Your source for downloading popular benchmarks

With the launch of Tahiti behind them, AMD is now firing on all cylinders to get the rest of their Southern Islands lineup out the door. Typically we’d see AMD launch their GPUs in descending order of performance, but this time AMD is taking a slight detour. Rather than following up the Tahiti based 7900 series with the Pitcairn based 7800 series, AMD is instead going straight to the bottom and launching the Cape Verde based 7700 series first.

Today AMD will be launching two cards based on the Cape Verde GPU: the Radeon HD 7750, and the Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition. As the Juniper based 5700 series never got a proper Northern Islands successor, this is the first real update for the x700 series since the launch of the 5700 series in October of 2009. Given the success of the 5700 expectations are going to be high, and to fulfill those expectations AMD will be bringing to bear their new GCN architecture along with a full node jump with TSMC’s 28nm process. But will this be enough to enable the 7700 series to replicate the success of the 5700 series? Let’s find out.

I just found out that AMD's Eric Demers (Corporate VP & CTO, Graphics Division) is leaving the company at the end of this week. He's not going to Intel or NVIDIA but I suspect that someone of Eric's talents will remain in the industry. I just had dinner with Eric a couple of weeks ago and he seemed very positive on AMD's roadmap going forward. Given how important the GPU is becoming in this ever expanding industry, someone like Eric is in very high demand. 

We now have an official statement from AMD:

Eric Demers, AMD Corporate Vice President and CTO, Graphics Business Unit, has decided leave AMD to pursue other opportunities. 

AMD Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster will assume interim responsibility for the Graphics Business Unit CTO role until a replacement is found. 

AMD remains fully committed to our critical graphics IP development and discrete GPU products.  We have a tremendous depth of talent in our organization, a game plan that is resonating with our customers and our team, and we are continuing to bring graphics-performance-leading products to market.  We will attract the right technology leader for this role.

We thank Eric for his contributions to the business and wish him well in his future endeavors.

Intel has posted versions 15.22.54.2622 (32-bit) and 15.22.54.64.2622 (64-bit) of its drivers for the Intel HD-series lineup of integrated graphics processors, which includes both Sandy Bridge and older Nehalem-based chips in both desktop and laptop computers. The drivers are available for all editions of Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Of the Big Three players in the graphics market, Intel is the most erratic about its driver releases - their last generic driver was posted way back in September, and while that driver brought a good number of performance improvements and bug fixes, Intel's latest and greatest fixes just three documented issues: a crashing issue with a program called Interstage Studio Standard J-edition, an issue where the driver would change the refresh rate while on battery power, and an issue where content would appear strangely when rewound. Not terribly exciting, given the wait, but I'm sure that the people experiencing those problems are grateful for the fixes.

As always, Intel notes that these are generic drivers which may or may not be missing features present in the drivers provided by OEMs. I've never had issues using generic Intel drivers on any of my machines, from homemade desktops to OEM laptops to Macs running Windows, but your mileage may vary.

Source: Intel

While AMD’s consumer GPU division is well into its deployment of their first 28nm products, the long validation and certification period for business hardware means that AMD’s business GPU division is still in the process of wrapping up the last of their 40nm product launches. In November AMD launched the Turks based FirePro V4900, and today they’re launching the final member of the current generation FirePro product stack: the FirePro V3900.

If the FirePro V4900 was a business version of the Radeon HD 6670, then the FirePro V3900 is a business version of the Radeon HD 6570 DDR3. Clocked at 650MHz and coupled with 1GB of 900MHz DDR3, the hardware specs are identical to the DDR3 version of the Radeon HD 6570.

For this reason the FirePro V3900 compares to the V4900 in much the same way the 6570 and 6670 do. While the V3900 has a lower core clock (650MHz vs. 800MHz), it’s otherwise a fully functional Turks GPU just like the V4900. The bigger reason for their performance difference is that while the V4900 uses GDDR5, the V3900 uses DDR3, giving it less than half the memory bandwidth and a similar overall performance drop compared to the V4900.

Of course the tradeoff for this drop in performance is size and power consumption. While the V4900 was a full profile card rated for 75W the V3900 is a low-profile card rated for 50W, with most of those power savings coming from switching out GDDR5 for DDR3. This makes the V3900 unique in that it’s the only low-profile FirePro card in AMD’s lineup – though it should be noted that for compatibility purposes it will be shipping with its full-profile bracket installed while the low-profile bracket will be in the box.

AMD will be releasing the V3900 today, with a price of $119. This positions it directly against NVIDIA’s GT216 based Quadro 400, and roughly $50 below NVIDIA’s GF108 based Quadro 600. For the V3900 AMD will be heavily leaning upon the fact that Turks can drive 5 monitors. However as with the V4900 this feature is effectively MIA until DisplayPort MST hubs ship this summer, as without the hub the card can only drive up to 2 monitors via its DP 1.2 and DL-DVI ports.

More immediately, on paper the V3900 should be far more powerful than the architecturally ancient Quadro 400. But as this is the professional market AMD’s real competition is NVIDIA’s certification and support, more so than their performance at any given price.

On that note, since AMD already launched a Turks based FirePro last year the certification process should be rather straightforward. Products (rather than GPUs) are individually certified, but as AMD already worked out any Turks driver kinks for the V4900 there shouldn’t be any surprises in store for the V3900.

Finally, it’s interesting to note that with this launch AMD has effectively committed to keeping Turks around for quite some time. AMD’s 3 year FirePro lifecycle means that the V3900 will be available until at least February of 2015, some 4 years after the first Turks products launched. Given Turks’ continual recurrence through 2012 in OEM laptops, desktops, and now professional cards, it’s clear that it’s living up to its position of being AMD’s low cost, high volume anchor GPU for the 40nm generation.

Announced late last month and shipping 3 weeks ago, AMD kicked off the 28nm generation with a bang with their Radeon HD 7970. Combining TSMC’s new 28nm HKMG process with AMD’s equally new Graphics Core Next Architecture, AMD finally took back the single-GPU performance crown for the first time since 2010 with an all-around impressive flagship video card.

Of course AMD has always produced multiple video cards from their high-end GPUs, and with Tahiti this was no different. The second Tahiti card has been waiting in the wings for its own launch, and that launch has finally come. Today AMD is launching the Radeon HD 7950, the cooler, quieter, and cheaper sibling of the Radeon HD 7970. Aimed right at NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 580, AMD is looking to sew up the high-end market, and as we’ll see the Radeon HD 7950 is exactly the card to accomplish that.

With the release of AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 it’s clear that AMD has once again regained the single-GPU performance crown. But while the 7970’s place in the current GPU hierarchy is well established, we’re still trying to better understand the ins and outs of AMD’s new Graphics Core Next Architecture. What does it perform well at and what is it weak at? How might GCN scale with future GPUs? Etc.

Next week we’ll be taking a look at CrossFire performance and the performance of AMD’s first driver update. But in the meantime we wanted to examine a few other facets of the 7970: the impact of PCIe bandwidth on performance, overclocking our reference 7970 (and the performance impact thereof), and what AMD is doing for anti-aliasing with the surprise addition of SSAA for DX10+ along with an interesting technical demo implementing MSAA and complex lighting side-by-side. So let’s get started.

With the emphasis on smartphones and tablets at this year’s CES, it should come as no surprise that the various SoC IP developers are focusing their announcements around the show, and PowerVR is among them. In 2011 PowerVR announced their next generation of SoC GPUs, the Series 6 family, based on PowerVR’s Rogue architecture.  Now just under a year later PowerVR has announced that they’ve officially released their first GPU designs to licensing for inclusion into SoCs.

Shedding more light on feature support for the first time, PowerVR has announced that the baseline graphics feature set for Series 6 will include support for OpenGL ES “Halti”, the current working name for ES 3.0, itself derived from OpenGL 3.x. In terms of DirectX generations, this would make Series 6 a DirectX 10 part, analogous to the GeForce 8/9/200 series, the Radeon 2000-4000 series, and Intel’s HD2000/3000 iGPUs. Interestingly enough PowerVR will also be offering designs that are DirectX 11.1/OpenGL 4.x compliant, which would bring them to parity with the very latest GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA.

Meanwhile on the compute side OpenCL will also be supported, and while PowerVR doesn’t list the specific version we believe they will be conformant up to version 1.1. Microsoft’s DirectCompute is not specifically mentioned, however at a minimum the DX11.1 parts would need to support it.

Unfortunately at this time PowerVR is still playing their cards close to their chest, so while we know what APIs Series 6 supports, we don’t know much about the configuration of the first two GPUs: G6200 and G6400. G6200 features two “compute clusters”, while G6400 features four of them, though beyond shader blocks we don’t know what a compute cluster entails.

PowerVR Series 5XT Architecture Diagram

Most likely PowerVR is configuring their GPUs in a method similar to the SGX543 series, where a fixed frontend is coupled with a specific number of shader blocks and ROPs, along with several fixed function DSPs. The biggest question perhaps is whether Series 6’s geometry performance will once again be fixed; SGX543 only scaled the number of USSE2 pipelines, so while PowerVR could grow the number of pixels they could deal with geometry performance was solely a function of a given GPU’s clockspeed.

Long term PowerVR is planning to have designs that offer up to 1 TFLOP of shader performance, which would be nearly 10 times the theoretical shader performance of the SGX543MP16. The initial G6200 and G6400 will be much more conservative, though we don’t have specific performance estimates for them yet.

Finally, as PowerVR is an IP vendor, there isn’t any kind of timeline on availability as this is up to their customers. The only SoC announced to use Series 6 so far is ST-Ericsson’s Nova A9600, which is not scheduled to arrive until sometime in 2013. Given the fabrication ramp-up schedule for most SoCs, any Series 6 equipped SoC is still a year out if not more; in the meantime there are still a number of ARM A15 + SGX543/544 scheduled for later this year. As for larger and more capable GPUs such as the SGX545 the release gap has been closer to 2 years, so DirectX 11.1 SoCs in particular are almost certainly 2014 products assuming PowerVR gets a DX11.1 GPU design out this year.

We’ll have much more on Series 6 later this year as further designs are announced and PowerVR publishes more details about the underpinnings of their Rogue architecture, so stay tuned.

AMD's brand-new Radeon HD 7970 is officially on sale, though as of this writing it's sold out practically everywhere. Unlike the sneakily rebranded OEM-targeted 7000-series cards, the 7970 is the first card in AMD's Southern Islands lineup, and is its first card to be built on TSMC's 28nm node. Ryan and Anand have already spilled plenty of ink about the new architecture - Ryan's full review is here, or you can check here for a quick and dirty version. 

As we did for NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 Cores, I'll be rounding up all of the freshly-launched cards and comparing their sizes, coolers, prices, pack-ins, and other features. One thing you'll notice as we move through the pack is that there's much less variance than with the NVIDIA card - the GTX 500 series has been around for awhile, and NVIDIA's partners have had plenty of time to develop their own specialized coolers and PCBs. Likewise, since this is such a new card, expect availability and prices to vary as inventories are depleted and competing products are released.

There are a whopping eight 7970s to look at today, but with the exception of an offering from XFX, we're looking at mostly reference designs. See the tables below for comparison.

The chart above serves to highlight the differences between the cards, where there were any. Common to every card here is 3GB of GDDR5 on a 384-bit bus and the same compliment of outputs: two Mini DisplayPorts, an HDMI port, and a single DVI-I port. All cards listed require one 6-pin and one 8-pin power connector, and use a dual-slot cooler.

Something interesting I noticed while comparing these cards was that, while most of them use identical or near-identical reference designs, measurements varied quite a bit between cards - the variance is rarely more than a complete inch in any dimension, but it's enough to make me wonder how these manufacturers are getting these measurements.

Diamond (Product page)

Like most of the cards we're looking at, the Diamond card mostly sticks to AMD's reference design and its stock clocks - so many of these cards meet that description that we'll probably blow through most of these. Its $559.99 price is $10 more than some of the competition, but its 5-year warranty is the second best on offer here. 

ASUS

Another reference card with stock clocks, the ASUS card does include a solid clutch of accessories and a decent 3-year warranty, but it does fetch a $40 premium over the Sapphire, PowerColor, HIS, and Gigabyte cards (the latter of which also includes a 3-year warranty).

Sapphire (Product page)

Recognize that cooler yet? We've got another stock card with stock clocks here. This is tied with a few cards for both the cheapest card (at $549.99) and the card with the shortest warranty (two years), but it includes a huge variety of accessories, including an HDMI cable (something most HD-oriented game consoles still can't be bothered to include).

PowerColor (Product page)

Reference card with stock clocks. Not quite as many accessories as the Sapphire card, but still a good bit more than some of the other $549.99 and $559.99 cards in this bunch.

XFX Core Edition (Product page)

OK, this is another reference card with reference clocks, but there's actually a bit more to say about both of the XFX cards: while Newegg is selling two SKUs, XFX actually lists four on its product page. There are two that use the stock cooler and two that use the two-fan Double Dissipation custom cooler. The other card with the reference cooler, referred to as a Black Edition (part number FX-797A-TNBC), comes with a factory overclock. The other card with XFX's custom cooler, called the Double Dissipation edition (part number FX-797A-TDFC), uses stock clocks.

All of that said, this particular card doesn't have much to offer over its bretheren - it's not the cheapest, but it ties for the longest warranty (lifetime) though it is definitely light on accessories.

XFX Black Edition Double Dissipation (Product page)

It's similarly light on accessories and is the most expensive card here by $50, but it includes a few things that may interest some of you: the first is the factory overclock, which is a 7.5% and 3.5% improvement over stock core and memory speeds, respectively.

More notable is the two-fan cooler - our review found it to be comparable to the reference cooler in temperature, but slightly louder at idle and quieter under load. The lifetime warranty is also a nice touch, though it's up to you to decide whether it's worth the extra cost.

HIS (Product page)

As we get to the end of our lineup, we get back to reference cards with stock speeds. This $549.99 card has a two-year warranty and a decent selection of display adapters, but not much else of interest.

Gigabyte (Product page)

Yet another reference card with stock clocks, though this is the only $549.99 card to come with a 3-year warranty instead of a 2-year. A couple of display and power adapters round out the package, making this one of the better values of the lineup if you can find it.

Traditionally the launch of a next-generation high-end video card has been a staggered process. In the name of getting cards out as soon as possible the first cards are almost always reference cards coming preassembled straight from AMD or NVIDIA, which are then touched up in the livery of their partners before being boxed and sold. Only later on – particularly when there’s a solid supply of GPUs – can partners acquire individual parts and put together their custom designs.

But as it’s turning out the Radeon HD 7970 isn’t going to be a traditional launch. In a rare move AMD has loosened the leash on their partners just a bit, and as a result we’re seeing semi-custom cards planned for launch earlier than usual. XFX looks to be the first partner to take advantage of this more liberal policy, as alongside the reference cards being launched today they’re launching their first semi-custom 7970s

.

Although they're not officially supposed to go on sale until tomorrow, Newegg already has their selection of 7970s up for sale this evening. Newegg has cards from all of AMD's major North American partners, including HIS, Gigabyte, XFX, Asus, Sapphire, and PowerColor. Most of them are at the AMD MSRP of $549, though the Asus card is $589, and XFX's custom cooled and overclocked model is at $599.

While we don't have an official statement from AMD on 7970 availability, historically the first run of every next-generation GPU has sold out and we don't expect the 7970 to be any different. (Ed: One sold out while we were writing this post).