However, PowerTune Boost, the higher core clock speed, and the faster memory does come at a cost-while idle power is actually a little better than the original, at 120W (versus 124W for the first Radeon HD 7970), full load power is a whopping 384W, over 18 percent higher than the 324W maximum power draw on the original HD 7970. The architecture hasn’t changed, and the AMD reference card looks nearly identical, right down to the display connectors and fan. All the game tests are reported at 2560 x 1600 pixel resolution with 4x multisampling antialiasing enabled.
A Watts Up Pro USB power meter collected the system power data.
But perhaps most interesting is the new “boost clock”-something that Nvidia implemented in the GTX 680. Since a number of AMD partners already ship cards running in excess of 1GHz, officially supporting that clock speed isn’t a surprise.ĪMD is also building the new version with faster memory-the same 6GHz effective memory that Nvidia uses on the GTX 680. The reference card has a sticker on the back labeled “Rev 02”, though that probably refers to the card as a whole. For now, let’s run down the key differences between the original and the new card.ġ x Dual Link DVI, 1 x HDMI 1.4a (Fast), 2 x mini-DisplayPort 1.2Ģ x Dual Link DVI, 1 x HDMI 1.4a (Fast), 2 x mini-DisplayPort 1.2ĪMD claims the core clock boost from 925MHz to 1GHz is due to better understanding of the manufacturing process and a few tweaks to that process. We’ll take a look at a couple of these games later. That’s proved a good product strategy, but now we’re starting to see a new generation of games that integrate GPU compute features into the game, either using DirectCompute or OpenCL.
The latest GTX 680 drivers don’t support OpenCL 1.2 (more on that later), though you can still run Nvidia’s own CUDA framework for GPU compute. Nvidia has been reluctant to supply what’s called GPU compute performance, and it’s been suggested that Nvidia deemphasized the compute performance in search of gaming performance glory. In some ways, though, the GTX 680 is an odd beast. Several months later, Nvidia launched the GTX 680, a power-efficient graphics card that retook the slot as the best single GPU card for gaming. AMD shipped its original Radeon HD 7970 in December 2011, and for a brief period, this 4.3-billion-transistor monster held the graphics performance crown.