We chose Crysis 2 for our overclocking tests. In our experience, this title is extremely sensitive to variations in GPU frequency, reacting negatively when a graphics card is near its edge (even more so than FurMark).
Both the Radeon HD 7970 and 7970 GHz Edition are set to 1050, 1100, 1150, and 1175 MHz. We were unable to reach anything higher than 1175 MHz on either of our GHz Edition samples without encountering serious visual artifacts.
First, let’s compare power consumption across the four runs at each frequency setting.

As we can see, increased power consumption corresponds to a reduction in GPU voltage. We would have expected the opposite.


Starting at 1175 MHz, we began to see minor visual artifacts (missing texture transparencies and polygon errors) that we were able to remedy by increasing VDDC. Apparently, PowerTune is stepping in very early on to turn voltage down, way before power consumption actually reaches a critical level.
The results of this intervention are quite obvious, manifesting as sporadically-dropped frames, texture errors, absent light sources, and other missing effects. Strangely, although the average and maximum frame rates continually increased, the minimum frame rates started to go down with each clock rate increase starting at 1150 MHz.

Our Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition cards aren’t any more capable than the original Radeon HD 7970 overclocked. In our opinion, you reach the best results at 1150 MHz using AMD’s own tools. Push any harder and you’ll find the card dropping frames (even if its average frame rates seem to suggest better performance).
- Is An Overclocked Radeon HD 7970 Greater Than GeForce GTX 680?
- PowerTune With Boost: Is The Accelerator Stuck?
- Radeon HD 7970 Vs. Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition
- Overclocking With PowerTune
- Will Your Old 7970 Take A GHz Edition Firmware?
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: 3DMark 11
- Benchmark Results: Battlefield 3 (DX 11)
- Benchmark Results: Crysis 2 (DX 9/11)
- Benchmark Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (DX 9)
- Benchmark Results: DiRT 3 (DX 11)
- Benchmark Results: World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm (DX 11)
- Benchmark Results: Metro 2033 (DX 11)
- Benchmark Results: GPU Compute
- Benchmark Results: MediaConverter 7.5
- Temperature And Noise
- Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Gets Our Aftermarket Cooling Treatment
- Power Consumption
- New Drivers Deliver; Radeon HD 7970 Claims A Symbolic Win
And for the gamers: take a look at the new UT4 engine! Without excellent GPGPU performace this will be a disaster for each graphics card. See you, Nvidia.
the issue is them rethinking their future designs scares me... Nvidia has started a HORRIBLE trend in the business that I hope to dear god AMD does not follow suite. True, Nvidia is able to produce more gaming performance for less, but this is pushing anyone who wants GPU compute to get an overpriced professional card. now before you say "well if you're making a living out of it, fork out the cash and go Quadro", let me remind you that a lot of innovators in various fields actually do use GPU compute to ultimately make progress (especially in academic sciences) to ultimately bring us better tech AND new directions in tech development... and I for one know a lot of government funded labs that can't afford to buy a stack of quadro cards
now if only you could bold it
with Winzip that does not use GPU, VCE that slows down video encoding and a card that gives lower min FPS..... EPIC FAIL.
or before releasing your products, try to ensure S/W compatibility.
the issue is them rethinking their future designs scares me... Nvidia has started a HORRIBLE trend in the business that I hope to dear god AMD does not follow suite. True, Nvidia is able to produce more gaming performance for less, but this is pushing anyone who wants GPU compute to get an overpriced professional card. now before you say "well if you're making a living out of it, fork out the cash and go Quadro", let me remind you that a lot of innovators in various fields actually do use GPU compute to ultimately make progress (especially in academic sciences) to ultimately bring us better tech AND new directions in tech development... and I for one know a lot of government funded labs that can't afford to buy a stack of quadro cards
And for the gamers: take a look at the new UT4 engine! Without excellent GPGPU performace this will be a disaster for each graphics card. See you, Nvidia.
;-)
Excellent tip. Told you I'd look into it!
WoW is meaningful, actually.
New games will make it in when vendors start giving us more than two or three days to retest all of their graphics cards
And here's me, hoping that this kind of competition landscape would still be present in the enthusiast CPU market.
I really hope this is trolling, rather than a calous endeavor to discredit a competitors product.