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[pestul]

I wonder if the prices will slowly slide down on their own in February. Probably not, but one can hope.

 

[DonasaurusRex]

Yeah, the best that could have been hoped for was probably $50 cheaper on both 7970 and 7950 (399/499) and that would have been nice. As is the pricing is understandable and justifiable, but not particularly exciting.

Still waiting for the lower priced stuff here. Wish we knew more about that roadmap.

Odd that the 7950 is only down 4% when clocked equally. Guess shaders aren't the bottleneck, but then what is?

good question, maybe AMD is prepping a revision to the 7970 to compete with kepler shortly after its released. Normally we could point to the CPU as being way too slow to keep up with powerful cards. Not so sure now.

 

[artist]

Average oc result is a shade below 40%. This is mind boggling because the previous best overclocking champ was the GTX460 and it was below 30% ..

 

[luca_29_bg]

guys but the custom 7970 version from sapphire ? I'm waiting Toxic 3g.....

 

[derFeef]

guys but the custom 7970 version from sapphire ? I'm waiting Toxic 3g.....

Me too!

Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 Atomic RX - 1335 MHz 1435 MHz
Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 Atomic WC - 1335 MHz 1435 MHz
Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 Toxic 3G - 1125 MHz 1400 MHz

 

[specialguy]

speculation is those 1300 mhz cards are fake. so far there seems to be a ~1ghz limit on 7970 factory overclocks.

 

[pestul]

Holy shit @ that graph above. That's amazing performance given it is nearly clock for clock scaling with the 7970. I haven't read all the reviews, but have any actually been able to bump the voltage etc. yet?

 

[luca_29_bg]

speculation is those 1300 mhz cards are fake. so far there seems to be a ~1ghz limit on 7970 factory overclocks.

so the toxic at 1.125 is fake too ? I mean, some reference cards can go beyond this...O_O

 

[Soi-Fong]

Man really wanna get a 7970 or a 7950 now, but in the back of my mind, I know that Nvidia might be releasing something better!

 

[specialguy]

so the toxic at 1.125 is fake too ? I mean, some reference cards can go beyond this...O_O

It would be more like an AMD enforced limit from on high. Dont take what I say as gospel of course, maybe those monsters are coming, 1300+ mhz just seems unlikely to me from any factory card.

The current fastest announced factory overclocks are all 1010 mhz I think. I have read forum posts speculating a possible ~1ghz limit from AMD, presumably at least for now.

Heck if AMD was planning on eventually releasing some type of say, 1200-1300 mhz 7980 type card perhaps to respond to Kepler one day, such a limit would protect them from being undermined.

Man really wanna get a 7970 or a 7950 now, but in the back of my mind, I know that Nvidia might be releasing something better!

Yeah, it's probably a good idea to wait possibly 3-4 months until presumably everything from this gen is released. We havent had a new slew of cards in seemingly ages so might as well see what cards are on the table before committing, it would be dumb to lock in at this time.

 

[Soi-Fong]

It would be more like an AMD enforced limit from on high. Dont take what I say as gospel of course, maybe those monsters are coming, 1300+ mhz just seems unlikely to me from any factory card.

The current fastest announced factory overclocks are all 1010 mhz I think. I have read forum posts speculating a possible ~1ghz limit from AMD, presumably at least for now.

Heck if AMD was planning on eventually releasing some type of say, 1200-1300 mhz 7980 type card perhaps to respond to Kepler one day, such a limit would protect them from being undermined.



Yeah, it's probably a good idea to wait possibly 3-4 months until presumably everything from this gen is released. We havent had a new slew of cards in seemingly ages so might as well see what cards are on the table before committing, it would be dumb to lock in at this time.

It helps also! Get to save more money! haha

 

[kitch9]

I'll bet AMD are binning the 1200mhz+ low voltage capable chips ready for the Nvidia onslaught, because looking at the clocks these cards are getting up to I'll bet there's plenty of prime chips coming of the production line.

 

[artist]

I'll bet AMD are binning the 1200mhz+ low voltage capable chips ready for the Nvidia onslaught, because looking at the clocks these cards are getting up to I'll bet there's plenty of prime chips coming of the production line.

AMD is probably already binning higher voltage (low leakage) chips for the 7990 or New Zealand. If required to combat against Kepler, they might release a higher clocked SKU but I doubt it'd be in the 1.2GHz range, most likely topping out at 1.1GHz, which would still net them an extra 15-20% boost.

 

[Chris R]

Man really wanna get a 7970 or a 7950 now, but in the back of my mind, I know that Nvidia might be releasing something better!

I'm in the same boat. The good thing about waiting is maybe the cards will get a better pack in game in a month or two, I don't want DIRT 3

 

[luca_29_bg]

AMD is probably already binning higher voltage (low leakage) chips for the 7990 or New Zealand. If required to combat against Kepler, they might release a higher clocked SKU but I doubt it'd be in the 1.2GHz range, most likely topping out at 1.1GHz, which would still net them an extra 15-20% boost.

So Toxic edition at 1.125 is out of question from sapphire in the near future ? I was waiting that card...

 

[artist]

So Toxic edition at 1.125 is out of question from sapphire in the near future ? I was waiting that card...

No, I meant that IMO the max AMD's going to release an official SKU like 7980 or 7975 etc is 1.1GHz. Their AIC partners could very well go ahead with a limited run of cards with exotic frequencies ..

 

[luca_29_bg]

No, I meant that IMO the max AMD's going to release an official SKU like 7980 or 7975 etc is 1.1GHz. Their AIC partners could very well go ahead with a limited run of cards with exotic frequencies ..

i really hope that it will be the case..i will have soon the money but the card that i want is not out there...funny eh? ^^

 

[Refreshment.01]

Possibly already answered in some part of the thread. What date it is expected for the 7870 to release, what performance levels and power comsumption in comparison to the 6000 series?

That is if the data has been leaked or speculated by solid sources. If anypne could share some light it would be apreciated.

 

[artist]

Possibly already answered in some part of the thread. What date it is expected for the 7870 to release, what performance levels and power comsumption in comparison to the 6000 series?

That is if the data has been leaked or speculated by solid sources. If anypne could share some light it would be apreciated.

Official word is Q1 so anytime before April. Expect performance of 6970/6950 with the consumption of 6870/6850 or lower.

 

[teh_pwn]

No one, absolutely no one, should be even contemplating, let alone going out, to buy the 7900 series until GK104/GTX 660 Ti arrives in April.

The temporary pleasure will not be the worth pain in the wallet 2 months later.

What games will it matter in? I'm using my 6950x2 CF that I built a year ago and it still runs things 90% maxed at high framerate (after tweaking settings at release, sure).

Waiting may be good for price though. I could easily see the 7950 drop to $225-275 within a few months if Nvidia is competitive.

 

[BoobPhysics101]

What games will it matter in? I'm using my 6950x2 CF that I built a year ago and it still runs things 90% maxed at high framerate (after tweaking settings at release, sure).

Waiting may be good for price though. I could easily see the 7950 drop to $225-275 within a few months if Nvidia is competitive.

You're crazy. 7950 won't drop any lower than $350 for the next 3 months

 

[artist]

Cape Verde
~125mm2 (smaller than 4770)
*Guesses*
~6850 performance
~$100 price

AMD gearing up for the Cape Verde launch?

http://verdetrol.com/

A small overnight UPS package arrived this morning that had what sounded like a medicine bottle inside. I opened it up and it turned out to be a prescription bottle from AMD with 28 doses of Verdetrol 1GHz.

The bottle says that the pills are for natural performance enhancement and that we are to give our video card 1 tablet by the fan intake four times a day. This is obviously a marketing promotion for an upcoming product release of a video card that is clocked at 1GHz. The AMD Radeon HD 7770 (Cape Verde) is said to run at 1GHz, so this could mean that the Radeon HD 7770 is very close to launching. The label on the bottle was well done with 28 doses (28nm manufacturing process), a prescription number of 1337-2012 (if you don't know what 1337 means hit alt+f4) and that the tablets are 1GHz (the core clock speed of an upcoming product). We'll let you guys guess the meaning of Verdetrol, but NVIDIA's colors are green. You can see more pictures of the bottle label by following the link below to the forums.

The warning labels were pretty funny. Be sure to check out the Verdetrol website

This will probably the first stock card to hit 1GHz.

 

[godnorazi]

ive stuck with AMD/ATI the past few generations because they held a sizable advantage in performance per watt. i hope kepler knocks some socks off in that category

 

[artist]

New BF3 update tomorrow ..

Minor PC Update

We are releasing a minor PC update that aims to improve general performance and stability and solve some reproducible crash issues. The update also includes support for the upcoming Intel “Ivy Bridge” product line and performance improvements on AMD Radeon 7xxx series graphics cards.


List of issues fixed:

Support for Intel’s new Ivy Bridge product line (as yet unreleased)

Fixes for two reproducible client crashes:
Operation Firestorm- Conquest Large – Fixed a client crash when users spawn in certain vehicles.

Canals - Rush – Fixed a client crash at the 2nd set of mcoms if the player drives a vehicle into the vicinity of the exploding rocket battery.

AMD Radeon 7xxx series performance improvements

This minor fix is releasing on the 14th February, 8AM UT. This download will be via Origin.

 

[artist]

 

[Hazaro]

If those numbers are right... 7850 and 7870 could be really nice cards.

 

[Perfect Cha0s]

Can someone explain to me why the 7770s are coming clocked at 1Ghz, while some of the 7970s came at less than that? I know clock speed isn't the end-all when it comes to performance, but what is the 7770 lacking compared to the 7970 that makes it a 7700 series?

 

[Lactose_Intolerant]

Can someone explain to me why the 7770s are coming clocked at 1Ghz, while some of the 7970s came at less than that? I know clock speed isn't the end-all when it comes to performance, but what is the 7770 lacking compared to the 7970 that makes it a 7700 series?

Main thing is the amount of ram. 3gigs vs 1
I believe some of the newer games out use just under 1.5gigs of memory, so you can't play on ultra texture setting on these games. I could just be making shit up here though.

 

[Perfect Cha0s]

Main thing is the amount of ram. 3gigs vs 1
I believe some of the newer games out use just under 1.5gigs of memory, so you can't play on ultra texture setting on these games. I could just be making shit up here though.

Thanks for that. I can definitely see the discrepancies now. The 7770s still look like nice cards, but since I'm running with an OCed 5850, I guess I'll be holding out to see what Nvidia brings to the table.

 

[specialguy]

Can someone explain to me why the 7770s are coming clocked at 1Ghz, while some of the 7970s came at less than that? I know clock speed isn't the end-all when it comes to performance, but what is the 7770 lacking compared to the 7970 that makes it a 7700 series?

Umm, about 2/3 of the chip.

If you're using a 5850 you shouldn't even be looking at this card.

 

[artist]

Can someone explain to me why the 7770s are coming clocked at 1Ghz, while some of the 7970s came at less than that? I know clock speed isn't the end-all when it comes to performance, but what is the 7770 lacking compared to the 7970 that makes it a 7700 series?

Because the 7700 chip is really tiny. AMD can clock it up really high without worrying about the thermals (heat dissipation, power consumption).

Besides that the 7970 is already at 925MHz. You can OC it easily to 1GHz but the TDP will also creep slightly higher. Besides that, binning chips for a target of 925MHz is easier than higher frequencies, so its also more feasible to get more dies that can hit 925MHz than 1GHz.

 

[Perfect Cha0s]

Umm, about 2/3 of the chip.

If you're using a 5850 you shouldn't even be looking at this card.

Oh, I wasn't banking on it, but if it's $100 and was any non-trivial performance upgrade, I was thinking of grabbing one or two for my other machines around the house.

If it ended up being that good, then I might start looking at it as a 5850 replacement, but I was never of the impression "Oh man, gotta see how the 7700s turn out so I can replace my 5850!"

 

[vaelic]

7950 much of an upgrade over 5850?

 

[SapientWolf]

7950 much of an upgrade over 5850?

Overclocked it has about twice the performance as a 5850.

 

[ThaiGrocer]

7950 much of an upgrade over 5850?

Looking at a hierarchy chart, roughly, not much. Would look deeper into benchmarks though with consideration of your other components as possible bottlenecks. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html Might be more worth it if you can sell the 5850 with a high return from the price originally purchased.

 

[TheExodu5]

Can someone explain to me why the 7770s are coming clocked at 1Ghz, while some of the 7970s came at less than that? I know clock speed isn't the end-all when it comes to performance, but what is the 7770 lacking compared to the 7970 that makes it a 7700 series?

The 7970 has a ton more shader processors. It's like comparing a quad-core to a dual-core.

 

[artist]

Reviews for the 7770/7750 are out.

The above conclusion is important because you have to consider video cards near the price of the video card evaluated, the XFX R7770 Black Edition at $179. The cheapest GeForce GTX 560 Ti can actually be had right now for $189, or a Galaxy GTX 560 Ti for $197 or a Gigabyte for $209. The GTX 560 Ti is more expensive than the XFX R7770 Black Edition, yet in our gameplay testing we have discovered that the gameplay experience is the exact same between these two! The less expensive XFX R7770 Black Edition produces the same gameplay experience as the more expensive GTX 560 Ti. This is amazing, and is the exact definition of value for your money. Yes, the GTX 560Ti is technically faster than the R7770 in most of the games we tested but those frames did not pay off in a better gameplay experience.

 

[vaelic]

Looking at a hierarchy chart, roughly, not much. Would look deeper into benchmarks though with consideration of your other components as possible bottlenecks. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html Might be more worth it if you can sell the 5850 with a high return from the price originally purchased.

what do you think I can sell the 5850 for?

 

[Zombie James]

Anandtech has issues with pricing:

The problem for AMD today isn’t the power/performance curve, it’s the price/performance curve. 16 months ago AMD launched the Radeon HD 6850 at $179 amidst fierce competition from NVIDIA. Ignoring the current price of the 6850 for the moment, on average the 7770 delivers 90% of the 6850’s gaming performance for 90% of the 6850’s launch price. In other words in 16 months AMD has moved nowhere along the price/performance curve – if you go by launch prices you’re getting the same amount of performance per dollar today as you did in October of 2010. In reality the 6850 is much cheaper than that, with a number of cards selling for $159 before a rebate, while several more 6870s sell for $159 after rebate. The 7770 is so far off the price/performance curve that you have to believe that this is either a pricing error or AMD is planning on quickly halting 6800 series production.

 

[Hazaro]

what do you think I can sell the 5850 for?

Unless you are unsatisfied with you 5850 keep it. It's still a stupidly strong card today because GPU advancement has been shit.

Anandtech has issues with pricing:

This is exactly what I posted in the PC thread. Now I have to hope nVidia plays hard ball with Kepler, and not 5-10% more powerful + sell people on PhysX bullshit.

 

[artist]

Anandtech has issues with pricing:

The pricing is as expected and in-line. The hyperbole coming from Anand is just too much. I will now completely make that conclusion sound ridiculous over the next few minutes.

Is this so far off the perf/price curve? http://tpucdn.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7770/images/perfdollar.gif

And lets look back at Anand's 5700 review, shall we?

When we were looking at the Radeon HD 5800 series cards, writing a conclusion was rather easy for us. We didn’t need to talk about intangibles like Eyefinity or DirectX 11, because the 5800 series brought better performance at better prices for existing games. This made recommending the 5800 series a straightforward thing to do.

But we don’t have that luxury with the Radeon HD 5700 series. The value of the 5770 in particular is clearly not going to be in its performance. Compared to AMD’s 4870, it loses well more than it wins, and if we throw out Far Cry 2, it’s around 10% slower overall. It also spends most of its time losing to NVIDIA’s GTX 260, which unfortunately the 4870 didn’t have so much trouble with. AMD clearly has put themselves in to a hole with memory bandwidth, and the 5770 doesn’t have enough of it to reach the performance it needs to be at.

If you value solely performance in today’s games, we can’t recommend the 5770. Either the 4870 1GB or the GTX 260 would be the better buy.

But don’t mistake that for a wholesale write-off of the 5770. As a 40nm product it’s cooler running and quieter than a 4870 or a GTX 260. As a DirectX 11 product it has longer legs to run on for future games and/or applications using DirectCompute 5.0. Eyefinity is also there, but with the performance of the card, (not to mention the cost of more monitors) it’s not something we’d seriously expect to see used on a 5770.

Our jobs would be made much easier if AMD had either made the 5770 perform at parity with the 4870, or made the 5770 cheaper. Right now on a good deal we can swing a 4870 for $140, while the 5770 will be sticking to $160. That’s 14% more for a card that performs 10% worse. If we take a linear extrapolation, the 5770 needs to be at around $130 to win on performance alone, or at the very least $140 so that we can talk solely about the 10% performance loss versus the extra functionality of the 5770.

Just switch 5770 for 7770 and the case is exactly the same.

And just as it is normal for this price segment, there is a lot of price wiggle room and prices generally tend to go down with time. Again, from Anand's own piece:



What Cape Verde (7700) has over Juniper (5700) is 35% smaller die, slower memory, half the bus-width and less layers for the PCB. So it's expected to hit those cheaper price points even sooner.

Ryan/Ganesh (Anandtech) are either having a really off day or may have forgotten how the mainstream segments are positioned or atleast tone down the hyperbole. Not liking the pricing is one thing but making insane conclusions is a completely different thing.

 

[Hazaro]

Just switch 5770 for 7770 and the case is exactly the same.

In terms of low end improvements for the FPS/$, the 5 series to 6 jump was unacceptable and so is the 6 to 7.
4770 to 5770 the same deal.

New arch and new process = same FPS/$? Come on.
Zero-Core is great. 40W less under load is great. But it's not faster at the same price.

TechpowerUp's chart says the 6870 (Which is cheaper) is 26% faster. I think that's fair. Anandtech has their BENCH up as well.

Everyone is just slotting in everything at the same prices and I'm not happy.
I know prices on new parts will come down. I know pricing on the 6870's are to clear them out. Just right now and mostly likely for another month or so it's just a bad buy for most people.

*And to be clear, I 100% understand that lowering the wattage stuff like this is super important. Many more applications and this trend is very good for the future. But I still want good value parts for desktop users.

 

[Reallink]

Damn, approaching 2 years later and $200 still buys GTX460 level performance.

 

[Log4Girlz]

Reviews for the 7770/7750 are out.

It looks like its shooting lasers with words attached to them.

 

[dynamitejim]

Would be interesting to see 3x CrossFire 7770 versus a single 7970 or 7950.

 

[Kinan]

Damn, I love performance/W ratio of the new chips. Waiting for 7850 cards to be released - hopefully they can keep their peak power load under 150W.

 

[1-D_FTW]

Seems like a great architecture for the 360 successor (with the performance/watt).

 

[DieH@rd]

Pricing for 77xx is not great, but perf/w is.

 

[Cow Mengde]

Anandtech has issues with pricing:

The 7770 and the 6850 aren't even in the same class. The 7770 is a mainstream card, while the 6850 is a performance card.

 

[specialguy]

Seems like a great architecture for the 360 successor (with the performance/watt).

PS4 or Wii U if anything (probably not Wii U).