AMD Radeon HD 7970 i Crossfire

AMD barely managed to introduce the first graphics card in the Radeon HD 7000 series before the turn of the year, but nothing less than the flagship HD 7970. After an initial round in the test lab, it’s time to take another look at the performance king, now with no less than two copies in Crossfire.

For those who do not have the strength to plow through all the test results, the overall performance is compiled in an index as usual. In the resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, a scaling of about 70 percent is shown, significantly worse than what Crossfire can usually achieve.

Part of this can be blamed on Civilization V, a game that needs to be optimized in the drivers to take better advantage of both graphics processors. Another factor is that the resolution is too low and that other limitations, such as processor performance, hold back the frame rate.

When the resolution is screwed up to 2560 x 1600 pixels, the two newcomers scale significantly better, about 84 percent – a result in class with Nvidia SLI. In this case, two Radeon HD 7970 performs 34 percent better than Geforce GTX 580 in SLI.

As usual, it is advisable to flag so that the result can be improved in step with new versions of the drivers and updated application profiles. However, the test results give a good indication of how much performance there is to get with an extra graphics card in Crossfire.

All test results are gathered in the original review of the Radeon HD 7970, which has now been updated with the figures from the Crossfire tests. Note that updating the browser’s local image cache (ctrl + f5) may be required for the new charts to be visible.

► SweClocker’s review of the Radeon HD 7970