28nm Graphics Cards

[naut]

I dunno if you guys have seen much of this, but AMD's 7000 series is looking pretty swanky. And Nvidea's that will follow fairly soon after will also be on 28nm architecture.

AMD Line-up:

HD7970 ( Tahiti XT )
Core's 2048 operate at 1GHz clock
3GB of GDDR5 memory at 5.5GHz
Memory Bandwidth 264GB/s
Memory Bus Width 384-bits
Texture Units 128
ROPs 64
Manufacturing Process TSMC 28nm
Price $449

HD7950 ( Tahiti Pro )
Core's 1920 operate at 900MHz clock
3GB of GDDR5 memory at 5.0GHz
Memory Bandwidth 240GB/s
Memory Bus Width 384-bits
Texture Units 120
ROPs 60
Manufacturing Process TSMC 28nm
Price $349

HD7990 ( New Zealand ) HD7970 X2 "March Realease"
6GB of GDDR5 memory at 5.5GHz
Price $699


I am pretty certain my next upgrade will be a 7970. I'm pretty excited. Y'all?

[Furunculus]

yes, i have seen the specs for the 79xx series and i think i'm getting one.

blender 2.6.x running cycles off the gpu via OpenCL sounds magnificient, particularly if they memory virtualisation comes true so we are not shackled to the 3GB limit.

[SkySonata]

Got my 7970 yesterday.

VERY powerful. Chews up Witcher 2 on ultra and on ubersampling. derlicioussss

Kinda loud too. Gonna need a new PSU (my 700W isn't 80+ bronze and I will need one when overclocking).

[Lemur]

Daddy want (http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review).

[Furunculus]

i want too, but even i balk at paying £480 for a graphics card!

[naut]

i want too, but even i balk at paying £480 for a graphics card!
Yep. The current price range is far too much.

[Lemur]

Bah, I didn't say I was getting it, I said I wanted it. Besides which, my rig is pushing the six-year-old mark, so the next upgrade will be a full rebuild, not a new videocard. There's only so far you can take a core2duo system.

I'm playing current-gen games at 1920x1080 and they are fine. I figure I will either wait for a windfall of money or for a game I dig to be slow, and then I'll do the rebuild. Besides which, I want my OS and my Steamapps on a single SSD, which means I prolly want at least 200 gigs, so I'm also waiting for SSD prices to fall, fall, fall.

[a completely inoffensive name]

By the time I will be getting a new computer (probably putting it together myself), the scale will probably be down to 16nm architecture. The industry is progressing so fast. I wonder what will come next once the quantum tunneling issue is finally reached.

[WinterGreen]

It's progressing fast but at the same time hitting diminishing returns faster... gonna need some serious technological change besides nm shrinks.

[Furunculus]

the biggest technical change we need to see better graphics is to get the Xbox720 and PS4 on the market as rapidly as possible.

multiplatform games are so bottlenecked by consoles right now it is difficiult to comphrehend what high-end DX11 graphics cards could output if content was aimed at their capability:

the PS3 is 24 DX9 fixed function pipelines at ~550MHz (~300m transistors)
a 7970 is 2048 DX11.1 compute shaders at ~1GHz (4.3b transistors)

the difference is measured by orders of magnitude!