First AMD Radeon HD7970 GHZ Edition Benchmark Results

AMD’s plan to release a 1 GHz edition of the company’s top performing GPU seems to have paid off.  The Tahiti architecture appears to be well-equipped to handle Nvidia’s Kepler offensive without requiring much effort on AMD’s part.

Here are the first benchmark results that have surfaced the internet. AMD’s Tahiti is not as efficient as Nvidia’s Kepler architecture. It is true that it was launched earlier and has a greater number of transistors but this and the 385-bit versus 256-bit memory interface allows it to achieve much better results in general computing. The Graphics Core Next architecture seems to have much better performance when scientific and GPU computing is involved. The company’s Tahiti GPU implementation seems to be very capable in terms of overclocking. Despite the fact that it has 23% more transistors than Kepler in the GTX 680 implementation and a more complex memory architecture, the frequencies of the Tahiti GPUs are simply amazing. AMD’s GPUs currently hold the 3D Mark 11 record for the single GPU card in both versions of the famous testing suite.

We wrote here about the 3D Mark 11 E score record (Extreme Preset) and here about the 3D Mark 11 P score record (Performance Preset). Today’s benchmark results show that AMD did very little effort to achieve performance parity with Nvidia’s GTX 680 and that the card is able to stay within a 300 watts TDP. The benchmarking experts have managed to measure a 310 TDP, but it seems that the result is particular to their test sample. The games in which AMD’s Radeon 7970 GH Edition has demonstrated clear performance superiority are Call of Duty, Crysis 2 and Metro 2033 with performance deltas of 8.6%, 16.1% and 9.5%, respectively.

Those are the results in 2560 by 1600 pixel resolution, as in FullHD, the GHz Edition is 2% slower overall when compared with Nvidia’s GTX 680. There is no information of pricing or availability.

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