Legit Video Card Reviews

AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Video Card Review

Manufacturer: AMD
Product: Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition
Date: Fri, Jul 13, 2012 - 12:00 AM
Written By: Nathan Kirsch -
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Unigine Heaven 3.0

Unigine DirectX 11 benchmark Heaven

The 'Heaven' benchmark that uses the Unigine easily shows off the full potential of DirectX 11 graphics cards. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. With the interactive mode emerging, experience of exploring the intricate world is within reach. Through its advanced renderer, Unigine is one of the first to set precedence in showcasing the art assets with tessellation, bringing compelling visual finesse, utilizing the technology to the full extent and exhibiting the possibilities of enriching 3D gaming. The distinguishing feature of the benchmark is a hardware tessellation that is a scalable technology aimed for automatic subdivision of polygons into smaller and finer pieces so that developers can gain a more detailed look of their games almost free of charge in terms of performance. Thanks to this procedure, the elaboration of the rendered image finally approaches the boundary of veridical visual perception: the virtual reality transcends conjured by your hand.

DirectX 11 benchmark Unigine engine

For this benchmark we used Heaven DX11 Benchmark Version 3.0, which just came out on March 7th, 2012. We haven't run this benchmark in over a year, so it will be interesting to see how this new generation of video cards handles this benchmark.  We wanted to see how the cards would do with mild settings, so we disabled AA and AF and set the Tessellation to moderate. We ran the benchmark at 2560x1600, 1920x1200 and 1280x1024 to see how the cards would perform with a wide variety of settings.

Heaven 3.0 Benchmark Results

With moderate tessellation enabled and AA and AF disabled the benchmark results were very close, but the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition was clearly faster than the other Radeon HD 7970 cards that we have looked at in the past. 

DirectX 11 benchmark Unigine engine

Many feel that tessellation is one of the most important features of game titles today and in the future, so we set tessellation to extreme and maxed out the anti-aliasing at 8x and the anisotropic filtering at 16x. These are as high as you can set the tessellation and image quality settings in Heaven DX11 Benchmark v3.0, so it will really punish these cards.

Heaven 3.0 Benchmark Results

With the tessellation set to extreme and AA cranked up we really stress the cards memory bandwidth! The AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition does better than the Sapphire HD 7970 OC and basically ties the MSI R7970 Lightning. 

Next Page - Power Consumption


Review Index
Page 1 - Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition - What is it?
Page 2 - The Test System
Page 3 - Batman: Arkham City
Page 4 - Battlefield 3
Page 5 - Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Page 6 - DiRT 3
Page 7 - Just Cause 2
Page 8 - Metro 2033
Page 9 - 3DMark 11
Page 10 - Unigine Heaven 3.0
Page 11 - Power Consumption
Page 12 - Temperature & Noise Testing
Page 13 - Overclocking The 7970 GHz Edition
Page 14 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions