Sapphire Radeon HD 7970

Sapphire HD 7970 3GB Review

Back right before Christmas AMD took the wraps off their latest GPU architecture code named Southern Islands. This architecture rang in the drop to a 28nm process with what AMD calls a revolutionary architecture to drive computing power to +1.4x the previous generation. Along the way we also get a move to PCIe 3 support, 3GB of high speed GDDR5 memory, DX 11.1 compliance, Power Tune and Zero Core power technologies and Eyefinity 2.0 that brings its own new feature sets. AMD's GCN or Graphics Core Next Tahiti core is a step away from the VLIW design to a non VLIW SIMD engine for higher computing performance. This new core comes with a large increase in the transistor count to 4.31 Billion, an increase in the streaming processor count to 2048 with 32 raster units, 128 texture units and finally a move to a 384bit wide memory bus that drives compute performance and memory bandwidth scaling upwards. All this together on paper looks pretty significant and should drive gaming performance to new levels.