Posted by Le in
AMD shipped its original Radeon HD 7970 in December 2011, and for a brief period, this 4.3-billion-transistor monster held the graphics performance crown. Several months later, Nvidia launched the GTX 680, a power-efficient graphics card that retook the slot as the best single GPU card for gaming.
In some ways, though, the GTX 680 is an odd beast. Nvidia has been reluctant to supply what's called GPU compute performance, and it’s been suggested that Nvidia deemphasized the compute performance in search of gaming performance glory. The latest GTX 680 drivers don’t support OpenCL 1.2 (more on that later), though you can still run Nvidia’s own CUDA framework for GPU compute.
That’s proved a good product strategy, but now we’re starting to see a new generation of games that integrate GPU compute features into the game, either using DirectCompute or OpenCL. We’ll take a look at a couple of these games later. For now, let’s run down the key differences between the original and the new card.
AMD claims the core clock boost from 925MHz to 1GHz is due to better understanding of the manufacturing process and a few tweaks to that process. The reference card has a sticker on the back labeled “Rev 02”, though that probably refers to the card as a whole. Since a number of AMD partners already ship cards running in excess of 1GHz, officially supporting that clock speed isn’t a surprise.
AMD is also building the new version with faster memory—the same 6GHz effective memory that Nvidia uses on the GTX 680. But perhaps most interesting is the new “boost clock”—something that Nvidia implemented in the GTX 680. AMD tweaked its PowerTune technology, which manages the power envelope of the card, to allow for slightly higher core clock speeds if power demands aren’t too high.
