For the last 12 months, AMD has had the Radeon HD 6970 be its premier unmarried GPU graphics carte du jour, competing head to head with the GeForce GTX 570 and at times challenging the mighty GTX 580. For near $369 today, yous can all the same go i hell of a graphics card, comprised of 2.6 billion transistors, a die measuring 389mm2 and a 250W TDP rating, but most importantly capable of running all modern PC games fluidly except for some extreme scenarios.

When compared to its previous generation board (the Radeon Hd 5870), the Radeon HD 6970 was on boilerplate 24% faster. Now a twelvemonth later AMD is launching its Radeon HD 7000 serial which has been given the codename 'Southern Islands'.

The Radeon HD 7970 is the first of a series of upcoming graphics cards that are making the jump to the 28nm fabrication process. The new Hard disk drive 7970 volition effectively become AMD's new flagship unmarried GPU graphics carte come Jan, when the lath is expected to ship.

The die shrink means AMD can cram more transistors into the same infinite, a lot more. Although the die size is only slightly smaller, at 365mm2 there are some 1.vii billion more transistors, taking the total count to a whopping 4.3 billion. This number whales that of the GeForce GTX 580 which boasts 3+ billion transistors in its massive 520mm2 die.

Nvidia is said to exist updating their graphics lineup early on in 2022, with the GeForce 600 serial also expected to utilize the 28nm process. In an effort to beat Nvidia, AMD pushed upward their (soft) launch date to belatedly Dec.

With a mere two weeks before it'll be possible to get your easily on a new Radeon Hd 7970 graphics card, it'south definitely nice to go a look now at how they perform. But before we spring into our gaming benchmarks, let's have a moment to check out the new card's capabilities and features in greater detail.

AMD Graphics Core Next

The Radeon Hd 7000 series is a big leap for AMD, representing its most significant architecture overhaul in the terminal decade. It was back then that AMD adopted the Graphics Parallel Core compages, which employs groups of scalar processors that work out very long educational activity words, usually abbreviated as VLIW.

The Radeon HD 5000 series used the VLIW5 architecture, while last year's 6000 series transitioned to a more advanced VLIW4 architecture. Even so, the Radeon HD 7970 and all other graphics cards based on the high-finish Tahiti cadre replace the VLIW stream processor clusters with what AMD calls GCN (Graphics Cadre Next) compute units.

A GCN is basically a GPU that can handle both graphical and computing tasks with a high level of efficiency. Information technology'south AMD's answer to Nvidia'south Fermi compages, making the Radeon Hard disk drive 7970 a capable computing workhorse. It's worth noting that but high-finish HD 7000 series cards are based on the new Graphics Core Next architecture, while all other models will still use VLIW.

And then essentially, a Shader cluster is at present called a GCN compute unit of measurement and each unit of measurement is a super-scalar processor with scalar and vector elements that follow a new non-VLIW instruction-fix architecture. This is a more efficient architecture that delivers more ability per millimeter square of GPU die surface area.

The HD 7970 features a new 9th Generation Tessellation Geometry Engine with optimizations such as increased vertex re-use, off-chip buffering improvements and larger parameter caches. This helps improve performance at all tessellation factors with up to 4x the throughput of the Hd 6900 series (Gen 8).