AMD's Radeon HD7970 -- It's f:)cking fast.

Yeah. It's been out for a while now, but I've been waiting for the Tech Report review of the thing because they actually do a half-decent job (including measuring frame times as well as rates, which give an indication of if, and how much microstutter will impact performance).



Anyway. It's fast. Faster than the GTX580 by 5-25%, in most cases. Unlike the rest of the Radeons based on the VLIW4/5 architecture, this thing (GCN) actually does tesselation and GPGPU incredibly well.

There's some other fancies like ZeroCore (fuck yes, 3W idle power ) and power consumption is down as well. It draws less power than a 6970 even though it's been beefed up quite a bit more.

I guess here's the graphs that count most for you guys:





(By the way, 99th percentile frame time is how long each frame stays on screen for. The last 1% are excluded)





And here's the link to the full review.