AMD Releases Radeon HD 8970M Mobile GPU
AMD is launching its Radeon HD 8970M discrete mobile graphics card.
Today, AMD has officially announced the arrival of the Radeon HD 8900M Series mobile graphics cards. The new chip that AMD is releasing is the Radeon HD 8970M GPU.
The Radeon HD 8970M GPU will feature 1280 stream processors, 80 TMUs, 128 Z/Stencil ROPs, and 32 Color ROPs. The GPU will have a base clock speed of 850 MHz, with a Boost speed of 900 MHz. The card will pack 2 GB of GDDR5 memory that runs at an effective speed of 4.8 GHz over a 256-bit memory interface. The HD 8970M is simply a rebrand of the original HD 7970M. The only difference appears to be the added Boost technology, which brings the maximum stock clock speed up to 900 MHz. Regardless, the card's single precision compute power has gone up to 2304 GFlops.
Regarding the performance, AMD boasts a handful of numbers compared to the GTX 680M. For instance, Tomb Raider with TressFX off runs 54 percent faster, Bioshock Infinite runs 42 percent faster, Crysis 3 runs 12 percent faster, and 3DMark FireStrike scores 21 percent higher.
Tagging along with the release is MSI's GX70 gaming notebook. The notebook features an A10-series quad-core CPU, the HD 8970M discrete graphics card, Killer networking, and a 17" FullHD anti-glare LCD panel. It even supports Eyefinity. There is no official word on precise availability, but pricing for the GX70 notebook is expected to be around €1250.



I'm expecting NVIDIA's new flagship to handily beat this, though, albeit at a significantly higher price.
I own an Alienware M17X with a Radeon 7970M and drivers are absolutely fine.
Except that I sometimes get confused with whether or not I need Enduro drivers or not.
If he wants to support a company that builds hardware that does not work and then a company that lies about it, go right ahead.
Beyond 11.8, i had no problems at all. Ever.
I do not know why the other guy down-voted so much but... usually mobile graphics drivers fall on the laptop manufacturer. With my experience he is dead-on as far as HP drivers go. Their drivers for 6970m were "borrowed" from an earlier edition GPU that had insane compatibility problems. Games would constantly freeze, black screens and etc. Automatic transition from intel GPU to Radeon never worked, even if you disabled intel GPU and forced only to use radeon as the default. There was a large outcry on the internet and twitter/facebook but HP did nothing at all short of exchanging your laptop for another model within 30 days, after 30 days you were SOL. After emailing AMD/ATI they straight out said that it is the responsibility of laptop manufacturer to provide and "brew" their own drivers for their laptops.
HP never fixed problems with their videocard drivers to this day! There was sooo much frustration that people started to release their own 3rd party modified drivers to alleviate HP's lack of care. I forgot the website but can look it up if needed.
ATI/AMD really needs to start cracking the whip on lazy companies like HP; they make them look bad even though they are not directly related.
This is just terrible that AMD rebrands stuff. I mean NV never does this. I can't believe the BALLS of AMD to pull these shenanigans. I will never buy AMD again, I hope they go out of business...
/sarcasm
Both sides do it. Get OVER it. I guess they forgot to mention 780m is already in haswell laptop leaks
It saves me a lot of hunting, as i only have to download once and install on two machines.
I own an Alienware M17X with a Radeon 7970M and drivers are absolutely fine.
Except that I sometimes get confused with whether or not I need Enduro drivers or not.
As the other guy noted, AMD has problems with drivers. I'll go further and say both on desktop & mobile:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Update-Radeon-HD-7970M-vs-GeForce-GTX-680M.87744.0.html
"Nearly 60,000 hits and more than 1,200 comments on 80+ pages: Our forum thread »Radeon HD 7970M problems« proves that AMD's mobile high-end graphics card was even months after its launch anything but mature."
80 pages of complaints doesn't lie and this is still having issues with their rehash. They even note some crap STILL is the same from the first time they did the review a year earlier.
"Although AMD promised optimizations, the improvements were only small. Despite several performance gains and bug fixes, the graphics card never worked completely as it was advertised. Only since Catalyst 12.11 Beta, which brought some innovations, did it begin to function reasonably well, but still not without its problems."
His point is valid. You may have had a great experience, but TONS of people would beg to differ. Maybe they'll get it right with the rebadge eventually. It's just beginning to function well?
"Although Nvidia's Optimus technology still performs better (Optimus is more reliable and features more visual notifications and comfortable functions), Enduro is now fairly useful."
Well, at least they are FAIRLY useful now. See the point? Just fairly useful though.
"Overall, the driver development is decent, but still requires improvements in some aspects. The following table lists the major fixes and what still needs more attention:"
I'll refrain from posting the table but you see where I'm going here...
"However, Enduro is still inferior to Optimus on almost all levels despite the small optimizations."
"The GeForce GTX 680M can only justify its higher price to some extent. The reader has to decide whether the superior energy efficiency, bigger feature set (3D Vision, PhysX etc.), and better driver support are worth the surcharge."
The surcharge means nothing if I don't have to live with problems for over a year that still are not fixed as shown. Features are just a bonus. As a gamer it's Drivers, Drivers, Drivers, just like in business it's location, location, location