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The Southern Islands family consists of three 28nm GPUs: Tahiti, Pitcairn and Cape Verde. Of the three, we have examined the high-end Tahiti GPU and mainstream Cape Verde, leaving only Pitcairn untested. In today’s review we are able to round out the series as Pitcairn has finally arrived in our labs, allowing us to benchmark, dissect and analyze AMD’s latest Graphics Core Next (GCN) core.
In total we are going to be examining two new cards, AMD's Radeon HD 7870 and 7850, both based on the GCN architecture. GCN is revolutionary in that eliminates the previous VLIW design for a non-VLIW SIMD engine. Additionally, the “Pitcairn” cores pack in between 16 and 20 GCN cores, 32 raster units and 128 texture units, all while boasting a transistor count of 1.4 billion in a 212mm² die. These specifications place these new products right in the middle of the Southern Islands family, and give them a good shot a competing with last gen's high-end hardware.
Along with the internal specifications, Pitcairn shares the same feature set as the HD 7900 series. This gives both models support for Eyefinity 2.0, App Acceleration, DX 11.1 and HD3D technology. What is different, however, is that the 7800 series runs on a 256-bit interface instead of the 384-bit interface utilized by the HD 7900 series. With the slightly scaled back architecture and memory interface, the HD 7800 series is able to launch at a lower price than the high-end gear, while still having the ability to render massive amounts of pixels-per-second.
If you remember anything about the Radeon HD 7970 launch, then you've probably figured our "review" today is more of an in-depth, hands-on preview of the new graphics cards, as the hardware won’t be in the channel until later this March 19th. AMD has timed the preview launch to happen just before events such as CeBIT and GDC to avoid any possible leaks.
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I gotta admit I wasn't expecting the 7870 to be that powerful. I know typically the new mid-range card replaces the previous high end card, but normally it's a like for like swap. I was surprised when most tests put the 7870 between 14 and 20% faster than the 6970. That was a pleasant surprise.. I may have to do a little saving and get one of these though I am still cautious of what Nvidia are planning. I really don't wanna jump in and get a new HD 7series card only for Nvidia to release new cards that on all levels just destroy it. I guess as hard as it will be to wait I'll have to be patient..
new gen should succeed it by a healthy margin.
I have noticed though that 7950s are getting cheaper in the UK, This one is £313, which was the same price my brother paid two month ago for a 6970.
Not quite sure on the reliability of the benchmarks, but the HD7770 has a lower score than the 6700.