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- Date:
- Monday , January 30, 2012
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Google +1
AMD Radeon HD 7950 Video Card Review
The new Radeon HD 7950 marks the launch of AMD's more affordable Radeon HD 7900 series GPU. The Radeon HD 7950 is priced to compete with the GeForce GTX 580. We'll look at performance in comparison to several video cards in single-GPU, dual-GPU CrossFireX, Eyefinity, and Overclocking to see where it truly lands.
Batman: Arkham City
We are using the full downloaded version of Batman: Arkham City from Steam with the latest patch update. To learn what this game has to offer in terms of graphics options and testing procedure please read our Batman: Arkham City Performance Review and our Batman: Arkham City DirectX 11 Performance Review. We will be running Batman with DX11 enabled along with MVSS and HBAO and we will use tessellation levels that are playable. In all the tests below, all of the features are enabled, and we adjusted resolution, AA, and tessellation as needed to find the highest playable settings.
Highest Playable Settings - Single Display
In Batman: Arkham City we wanted to experience this game with every in-game quality option enabled on the Radeon HD 7950. The Radeon HD 7900 series is supposed to have improved tessellation, and so we were hoping that we would be able to get the highest tessellation level, with MVSS shadows and HBAO to perform well at 2560x1600. However, that just wasn't going to happen. Performance was at unplayable levels with all the in-game settings at the highest levels at 2560x1600. In order to make the game playable at 2560x1600 we had to drop tessellation to the lowest setting.
We wanted to see what resolution we could play with at highest tessellation and in-game settings, and found that it was the next lower resolution of 1920x1200. At 1920x1200 we were able to have tessellation on High and MVSAA shadows and HBAO enabled in DX11. On top of that, there was performance enough to enable 4X MSAA, or alternatively FXAA for an even greater performance boost. We went with 4X MSAA as the highest playable settings to show you performance, and as you can see it was very playable. The part where tessellation has the greatest impact lands between 198 seconds and 301 seconds in the run through. HD Radeon 7970 performance is even better than the GTX 580 in this heavy tessellation area. There was one drop in performance with the HD 7950 right after the 241 second mark, but this was not consistent in our gameplay. To gain even more performance, using FXAA instead of 4X AA will give you a smoother experience.
With the GeForce GTX 580 we also had to play at 1920x1200 with MVSS shadows and HBAO while using full tessellation. On top of that, we were able to use the GTX 580's PhysX setting and turn it to High. With PhysX enabled, the only AA option we could use was FXAA, any of the other MSAA settings were too degrading performance-wise. With PhysX enabled the GTX 580 delivers an experience different to the two AMD GPU based video cards.
The AMD Radeon HD 6950 suffered the worse, and we not only had to play at 1920x1200 but also reduce the tessellation level down to Normal from High. With that done, the game was then playable with MVSS shadows and HBAO in DX11.
The new Radeon HD 7950 delivered a substantially better experience compared to the Radeon HD 6950. Compared to the GeForce GTX 580, the difference isn't as pronounced. The GTX 580 could do 4X MSAA as well if we didn't use PhysX. However, with PhysX enabled the gameplay experience in the game is improved in a way that the Radeon HD 7950 cannot. With both video cards able to handle maximum tessellation and shadows and ambient occlusion, these are on equal footing in terms of those experiences.
Apples-to-Apples
For apples-to-apples testing we played in DX11 at 2560x1600 with FXAA and the highest in-game settings.
We wanted to push the resolution up to 2560x1600 with full tessellation and in-game settings so you can see how the Radeon HD 7950 performed at this level in comparison. The AMD Radeon HD 7950 and GeForce GTX 580 are close in performance. In the end, the HD 7950 is technically fast with 3.6% more performance. Both video cards were entirely unplayable at these settings however, but we did want to bottleneck these cards very much graphically in this comparison.
The AMD Radeon HD 7950 was 69% faster than the AMD Radeon HD 6950!