute unit's ability to simultaneously execute instructions from multiple kernels, and delivers an increased number of instructions per clock cycle per square millimeter of GPU space. An updated vapor chamber design and a wider fan with new blades that are capable of wicking away more heat have also been implemented on the card.
PowerTune technology offers intelligent monitoring of energy usage on an application-by-application basis when the proper electrical and thermal headroom are available; and ZeroCore Power Technology shuts down the GPU and turns off the fan during long idle states, for a reduction in idle power usage of up to 95 percent. AMD says this delivers additional benefits in CrossFireX configurations: Secondary GPUs are always in the ZeroCore Power state when they're not in use, with the primary GPU joining them during long idle periods, thus saving even more power in electricity-hungry systems.
There are also the traditional ways in which the 7950 lines up with the 7970. This card, like the earlier one, measures 11 inches long and requires two additional six-pin cables from your power supply. It has four display outputs: DVI, HDMI, and two Mini DisplayPort. As with every video card in this class, the 7950's use of a large heat sink and fan assembly means it will block an adjacent expansion slot. All 7900 series cards support the newest update to the PCI Express (PCIe) bus interface, PCIe? 3.0. DirectX 11 (and, when Windows 8 comes around, DX11.1) is supported, as well; so is AMD's proprietary Eyefinity multimonitor technology, which recent Catalyst driver updates let use new monitor configurations and multiple larger monitors (running at resolutions like 1,920 by 1,200 and 2,560 by 1,600), enhanced with flexible bezel compensation. With the latter, you can even drive three stereoscopic 3D displays at once if they support DisplayPort 3D, and the card can even route multiple independent audio streams.
Major differences between the 7950 and 7970 are few, and located mostly in the hardware areas you'd expect. Though the 7950 is based on the same 28nm production process as the 7970 and utilizes the same number of transistors (4.31 billion), it is in most other ways a moderately scaled-down version of its predecessor. Its base engine clock is 800MHz rather than 925MHz (though there's head room for adventurous manufacturers to overclock it more); it contains 1,792 stream processors to the 7970?s 2,048, for 2.87 teraflops of compute power versus 3.79 teraflops; and it packs 112 texture units rather than 128. It has the same number of ROPs (32) and uses the same amount and type of RAM (3GB GDDR5) over the same size memory path (384 bits), but runs at a slower memory clock (1,250MHz versus 1,375MHz), with a data rate of 5Gbps as opposed to 5.5Gbps and memory bandwidth of 240GBps as opposed to 264GBps. Its TDP is rated at 200 watts, as compared with the 7970?s 250 watts.
Performance on the 7950 lands pretty much where you'd expect given its specs and its positioning this generation: just behind the 7970, but in most cases ahead of comparable Nvidia offerings. On Futuremark 3DMark 11 using the Extreme preset, for example, the 7950 earned a score of 2,293, compared with 2,734 for the 7970, 2,115 for the GTX 580, and 1,844 for the GTX 570. Alien vs. Predator saw actually playable frame rates of 31.4 frames per second (fps) at 2,560 by 1,600, compared with the 34.7fps of the 7970, the 27.5fps of the GTX 580, and the 22.8fps of the GTX 570. (Results at 1,920 by 1,200 were naturally better still, but maintained the same basic pattern.)
As should perhaps be expected, the 7950 stumbled a bit on Nvidia-oriented games: Its 115fps on HAWX 2 was behind both the 118fps of the GTX 570 and the 140fps of the GTX 580; and though the 7950 just scraped by the GTX 570 on Lost Planet 2 (45.7fps versus 45.2 at 1,920 by 1,200 and 34.2fps versus 32.2fps at 2,560 by 1,600), it didn't surpass the GTX 580 in either case (51.7fps and 36.9fps at the respective resolutions). On the more platform-agnostic Heaven Benchmark, however, the 7950 was a decisive winner over both the GTX 570 and the GTX 580 (31.7fps versus 23.6fps and 38.1fps at 1,920 by 1,200, and 21.5fps versus 10.4fps and 18.4fps at 2,560 by 1,600).
One area in which the 7950 skunks its competition is power usage; AMD's technological improvements in this area remain as impressive as they were with the 7970. We used an Extech Datalogger to measure full-system power usage on our test PC, and under full load (running 3DMark 11 with the resolution and all of the detail settings maxed out), the computer pulled 210.2 watts?a major improvement over the 246.5 watts of the GTX 570 and the 264.6 of the GTX 580, and even the 249.8 watts of the last-generation top-of-the-line AMD Radeon HD 6970 (which the 7950 otherwise trounced in every test).
The AMD Radeon HD 7950 isn't going to help you if you want the absolute fastest single-GPU video card out there?for now, that remains our Editors' Choice, the 7970. But if you aren't inclined to shell out the extra $100 for the slightly improved frame rates you'll get (something we can understand), the 7950 is a top-notch choice for the serious PC gamer. We'd declare it the next best thing (and a longer-lasting alternative) to a vacation to the real Tahiti, but who are we kidding? Even a video card as excellent as this one can only do so much.
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/UBNz0CPNcoU/0,2817,2399570,00.asp
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