Why is the HD 7950 still so freaking good?

[stricken404]

I've noticed recently that my older brother's computer is quite fast with what it has in it. It's rocking an i5-3570K (no OC though), and a Sapphire HD 7950 3GB Dual-X. His build now is going on 3-4 years old and still plays every title at 1080p at max or near max settings at 1080p at 60 fps. He probably spent around 1000-1100 on the build 3-4 years ago, and I'm just amazed how fast it still is.

 

Is this common for 200-230 dollar cards? I certainly don't hear about people still being able to adequately use the GTX 660 in newer titles. Why is that? Less VRAM? Same with the GTX 760, I very rarely hear about people still using them. Though it seems like HD 7950/7970 setups are still quite prevalent. 

 

 

[spwath]

IDK, but my FX-6300 and HD 7950 still work great, playing games at 2560x1080 at high-ultra settings

[Syntaxvgm]

well the 7970 is still re-branded, so yah not bad at all  

[Enderman]

Lol what are these "titles" that you play near max at 1080p 60fps?

Minecraft and CSGO?

Because I can tell you right now that that card cannot do 1080p 60fps on any recent triple A title, unless your idea of "near max settings" is actually medium/high.

[TristanKing]

11 minutes ago, stricken404 said:

I've noticed recently that my older brother's computer is quite fast with what it has in it. It's rocking an i5-3570K (no OC though), and a Sapphire HD 7950 3GB Dual-X. His build now is going on 3-4 years old and still plays every title at 1080p at max or near max settings at 1080p at 60 fps. He probably spent around 1000-1100 on the build 3-4 years ago, and I'm just amazed how fast it still is.

 

Is this common for 200-230 dollar cards? I certainly don't hear about people still being able to adequately use the GTX 660 in newer titles. Why is that? Less VRAM? Same with the GTX 760, I very rarely hear about people still using them. Though it seems like HD 7950/7970 setups are still quite prevalent. 

 

 

Because it was a top of the line $450 card when it released 4 years ago... It'd be worrying if it didn't run some of today's games at max settings with a fairly decent FPS.

 

From the same year a GTX 670 costs $50 less but performs almost the same... I really don't know why you seem to think a HD 7950 is so amazing.

[Nena Trinity]

I saw one of these in a store for a few weeks ago it was a XFX HD 7950, I wonder what they sell it for... o3o

[samcool55]

Well the 7950's performance today is quite uncommon.

Firstly it's over-engineerd which means it packs waay more performance than they could get out of it.

AMD drivers were far from perfect for the card when it got released, during the years driver optimization improved and the performance slowly increased with every update. Which caused in the end a quite big performance gain just from the drivers alone.

 

Also the damn thing supports DX12 and async compute which means it's still capable of running newer technologies, even tho the card is quite old, again, over-engineerd back in the day, results are paying of today. (some people argue nvidia card as recently as the 9XX series have no support for it and the advantage 10XX cards get from async compute isn't as big as AMD cards can get).

 

The GTX660, well... Nvidia cards are known to age not as well because they aren't over-engineerd and drivers are quite good from day 1 which means there's not really much performance left in them that can be obtained by better drivers, so after 2-3 years the drivers are usually as good as they can be, there is no more performance left and it's downhill from that point on.

 

And IMO the lack of vram is just planned obsolescence, something Nvidia does more than AMD but that's something not many people agree on >_>

[stricken404]

3 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Lol what are these "titles" that you play near max at 1080p 60fps?

Minecraft and CSGO?

Because I can tell you right now that that card cannot do 1080p 60fps on any recent triple A title, unless your idea of "near max settings" is actually medium/high.

Mad Max, Battlefield 4, Battlefield Hardline, Battlefield 1 Beta, Crysis 3, Grand Theft Auto V, Sleeping Dogs Definitive Edition, Sniper Elite III. 

 

Near max being, pretty much maxed out, with AA turned off, and certain settings that are framerate killers (turning grass on ultra in GTA V will cripple even a GTX 980) 

[stricken404]

4 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Well the 7950's performance today is quite uncommon.

Firstly it's over-engineerd which means it packs waay more performance than they could get out of it.

AMD drivers were far from perfect for the card when it got released, during the years driver optimization improved and the performance slowly increased with every update. Which caused in the end a quite big performance gain just from the drivers alone.

 

Also the damn thing supports DX12 and async compute which means it's still capable of running newer technologies, even tho the card is quite old, again, over-engineerd back in the day, results are paying of today. (some people argue nvidia card as recently as the 9XX series have no support for it and the advantage 10XX cards get from async compute isn't as big as AMD cards can get).

 

The GTX660, well... Nvidia cards are known to age not as well because they aren't over-engineerd and drivers are quite good from day 1 which means there's not really much performance left in them that can be obtained by better drivers, so after 2-3 years the drivers are usually as good as they can be, there is no more performance left and it's downhill from that point on.

 

And IMO the lack of vram is just planned obsolescence, something Nvidia does more than AMD but that's something not many people agree on >_>

That makes sense! Because I don't think it was nearly this fast when he first got it. I've noticed my R9 290X improve too with driver updates. 

[That Norwegian Guy]

The Radeon HD 7950/ 7970 series has a lot in common with Hawaii, Polaris and Fiji and a lot of the groundwork that AMD has been doing to move towards better API/ hardware interaction started with the HD 69xx series. Whilst Nvidia have always been doing more in terms of its optimization through direct brute force driver optimization for each "important" game.

 

AMD's philosophy: Try to force a change in the industry to not require 200+ software engineers to sit around and optimize drivers for specific games all the time

Nvidia's philosophy: Overprice cards so they can afford to have 200+ software engineers sitting around optimizing drivers for specific games all the time.

 

So naturally, since those software engineers aren't working for the GTX 6xx cards anymore at all, except for critical issues, those cards completely lose relevance - but since the 7950 is architecturally similar to what AMD is still doing, it's more relevant today, and magnified by Mantle/ Vulkan/ DX12

[samcool55]

Just now, stricken404 said:

That makes sense! Because I don't think it was nearly this fast when he first got it. I've noticed my R9 290X improve too with driver updates. 

You can probably do some tests yourself and figure out how much % it improved in general.

But yea that's indeed a thing, mainly for AMD cards, nvidia cards can also improve from drivers but usually not as big as AMD cards.

[Siard]

My Gigabyte HD7950 WIndforce 3 3GB still packs a punch too, although in the BF1 beta I had to turn down the settings to Medium to get good frame rates (40-50 or even 60). 

Sadly I think I have to say goodbye to my 4 year old friend soon, because it also suffers from crashing from time to time, that became even more apparent in the BF1 beta (crashing every session I was playing, for ~3 hours of playing constantly).

If anyone has a suggestion for that issue, so my friendship with the GPU can last longer I would like to hear it. Otherwise I would have to find a new friend

[DarkBlade2117]

7 minutes ago, stricken404 said:

Mad Max, Battlefield 4, Battlefield Hardline, Battlefield 1 Beta, Crysis 3, Grand Theft Auto V, Sleeping Dogs Definitive Edition, Sniper Elite III. 

 

Near max being, pretty much maxed out, with AA turned off, and certain settings that are framerate killers (turning grass on ultra in GTA V will cripple even a GTX 980) 

I can barely max out those games and my i3 and 290 have pretty hefty OCs on them. As it isn't a bad system, you pay $1,000 for a custom built system, expect 3-5 years minimum out of depending on your needs. Anyways, are you ignoring dips? Because at max I easily get down into the low 40s

[stricken404]

1 minute ago, That Norwegian Guy said:

 

AMD's philosophy: Try to force a change in the industry to not require 200+ software engineers to sit around and optimize drivers for specific games all the time

Nvidia's philosophy: Overprice cards so they can afford to have 200+ software engineers sitting around optimizing drivers for specific games all the time.

 

Hmmm... This is good to know. So the card has gotten better because of driver optimizations that work because of architectural similarity to their newer GPUs. Good to hear. 

[stricken404]

5 minutes ago, DarkBlade2117 said:

 Anyways, are you ignoring dips? Because at max I easily get down into the low 40s

No, we're talking average fps, not minimum. It does have dips of course! 

[ltguy]

This thread is thoroughly explaining why people should buy the rx480 over the gtx 1060. 3855 flops vs 5161 flops. When all of the Nvidia smoke and mirror driver optimizations have moved on to the next lastest gpu and AMD has further optimized the drivers, the RX 480 will thoroughly stomp the gtx 1060 and there will be a new forum thread with people wondering why the rx480 is still so good while the gtx 1060 is showing its age.

[i_build_nanosuits]

it was a fucking great GPU at the time...i bought one brand new and it was EPIC...3GB of video memory...much cheaper than HD7970 and just a bit slower...it was a real great card and for 1080p gaming even to this day is still very good.

 

You talking about the GTX 660 though?! really...the real competition to these cards where the GTX 680...which was a lot more expensive...but still doing great in games today...

[i_build_nanosuits]

14 minutes ago, DarkBlade2117 said:

I can barely max out those games and my i3 and 290 have pretty hefty OCs on them. As it isn't a bad system, you pay $1,000 for a custom built system, expect 3-5 years minimum out of depending on your needs. Anyways, are you ignoring dips? Because at max I easily get down into the low 40s

because your i3 processor is trash and AMD high-end GPU's have a huge CPU ressources requirement...if you upgrade to an i5 or i7 CPU those dips will be long gone

[i_build_nanosuits]

5 minutes ago, ltguy said:

This thread is thoroughly explaining why people should buy the rx480 over the gtx 1060. 3855 flops vs 5161 flops. When all of the Nvidia smoke and mirror driver optimizations have moved on to the next lastest gpu and AMD has further optimized the drivers, the RX 480 will thoroughly stomp the gtx 1060 and there will be a new forum thread with people wondering why the rx480 is still so good while the gtx 1060 is showing its age.

the fact that it hapenned once does NOT mean history will repeat itself...AMD GCN drivers are top notch now...there are no such gains to make in the future on these, the drivers are good now...GTX 1060 is a faster card, end of the story.

[ltguy]

3 minutes ago, i_build_nanosuits said:

it was a fucking great GPU at the time...i bought one brand new and it was EPIC...3GB of video memory...much cheaper than HD7970 and just a bit slower...it was a real great card and for 1080p gaming even to this day is still very good.

 

You talking about the GTX 660 though?! really...the real competition to these cards where the GTX 680...which was a lot more expensive...but still doing great in games today...

What was really epic was the prices when they were being phased out, I saw 7950's going for $175. What a steal! Really made the r9 280/280x look like a terrible value after how cheap the 7950's went out at.

[That Norwegian Guy]

6 minutes ago, i_build_nanosuits said:

You talking about the GTX 660 though?! really...the real competition to these cards where the GTX 680...which was a lot more expensive...but still doing great in games today...

The 670 was the competitor to the 7950

The 680 was the competitor to the 7970

 

I had a GTX 760 (pretty much a rebranded 670) and it was a disappointment to me, the 2GB of VRAM hurts it too much. With 3GB you have 1080p breathing room even today, to turn settings up.

[i_build_nanosuits]

Just now, ltguy said:

What was really epic was the prices when they were being phased out, I saw 7950's going for $175. What a steal! Really made the r9 280/280x look like a terrible value after how cheap the 7950's went out at.

i paid 240$ CAD for mine, brand new from new egg...a year later was able to trade if for a GTX 780...Hd7950+100$ for GTX 780...this was also IMHO a good deal.

[Jumper118]

because it was the best card of its generation by miles. £/performance was insane and literally every single build spec'ed on ocuk forum had a 7950 in it for a good 3 months or so. it was so good that even if your budget for the gpu was more you just got 2 of them instead of a higher end card like the titan.  

 

it also had 50% more vram than the 670 and 680 while the 4gb 670 and 680 were miles more expensive, so it was a beast! 

[i_build_nanosuits]

Just now, That Norwegian Guy said:

The 670 was the competitor to the 7950

The 680 was the competitor to the 7970

 

I had a GTX 760 (pretty much a rebranded 670) and it was a disappointment to me, the 2GB of VRAM hurts it too much. With 3GB you have 1080p breathing room even today, to turn settings up.

AMD was defenetly the way to go back then...now it's Nvidia...things change.

[Jumper118]

Just now, i_build_nanosuits said:

AMD was defenetly the way to go back then...now it's Nvidia...things change.

not to mention they were giving away 3 free games to start with then bumped it upto 6 free games later one :DDDDDDDDDDDDDDD