Then and Now: 5 Generations of Radeon Graphics In comparison

Remaining month we when compared part a decade’s value of DirectX 11-capable GeForce playing cards in the newest and biggest PC video games to peer the place Nvidia has made the largest efficiency leaps and which GPUs have elderly the most efficient.

We had by no means when compared such a lot of GPU generations underneath the similar prerequisites and the effects have been attention-grabbing. So naturally other folks the use of AMD Radeons have been additionally curious to peer how their single-GPU flagship portions have held up.

Provided with 5 years of Radeon era and the newest Catalyst motive force, we set to benchmark main AMD architectures launched between overdue 2009 and October 2014: Evergreen (HD 5870), Northern Islands (HD 6970), Southern Islands (HD 7970) and the corporate’s most up-to-date GPU structure, Sea Islands (R9 290X).

The HD 7000 sequence was once a large deal for AMD because it noticed the transfer from 40nm to a 28nm fabrication procedure. Additionally, it was once the corporate’s first in point of fact new structure in 5 years for the reason that HD 2000 sequence.

Referred to as ‘Graphics Core Subsequent’ (GCN), the HD 7000 vary featured a RISC SIMD structure that required significantly extra transistors than sooner than however presented benefits for GPU computation and likewise result in higher potency. Many of the GPUs within the HD 7000 sequence have been in keeping with the GCN 1.0 structure, even though the HD 7790 featured an advanced GCN 1.1 good judgment, which added AMD TrueAudio and a revised model of AMD’s Powertune era.

GCN 1.2 introduced alongside AMD’s Radeon R9 285, that includes advanced tessellation efficiency, lossless delta shade compression to scale back reminiscence bandwidth utilization, an up to date and extra environment friendly instruction set, a top of the range scaler for video, and a brand new multimedia engine for video encoding and deciphering.

AMD’s upcoming Radeon 300 sequence code-named ‘Pirate Islands’ is predicted to be in keeping with an identical GCN 1.2 structure.

The Radeon HD 5870 and HD 6970 have been obviously the single-GPU flagships for his or her sequence, whilst the 7970 was once changed after best 5 months with an overclocked model referred to as the 7970 GHz Version, which went directly to be the single-GPU flagship for 16 months.

The 7970 GHz was once launched out of necessity because it allowed AMD to retain the efficiency crown over Nvidia’s GTX 680 — if best slightly. This was once AMD’s resolution to keep away from instant worth cuts, a transfer steadily compelled on graphics chip makers after the contest undercuts them in worth vs. efficiency presented. Nonetheless, we did not just like the 7970 GHz Version when it landed because it was once costlier than the usual 7970 and best presented a modest manufacturing unit overclock. We have now incorporated each the 7970 and the 7970 GHz Version since each have been Radeon HD 7000 flagships at a given level.

Let’s discover how Radeon GPUs have scaled from one technology to the following during the last few years…