It is announced! AMD 7970

I saw the reviews too. Doesn't look bad at all. I'm sure we'll start to offer them within 1-2 days. I'm looking forward to see what NVIDIA has, but, we won't know for a while from my understanding.

I think it looks beast. Amd have sure changed things up a ton. Maybe enough to change your guys loyalty to nvidia (slightly?) :P either way i see why each is better but i like how they are improving tesselation performance as well as changing up the archetexture completely.

also this is by far the best article ive seen on it http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/amd%E2%80%99s_radeon_hd_7970_43_billion_transistors_pure_performance
What is kind of worrying is that it just ties the 580 on some games while the 580 is the last gen tech... oh well something to keep costs down regardless. If amd is still worse than nvidia then its just cheaper than nvidia, if they both are pretty even then they both go down in price. so i think a win either way.

I'm not impressed at all from the benchmarks so far.

I dont mind AMD beating nvidia by a small margin, but still a good card. IMO its all about driver support. Nvidia is always on the ball releasing profiles to support new games etc. AMD even though ive never had an issue with them, usually are slower at times for support for new games. Neither fanboy of both, i hope AMD sells well for the competition between nvidia and amd.

The estimated prices I have seen put the 7970 put it at $549, which is even more then the stock 580 and it just barely beat the stock 580 in the posted benchmarks. At $549 it would be the same price as the 3GB 580, which should meet or beat the performance of the 7970 at higher resolutions since they will have equal RAM amounts.

Compared to the 570, which is the I am figuring is the level the 7970 is meant to compete against, the 7970 does win in terms of performance, but it's $150 - $200 more expensive depending on which version of the 570 you are comparing it to. How the new GTX670 compares in terms of performance and price will be the real test.

It would be nice if Nvidia would increase the amount of RAM the use in the different versions of their cards. I have several games that exceed 1.2GB of VRAM usage at a relatively small resolution of only 1680x1050. 1.5GB would be perfectly fine, which is what you get in the base 580, but they should extend that base RAM amount to the second best card as well.

My old, and weak, AMD 5670 at least had a full 1GB of RAM while comparable cards from Nvidia, like the 9800GT, only have 512MB in their stock versions.


Edited by jmaster299 - 30 Dec 2011 at 10:42pm

Well its a good possibility that till the 670/680 comes out the prices on 580 and 570 will drop to make them look more attractive, I'm sure once the 670/680 come out they will beat amd.

the 7970 is meant to compete with 580 I believe and 7950 will compete with 570, tho when you look at them it looks more like jm299 said, 7970 competing with 570, just like the 6970 that is very close to 570 vs 580, I'm sure the 680 will put the smack down on the 7970.