AMD Radeon HD 7730 Review: A Harbinger Of The Kaveri APU?

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We got our hands on two Radeon HD 7730 cards from Sapphire: one with 2 GB of DDR3 and the other sporting 1 GB of GDDR5. How do they compare to AMD's Radeon HD 6670s, and what might we glean from these boards about the upcoming Kaveri-based APUs?

Results: Compute Performance

We'll begin our exploration of compute performance with GUIMiner, a popular tool used by Bitcoin miners. This workload is totally dependent on the GPU's hashing throughput, and memory bandwidth has little effect on the results.

Although it sports fewer shaders, AMD's Radeon HD 7730 beats the Radeon HD 6670 by a significant margin. This is yet another testament to GCN's potential in these types of tasks. The Radeon HD 7750 leaves its competition in the dust, while Nvidia's cards turn in dismal results, as we've seen in the past.

LuxMark is more affected by each card's memory configuration, in addition to its GPU's compute performance. This OpenCL-accelerated benchmark puts the GDDR5-based 7730 just ahead of the Radeon HD 7730 with DDR3.

Don Woligroski
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Don Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.