Radeon HD 7950 will be sporting AMD’s new GCN architecture and be made at 28 nanometer. Recently leaked benchmarks points to the card becoming the second fastest on the market, only beaten by big brorther Radeon HD 7970.
AMD will according to earlier rumors launch its second graphics card of the Southern Islands family on January 31st. and the graphics circuit that is developed under the code name Thaiti Pro will house 1792 Radeon cores and sport 3 GB GDDR5 memory. The card will launch with a GPU operating at 800 MHz, but several partners are working on overclocked models.
| Model | HD 7970 “Tahiti XT” | HD 7950 “Tahiti Pro” |
| Node | 28nm | 28nm |
| Circuit size |
365mm² | 365mm² |
| GCN units |
32 | 28 |
| Radeon cores | 2048 | 1792 |
| GPU frequency |
925 MHz | 800 MHz |
| GFLOPS | 3789 | 2867 |
| Memory buffer |
3 GB GDDR5 | 3 GB GDDR5 |
| Memory bus | 384-bit | 384-bit |
| Memory frequency |
1375 MHz (5500 MHz effectively) |
1250 MHz (5000 MHz effectively) |
| ROPs | 32 | 32 |
| Texture units |
128 | 112 |
| Price | ~500€ | ~400€ |
Several early benchmarks have appeared showing Radeon HD 7950 capable of squeezing in between Radeon HD 7970 and NVIDIA’s current flagship GeForce GTX 580 in raw GPU performance. According to Donanimhaber Radeon HD 7950 with 880 MHz (80 MHz over reference) and 5000 MHz memory (reference) beat GeForce GTX 580 in 3DMark 11 Extreme, which is a hint of what we have to expect.
Chinese MyDrivers has also published some early benchmarks where we see how an overclocked Radeon HD 7950 (1030/5000MHz) battles big brother Radeon HD 7970 in 3DMark 11 Performance. The overclocked 7950 card reaches 7056 points whiel HD7970 does 7228 points at stock clocks. A reference HD7950 scores 6139 points in the same test, while NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 and Radeon HD 6970 scores around 5450 points each.
3DMark 11 is far from a generic measuring device for graphics performance, as it differs big time between games and engines. AMD is aiming to beat GeForce GTX 580 with Radeon HD 7950, and it will be priced at around 400€ to make it even more appealing when compared to NVIDIA’s flagship.
