For the concluding 12 months, AMD has had the Radeon HD 6970 be its premier single GPU graphics card, competing head to caput with the GeForce GTX 570 and at times challenging the mighty GTX 580. For about $369 today, you can still get one hell of a graphics card, comprised of 2.6 billion transistors, a die measuring 389mm2 and a 250W TDP rating, simply most importantly capable of running all modern PC games fluidly except for some extreme scenarios.

When compared to its previous generation board (the Radeon Hd 5870), the Radeon HD 6970 was on average 24% faster. Now a twelvemonth subsequently AMD is launching its Radeon Hd 7000 series which has been given the codename 'Southern Islands'.

The Radeon HD 7970 is the first of a series of upcoming graphics cards that are making the spring to the 28nm fabrication process. The new Hard disk drive 7970 will effectively get AMD'due south new flagship unmarried GPU graphics card come January, when the lath is expected to send.

The die shrink means AMD can cram more than transistors into the aforementioned space, a lot more. Although the dice size is only slightly smaller, at 365mm2 there are some 1.7 billion more transistors, taking the total count to a whopping 4.iii billion. This number whales that of the GeForce GTX 580 which boasts 3+ billion transistors in its massive 520mm2 die.

Nvidia is said to be updating their graphics lineup early in 2012, with the GeForce 600 series too expected to utilize the 28nm process. In an try to trounce Nvidia, AMD pushed upward their (soft) launch date to tardily December.

With a mere two weeks earlier it'll exist possible to get your hands on a new Radeon Hd 7970 graphics card, it's definitely squeamish to get a look at present at how they perform. But before nosotros spring into our gaming benchmarks, allow'due south accept a moment to check out the new carte'southward capabilities and features in greater item.

AMD Graphics Core Next

The Radeon Hard disk 7000 series is a big spring for AMD, representing its well-nigh significant architecture overhaul in the concluding decade. It was dorsum then that AMD adopted the Graphics Parallel Core architecture, which employs groups of scalar processors that piece of work out very long instruction words, commonly abbreviated as VLIW.

The Radeon HD 5000 series used the VLIW5 architecture, while terminal twelvemonth's 6000 serial transitioned to a more avant-garde VLIW4 architecture. However, the Radeon Hard disk 7970 and all other graphics cards based on the high-end Tahiti core supplant the VLIW stream processor clusters with what AMD calls GCN (Graphics Core Adjacent) compute units.

A GCN is basically a GPU that can handle both graphical and computing tasks with a loftier level of efficiency. It's AMD's answer to Nvidia's Fermi architecture, making the Radeon HD 7970 a capable calculating workhorse. It'south worth noting that only loftier-terminate Hard disk 7000 serial cards are based on the new Graphics Core Next architecture, while all other models will still use VLIW.

Then essentially, a Shader cluster is now called a GCN compute unit and each unit is a super-scalar processor with scalar and vector elements that follow a new not-VLIW instruction-set architecture. This is a more efficient architecture that delivers more power per millimeter square of GPU die area.

The Hard disk drive 7970 features a new ninth Generation Tessellation Geometry Engine with optimizations such as increased vertex re-use, off-chip buffering improvements and larger parameter caches. This helps improve performance at all tessellation factors with up to 4x the throughput of the Hd 6900 series (Gen eight).