AMD Radeon HD 7990 and 7950 Details Leaked
Over the holiday weekend, details were leaked on the upcoming release of the AMD Radeon HD 7950 and the massive dual-GPU flagship Radeon HD 7990.
With the paper launch of the Radeon HD 7970 last week, we are starting to get more leaked information about the other models hitting the market under the new "Tahiti" platform. In the information leaked by xtreview, The HD 7950 will have 1792 stream processors, 28 GCN compute units, which is down 256 stream processors from the HD 7970. It will utilize a 384-bit memory bus and 3GB GDDR5 just like the HD 7970. The HD 7950 looks to utilize 112 texture units and 32 full color ROPs. It has support for a maximum of 6 displays. What is still unknown at this time is the core clock speed, memory clock speed and price point. With the HD 7970 set to release around $550, I would expect the HD 7950 to fall closer to the $400 price mark at release.
AMD is expected to release its flagship dual-GPU graphics card based on the "Tahiti" platform in 2012. We are learning under the codename "New Zealand", AMD is working on the monster HD 7990, which will utilize two HD 7970's and 6GB of total graphics memory (3 GB per GPU system). If AMD will indeed go for the HD 7970, this could mean that the card will include 62 compute units for a total of 4096 stream processors, 256 texture units and 64 full color ROPs.
One thing that will benefit the HD 7990 is AMD's new ZeroCore technology. ZeroCore technology completely powers down other GPUs, other than the primary one, to zero state, when the system is not running graphics-heavy applications (though as discussed in our review of the HD 7970, this feature still needs to be verified). This means at idle, desktop or video playback state, the HD 7990's power draw will be nearly equal to that of the HD 7970, which through early testing was impressive.
Early reports have the HD 7990 set to release around March, 2012 with a hefty price tag.



those are the 7970 reviews, not the 7950 or 7990 >_
http://www.techspot.com/review/481-amd-radeon-7970/page11.html
... how comes, that they haz the reviews, but TOM's talk just about leaks?
those are the 7970 reviews, not the 7950 or 7990 >_
i'd love to see 2 gb and 1 gb versions of 7950, 7870and 7850. would be cheaper than the flagship 3 gb ones and fall right into my budget....*dreams*
By 12:00 AM - December 22, 2011 by Don Woligroski, Igor Wallossek
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7970-benchmark-tahiti-gcn,3104.html
Although as expected, AMD will probably charge up the butt for such high-end cards, much like Nvidia has done in the past.
It really is good pricing that Radeon has done with the 7970 cause we must take into account that the Nvidia 580s that have a 3gb frame buffer are even more money than a vanilla 3gb 7970.
Do yu hasz stoopid?
I hope they never do. The only reason that a dual GPU card exists is just bragging rights. If you're actually looking for the price range of a dual GPU card and your computer is able to do SLI or crossfire.
And I shudder at the thought of the game are quite eerie dual GPU. I really hope the days of a crysis like game where we can't play it at max graphics for years is never to come around again.
Note that on PC gaming was… More popular than console gaming… At least more supported… It was actually viable for you to buy a new GPU every six months because the games requiring more and more power. I believe the very end of this was crysis, I can't think of any game that required more than that after it.
See the problem with crisis was that the engine was very an optimized and was honestly abysmal, you can see this best crysis 2 where he will push all crysis level graphics on the consoles, yet you are playing the original crysis on console level hardware, I really doubt you could play it much beyond low.
We have forgot the remake of cyisis for the consoles, where the textures aside it pushed very impressive graphics considering the consoles hardware.
I personally do not believe that any game should ever be made beyond what's available today in a single card configuration. I believe multi-card should be used to increase the FPS and extra crap like an insane resolution adding insane anti-aliasing I don't believe the game should have been made with the thought that someone is going to put two or three graphics cards in the system.
Basically what I'm saying is I want the engines the games run on to be refined, I don't want them to go brute force like they did in the past. If there is one thing I can think the consoles for, if they ended the era of brute forcing for games.
there really amazing, the die size on the 7970 is bigger than its equivalent 6XXX card, and it's a die shrink. Not only do the math right now because it's almost 6 AM, but I expected more performance from these cards, sure it might just be drivers and apparently these cards going to go a lot faster as time goes on I expected a bit more considering how much is in these cards.
Also, I'm even more crossing my fingers for the 7850 & 7870... The big question is, will they ALSO use GCN, or will we get saddled with VLIW4, basically making them little other than a slightly cheaper 6950/70? These benchmarks, even with preliminary drivers, are showing us just what a phenomenal leap forward GCN is providing: in terms of simple "raw" compute power, the 7970 isn't a whole huge leap above the 6970, as it only has 33% more compute units, and a ~5% bump in clock rate. In spite of the modest (~40% total) increase in raw power, and being hampered by PRELIMINARY drivers, we're seeing typically a 50-60% performance gain over the prior generation, indicating that GCN is seriously more efficient.
That, and the GPGPU benchmarks are boasting even higher improvements, suggesting that GCN fixed the double-precision failings of VLIW4, where it took 4 SPs to get enough parts for a DP FMA unit, when it wouldn't have been that hard/costly to make it take only 2 SPs. If a 7850/7870 can get this benefit, it'll partially help offset the rumored MSRPs, which ARE higher than for the prior generation.
The irony here is that these two were ALSO beaten to the punch by Tom's.... The guru3D article may have been the same day, but I recall it came up mid-day, whereas Mr. Woligrowski got the Tom's article up at midnight sharp. And the TechSpot article was 5 days late. And it appears Toms' went to painful extents to be far more complete than either... A commendable action given how scarce the info they had to go on other than having a sample card with glitchy drivers in their hand.