AMD Radeon HD 7970 Launched, Fastest GPU Tested 281
MojoKid writes "Rumors of AMD's Southern Island family of graphics processors have circulated for some time, though today AMD is officially announcing their latest flagship single-GPU graphics card, the Radeon HD 7970. AMD's new Tahiti GPU is outfitted with 2,048 stream processors with a 925MHz engine clock, featuring AMD's Graphics Core Next architecture, paired to 3GB of GDDR5 memory connected over a 384-bit wide memory bus. And yes, it's crazy fast as you'd expect and supports DX11.1 rendering. In the benchmarks, the new Radeon HD 7970 bests NVIDIA's fastest single GPU GeForce GTX 580 card by a comfortable margin of 15 — 20 percent and can even approach some dual GPU configurations in certain tests." PC Perspective has a similarly positive writeup. There are people who will pay $549 for a video card, and others who are just glad that the technology drags along the low-end offerings, too.
Re:This would be really cool... (Score:5, Informative)
Depends on the type of processing. GTX and Radeon cards artificially limit their double-precision performance to 1/4 of their capabilities, to protect the high-margin workstation SKUs. If all you're doing is single-precision math, you're fine with a gaming card.
Re:This would be really cool... (Score:5, Informative)
Ray Tracing!!!
We're also capped right now because of too many single-threaded game engines. A given thread can only push so many objects to the GPU at a time. Civ5 and BF3, being the first games to make use of deferred shading and other DX11 multi-threading abilities, can have lots of objects on the screen with decent FPS.
The biggest issue I have with nearly all of my games is my ATI6950 is at 20%-60% load and only getting sub 60fps, while my CPU has one core pegged. My FPS isn't CPU limited, it's thread limited.
Re:Overpowerful. (Score:5, Informative)
Human eye does not see in frames per second. It has a certain data transfer speed, and the way brains process the information is also not as discrete as you might want to wish.
For example, the flicker fusion point (inability to distinguish alternating black and white images) is somewhere around 60fps and the army has done experiments on showing images for a very short time to see whether they could be identified by pilots. The shortest intervals were way less than those postulated even by the flicker fusion point. It also matters greatly how large amount the object moves in your absolute field of vision between frames for your brain to understand motion and simulate smooth movement. Your brain has interpolation algorithms that piece together information streams to form smooth motion.
This has some information, but not many references: http://www.100fps.com/ [100fps.com]
Wikipedia has more stuff and it's a starting point to look for research. Here's some by BBC on fast-moving objects in sports: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP169.pdf [bbc.co.uk]
Also, you can test the difference of 30 and 60 fps here: http://frames-per-second.appspot.com/ [appspot.com]
At least to me, it is blatantly evident.
You were wrong, and acted like an ass over it towards me and other posters. Will you please apologize and shut up?
Re:Linux Driver State? (Score:3, Informative)