AMD launches Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, demands rematch with NVIDIA

If you've been missing out on the graphics card wars of late, then here's a quick rundown. AMD launched its high-end $549 Radeon HD 7970 at the end of last year, and it reigned comfortably for a few months until NVIDIA came out with the masterful GeForce GTX 680. That would have been the end of the matter, at least for this product cycle, except for one crucial factor: time. Having reached the market so much earlier, AMD has now had six months to not only tweak its drivers but also its 28nm silicon. That process has already culminated in 1GHz cards at the low- and mid-ranges, and today it leads to the (slightly predictable) announcement of a Radeon HD 7970 'GHz Edition' -- priced at $499 and expected to be available from a range of board makers from next week. To keep you amused in the meantime, there's plenty of detail in the gallery below and after the break.

Update: review roundup added here.

It almost goes without saying that the new version has a clock speed bump from 925MHz to 1GHz, but there are other fundamental changes too. For a start, AMD's PowerTune feature has been given the ability to boost voltage as well as clock speed, and it can also now push the clock up to 1050MHz when there's available headroom -- which should help it go up against NVIDIA's own GPU Boost feature. Interestingly, AMD is also promoting the card's compute prowess, which is increasingly relevant for non-gaming applications as well as rendering and lighting, declaring the 7970 GHz Edition to be the "world's first 1TFLOP DPFP [double-precision floating point] GPU" with a 2.6x lead over its rival in compute workloads.

The original 3GB of GDDR5 memory remains the same on this new edition, but it too has been clocked up to offer 10-percent more bandwidth -- a 6GB/s data rate instead of the previous 5.5GB/s per pin. What's more, all of this is being accomplished without changing the 250W typical power draw, which bodes well not only for operating noise and temperature, but also for keeping the price in check, since vendors can simply put the new silicon on their old boards. Given all this, AMD is already declaring that it has "taken back the crown," with its official benchmarks giving the GHz Edition a significant fps lead in all current games at 2560 x 1600 resolution -- but it may be safer to reserve judgement until we've rounded-up independent reviews from the specialist sites.

View the original article here

NVIDIA GeForce GT 640 review roundup: a $99 card that fails to keep Kepler's promise

NVIDIA blew reviewers away with its flagship GTX 680, but building cards for the low-end is a whole different challenge. The GT 640 hits the $99 price point, where it sits right between the AMD Radeon HD 7750 at $109 and the last-gen Radeon 6670 at around $80. As it turns out, these rivals pull off something of a pincer movement, leaving NVIDIA's card little room to retaliate. The GT 640 contains a 28nm Kepler chip, but it's a cutdown version of the silicon with just 384 CUDA cores, a poor memory bandwidth of 28.5GB/s and no GPU Boost feature -- which means the card can't boost its 900MHz to make use of thermal headroom. These limitations have a significant impact on the benchmarks, as you'll see in our little review roundup after the break.
Tom's Hardware found that the GT 640, as sold on an Afox board, trailed the Radeon HD 7750 (the old one, not even the newer 900MHz version) severely in Battlefield 3, with an average of 25fps versus 44fps at 1920 x 1080. It did better at Skyrim with the same settings, beating the cheaper 6670 and achieving a 32fps average -- but still lagging way behind a 48fps score from the 7750. Diablo III and DiRT 3 showed big disparities too, although both were still very much playable on the NVIDIA. The card ran cool and quiet, but overall this site concluded the card was "too expensive" and would need to drop to $85 in order to be competitive.
AnandTech came to a similar conclusion regarding a Zotac GT 640 card, praising temperature and power consumption but finding it to be a lot noisier than other alternatives and seriously tardy when it comes to actual gaming. The Radeon HD 7750 was around 10-30fps ahead at various resolutions in a number of titles, including Metro: 2033, DiRT 3, Shogun 2, and Arkham City. Overall, the GT 640 was condemned as "unremarkable if not flat-out bad" for gamers, but commended as one of the best low-end cards for HTPCs, thanks to its low-power credentials and ability to decode and output 4K.
We'll add links to more reviews as they trickle in.

View the original article here