When the card ins’t in use, it dials down its energy usage. Put simply, the card will automatically overclock itself while in use to make sure it’s delivering the most performance it possibly can.ĪMD ZeroCore Power Technology: ZeroCore is essentially PowerTune in reverse. When the graphics card detects that it isn’t operating at its maximum potential power threshold, it dynamically adjusts its clock speeds, to hit that power ceiling. It’s designed to operate much like AMD’s Turbo Core, or Intel’s Turbo Boost technologies. 264 HD video encoder, and “faster than real-time” HD video encoding.ĪMD PowerTune Technology: PowerTune was introduced back in the with the Radeon HD 6900 series, and it’s been refined for the Radeon HD 7000 series. It’s part of AMD’s App Acceleration front, offering a multi-stream H.
AMD RADEON HD 7970 SERIES
But AMD is hoping to convince users who are fed up with poor integrated graphics performance that an inexpensive 7000 series GPU can put a bit extra oomph into their everyday tasks.ĪMD Video Codec Engine (VCE): The Video Codec Engine built into the Radeon HD 7000 series GPU will provided dedicate hardware acceleration for media tasks.
AMD RADEON HD 7970 PC
That said, if you’re just using your PC to watch YouTube clips and edit PowerPoint presentations, you don’t need to worry about making room in your budget for a $550 graphics card. But AMD is betting that most users buying high end graphics cards will have also picked up monitors equipped with next-generation connectors. There’s also a mini-DisplayPort to DVI adapter, so you can use 3 DVI displays if you’d like, right out of the box.
An HDMI to DVI adapter is bundled with the graphics card, if you’d like to keep using two DVI ports. The card is theoretically capable of supporting a maximum of 6 displays with the aid of a DisplayPort 1.2 hub, though those haven’t actually hit the market yet. You’ll find DVI, HDMI, and two mini-DisplayPort connectors. This card (and architecture) is also built with multiple-displays at heart. That’s a lot of memory and bandwidth, to push a lot of data, and pixels back and forth – AMD is rolling quite a few new features into this launch, including support for 3D across three displays on a single card, so it’ll need it. Under the hood of the reference card are 3GB of DDR5 Memory, with a 384-bit memory bus. To that end, the Radeon HD 7900 series will also offer up to 768KB of read/write L2 cache, and amount we’d normally only see on proper CPUs. That means they can schedule their own tasks and manage workloads independently - AMD is focusing on versatility here, as these new cards are designed to be capable compute engines for non-gaming tasks. Now, though, they can go back and forth through the same cache.The 7900 series packs 32 clusters of GCN compute units, each behaving much like an individual CPU core. Historically, L1 was only used to read textures. The vector units could handle those tasks too, but this co-processor’s strength is in offloading scalar work in order to allow the vector units to flex their muscles in more appropriate ways.Įach CU has four texture units tied to a 16 KB read/write L1 cache, which is two times bigger than the VLIW4’s read-only cache.
AMD RADEON HD 7970 CODE
We haven’t yet talked about the CU’s scalar unit, which is primarily responsible for branching code and pointer arithmetic.
Equipped with four VUs, each CU can consequently process four wavefronts every four cycles, the equivalent of one wavefront per cycle per CU. Unlike the simplified clock cycle we use in the example above, each VU can process one-quarter of one wavefront per cycle. Let’s go into more depth on those VUs, though. And we know that the VUs operate independent of each other.
We also noted that the CU is composed of four vector units, which, in turn, contain 16 ALUs and a register file each. As mentioned previously, the CU replaces the SIMD engines (as named by AMD) we’ve seen since the Radeon 2000 days.