Last year AMD released their Northern Islands architecture starting with the Barts graphics processors, which was then followed by the Cayman architecture. These Northern Islands graphics cards have since become an extremely successful series, but the product range as we know it was an adaption on AMD's part to compensate for TSMC cancelling their 32nm process in favor of its 28nm technology. This forced AMD to release a second generation of 40nm parts. Though those issues are behind AMD now, as its Southern Islands architecture finally is among us, bringing with it the first 28nm GPU codenamed Tahiti. The first AMD graphics board to utilize this new architecture is the high-end Radeon HD 7970 launched today. - NeoSeeker

AMD Radeon HD 7970 Tahiti 28nm Video Card Review

This new card uses the Tahiti XT graphics chipset which aside from being built on this 28nm process also uses the brand new AMD graphics core next architecture. Additionally, the Tahiti XT core includes 2048 stream processors, 32 raster and 128 texture units. Just looking at the specifications, one can see that these Radeon HD 7970 is going to have no issues pushing pixels. Along with these changes to the architecture, AMD has expanded the video output features of the graphics card and kicked up the thermal performance. While the official launch date for the Radeon HD 7970 is only next year, AMD bumped up the review date so this is a paper launch.

As you can see, this Radeon HD 7970 still sports the classic AMD red and black color scheme and uses a rear mounted blower style fan, but the shroud has a more rounded design. The new visual style is actually quite appealing in comparison to the design of the Radeon HD 6900 series. Along with the improved look, the rounded design of the back-end of the shroud improves ventilation when the graphics card is used in CrossFireX. As far as the dimensions go, the Radeon HD 7970 is roughly the same size as the Radeon HD 6970. The back of the PCB is clean for a high-end graphics card, but all the solder points give away some of the card's secrets.

When it came to overclocking we had high expectations for the Radeon HD 7970. First off, the 28nm node should allow us to push the chip farther than the Cypress GPU, and since AMD also gave the card plenty of additional power headroom, we expected to easily hit over a gigabyte in clock speed. And to our surprise, we easily scaled the GPU core upwards to 1125MHz, which is the threshold available in the Catalyst control center. Getting to this speed required no additional voltage on our part, but most impressive was that we didn't observe a single crash or pixel errors while scaling to 1125MHz. In total this is just shy of an 18% overclock.

We finally have our first 28nm GPU and while the performance was not exactly earth shattering, the Radeon HD 7970 video card is still a strong graphics card that easily outperforms all single GPU solution, and has an improved performance per watt ratio over the previous generation. However, the Radeon HD 7970 has plenty of additional overclocking headroom, and when the GPU clock speed is increased over the 1GHz barrier, the GPU really comes alive. In addition, the Radeon HD 7970 is built to be a computing powerhouse. With this new architecture, AMD has brought to the market their graphics core next design which is more efficient at running parallel processes.

Overall, the performance of the Radeon HD 7970 is good, if not great. It offers a ton of new features expands upon the Eyefinity ecosystem and walks away with the single GPU performance crown. However, since the 3D performance cannot quite hit 50% over previous generation cards, we think it is slightly overpriced. Keep in mind however that this card has plenty of overclocking headroom, so if you are looking to achieve the best possible performance levels it is essential to either overclock the graphics card manually or keep an eye out for factory overclocked models.