AMD gave the New Year a warm welcome by launching the fastest single-GPU graphics card on the planet, displacing Nvidia’s year-old GTX 580. Southern Islands is the codename for the Radeon HD 7000 series cards, manufactured using the 28nm manufacturing process.. The change in architecture has made the GPUs very fast.
How fast? Well, with the flagship Radeon HD 7970, playing Battlefield 3 with the detail level set to “ultra” on a 1080p screen won’t see the frame-rates dipping below the 60 frames-per-second (fps) mark, assuming of course that you’ve got a CPU to match it in performance.
The 7950 on the other hand meets or beats the GTX 580 in most games. Now, apart from the impressive game performance, what’s so “next-gen” about these cards? For a start, the 7000-series cards are PCIe 3.0 based, opposed to version 2.0/2.1 of the interface that previous-gen cards use. This allows for a higher data transfer bandwidth between the GPU and the rest of the system.
AMD has also come up with a unique solution to manage power consumption in a multi-GPU CrossFire setup. When the cards (up to four) are idle, all cards power down and except one, the rest go to sleep. Even under load, the 7970 and 7950 are very efficient, with a very high performance-per-watt ratio. The cards remain cool and relatively quiet, which is a direct consequence of the smaller manufacturing process. CrossFire performance scaling is great too.
The cards are great, but not perfect. AMD seems to be a little slow in getting the video transcoding to work very well. The major problem for enthusiasts in India will be the price tag. The 7950 is a GTX 580 competitor, thus it only has value at around `30k or less. Going by the difference in the US prices, the 7970 only makes sense at the `35,000 price point. At `40k, you’ll almost always be better off using two Radeon HD 6790s or GTX 570s in a dual GPU configuration.