Shootouts

AMD Radeon HD 7970 Duel - ASUS vs. Sapphire

By James Lu - 2 May 2012

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat & Overclocking Results

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

In our S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat benchmark, the overclocked HD 7970 cards only showed marginal performance gains against the reference card on the less taxing Day Run with anti-aliasing off, averaging about 1% better. However all three cards were already churning out frame rates at over 150FPS. On the other hand, they trailed behind the GTX 680 by about 9%.

On the more intensive Sun Shafts Run with anti-aliasing set to 4x, both cards fared much better, improving on the reference card scores by about 3% while also getting the better of NVIDIA, with about 4% better average FPS on the lowest resolution, and improving as we bumped up the resolution, with the ASUS claiming a considerable 12% margin of victory over the GTX 680 at the resolution of 2560x1600 pixels.

      

      

 

Overclocking

For our overclocking efforts, we were able to push the ASUS Radeon HD 7970 up to 1245MHz at the core with memory running at 6800MHz DDR. On Sapphire, we were able to get to get its GPU core up to 1211MHz and memory to 6800MHz DDR. For both of these settings, we had to increase voltage to 1.185mV, up from the default value of 1.174mV.

For our efforts with ASUS, we were rewarded with a roughly 16% improvement on 3DMark 11’s Performance preset, while the card really shined on the Extreme setting, showing a 22% increase in performance compared to its factory overclock setting.

With Sapphire, our gains were even bigger, with a 17% increase on 3DMark 11’s Performance setting, and a massive 24.5% increase on Extreme.

Compared against each other, ASUS slightly edged out Sapphire with about a 1-2% lead in their final overclocked benchmark scores.

Against the overclocked GTX 680, both the Radeon HD 7970 cards lost in the Performance preset, with the NVIDIA card still holding pole position with just a 2.5% lead. However, the AMD camp turned the tables when it came to the higher resolution and tougher Extreme preset, with ASUS posting a substantial 7% margin of victory, and Sapphire at 5% over the GTX 680 respectively. Not a bad match-up at all and it shows that the custom designed cards from the respective vendors can offer something as enticing as the GeForce GTX 680 in certain respects.

      

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.