AMD Radeon HD 8970M Unveiled

I'm not enthusiastic about the 8970m at all, to be honest, unless it can hit 50% over stock 7970m with some OC.
What I want is the 8990m

 

lol,looks like someone was spoiled by the amazing jump from 6970/6990m to 7970m u cant expect that kinda perf. boost in every single gen mate

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

Indeed, many of us got spoiled by 7970, specially me, jump from 5870 to 7970 was quite good

And sure we can expect, we might get disappointed but that tiny 1% chance of it actually happening, well that is super exciting, so yeah we can expect

 

580m -> 7970m is even amazing (pretty much 40-50% gain), but certainly that happened because of Fermi -> Kepler. It won't happen (guaranteed unless nvidia has some ace in their sleeves with the Kepler).

 

Mobile Titan

 

^^ more like a mobile dream..

 

Haha Mobile titan would also open the ground up for 200w GPUs, and we would have monstrous notebooks. Well, they wouldn't be notebooks at that point.

 

Good time to introduce a water cooled notebook

But nobody wants to make it
<iframe width='640' height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/pz4a1RukOzA" frameborder='0' allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

It would essentially be a single gpu in a notebook like the NP9370/M18x... pretty pointless, considering the 680m sli is already around as powerful as a desktop Titan.

 

This isn't surprising. I expected this, to a certain extent. Hope to see at least a 10% - 15% gain from the 780M.

Q2 2014 or 2015 is when I will likely upgrade.

Post 1,000!

 

Same here... once Maxwell is out, I'll either upgrade my current rig with 880m sli, or sell it and get a new desktop or dual GPU AW if 880m sli doesn't work in my r2.

 

End of 2014 is where I'll aim to fully upgrade. I really hope there is a m18x rX or a new x51 out around then.
I am dying to see this next gen of cards though.

 

Drivers are already coming out...

Download AMD Radeon HD 8970M Graphics Driver 12.101.1.0 for Windows 8 Driver for Windows 8 - Softpedia

 

What a shame... I was planning to buy my first gaming laptop this year since I skipped out last year. But seeing how much of an "improvement" these cards will be, will the purchase be worth it? With the release of the 8970m and the haswell CPUs, will the price be in the same general area as the current gen GPUs and CPUs during its releases? At the moment a 7970m and i7 3630qm on the sager 9170 comes out to be ~$1500. Is it safe to say that the 8970m and the i7 4850hq will also be around ~$1500 on the next sager model equivalent to the 9170?

 

Well hopefully we will see a price drop in the 7970m series...

 

just on used cards on ebay, etc. new cars will actually be rising in price when the new gen comes out, as is usually the case with mobile gpus.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

Ill stay away this generation.
Waiting for next year =)

 

I think there actually is market for this. Most people that buy high end laptops are careful with them. A water cooled laptop if dropped however could get easily fried! Perhaps the danger and risk of this happening is preventing companies adopting this technology and cooling approach. They don't want to get sued by careless customers.

 

I did some math:
MSI source claims that we get about 7,5% gain over 680m, other source claims 30% increase over 7970.
So i did some calculations. It is all theory and based on simluation.

7970 spits out:
3dmark05: 24 300
3dmark06: 20 700
3dmark Van P Gpu: 21 394
3dmark11 P Gpu: 5 884
BioSock Infinite: 44 fps
Crysis 3: 45 fps
CoD: MW:80 fps
Now multiply it by 1.3 (30% increase claimed by one of the sources), we get "simulated" 8970 scores:

8970 spits out:
3dmark05: 24 300 * 1.3 = 31 590
3dmark06: 20 700 * 1.3 = 26 910
3dmark Van P Gpu: 21 394 *1.3 = 27 812
3dmark11 P Gpu: 5 884 * 1.3 = 7 649
BioSock Infinite: 44* 1.3 = 57.2
Crysis 3: 45* 1.3 = 58,5
CoD: MW: 80* 1.3 = 104

Now we take 680m results:
3dmark05: 29 052
3dmark06: 22 5000
3dmark Van P Gpu: 20 5754
3dmark11 P Gpu: 6 075
BioSock Infinite: 46 fps
Crysis 3: 51 fps
CoD: MW: 104 fps

Now we do simple math:
(8970 score/680m score )*100 - 100 we get the difference in performance 8970 over 680m.

3dmark05: (31 590/29 052)*100 - 100 = 8.7%
3dmark06: (26 910/22 500)*100 - 100 = 19.6%
3dmark Van P Gpu: (27 812/ 20 575)* 100 - 100 = 35%
3dmark11 P Gpu: (7 649/6 075)*100 - 100 = 25%
BioSock Infinite: (57.2/46)*100 - 100 = 24.34%
Crysis 3: (58.5/51)*100 - 100 = 14.7%
CoD: MW: (104/104)*100 - 100 = 0%

Scores were taken from notebookcheck. I did take fps that was playable so not all of the games are on max settings but this should reflect on what we are about here.

Now if sangemaru is right and we get 30% gain, it looks like APU will bottleneck 8970, as we can see from the math, 8970 should easly pass 680m, and that is nothing less that we expect, if rumors are true about 20% gain of 780m over 680m that means 8970 won't pass 780m but it will be really a tie there. So next gen will look more or less like this one: 8970 slightly slower then 780m but cheaper.

I am about to buy some Clevo, and i am wondering about waiting for 8970, and from what i see it is worth waiting for, 30% looks neat, if i was a owner of 7970 or 680m i would rather wait for next gen. Hope we will see some solid benchmarks results, now we can only base on what we get from rumors, and as we know, those tend to be not true Anyway, hope 8970 and 780 gain as much power as possible .

 

You guys are so negative When the 7970m came to market it would score around ~5400 points in 3dmark11 Performance GPU score stock.
At that time a 6990m would do around ~3400. That's about a 60% upgrade. With driver improvements, my card now pumps out ~6400 gpu score stock. Overclocked users have gotten up to 8000 points and above. That's a 25% improvement over current stock speeds, but it's almost 50% over the scores at the time of release.
Do you realize the magnitude of that?
So you got an upgrade representing something between 60-100% over the previous generation, then with driver updates and heavy OC you got an extra 50% to your update, or a whooping 235% compared to previous gen
Now, it's pretty much a done deal that 8970m is not just a refresh of the 7970m. There's a definite upgrade in memory capacity, maybe we'll see some extra shaders, clocks, etc.
If upgradelaptop claim 30% extra, I won't discount that claim. I doubt they're claiming 30% extra over the initial stock scores of the 7970m. Consider, that might actually be a downgrade these days .
Now imagine an optimized GCN 2.0 Chip (and it IS 2.0, I've seen AMD engineer discussions on this, don't ask me for links though), with more (and maybe faster) RAM, probably a higher shader count, faster clocks, more power efficiency (20% as claimed by AMD), probably the new memory manager that we were promised, and some OC.
I'm hopeful

And if it doesn't perform... meh, there's always next year.

 

If you drop a 15lb M18x, it's broken regardless

I admire your optimism, but I'll remain skeptical until it releases and I see concrete results. If the 8970m is anything like the 7970m was at launch, then I'll be staying far, far away.

 

Since upgradelaptop says both 8970M and 8990M will come out soon, I`m thinking 8970M slightly overclocked 7970M (explains the measly +7.5%) and the 8990M as a new faster GPU

 

If the 8970m is indeed 30% faster than it needs to have 1536 cores clocked at around 925mhz. That would be quite a jump. People here need to stop speculating based on this 7.5% extra. It doesn't tell us anything other than what we already know which is that AMD's APU's are garbage. lol

Wait for the results with an intel cpu!

 

Yeah , like i said, im gona buy new Clevo soon as AW looks unprofessional to me , as im a civil engineer and I can't show up on a meeting with something like that . So hell yeah im gona wait for 8970 na haswell. Hope 8970 and 780 will gain as much as possible, im not a fan boy of either company, had on my desktop both companies.

 

Should be interesting.

 

"unprofessional"
Wow, the really topped it off for me

 

interesting that AMD will wait Nvidia to throw their punch (if 8990m turns out to be true), 780m, first, almost as if they didn't like what happened last year

 

well, could be that amd still had large stocks of 7970m chips lying around and dont have large enough yields of 8990m chips yet to make it worth introducing that gpu

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

If the rumors of a new chip are true it's smaller than the desktop 7970 core, so I don't see yields being an issue.

 

good point

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

Hopefully they'll concentrate on reducing power consumption if they're not going to make it perform significantly better...

 

A rebalanced chip would perform better but there has been no evidence of it so far.

 

If GTX 680 can be used as GTX 780M, then so can 7970 be used as 8990M, atleast if you look at the power consumption perspective. So it might be a candidate although 7950 would be better power wise.
Question is though, can the 7970 be undervolted as much as GTX 680 to fit in to a notebook?

 

They have a better shot at using the HD7870 LE edition for their highest end gpu, and clock it accordingly. It scores basically on the level of an hd7950 on stock.

 

The 7970's 384-bit bus makes it highly unlikely.

 

Oh yeah I forgot about that. 7870LE does indeed seem plausible. Same power draw as 680 and its a 256bit bus. The only problem is that it might be too big. 352mm^2 vs 7970Ms 212m^2. 6970M was 212mm^2 too. Same goes for 7970 as candidate, 352mm^2.

Maybe AMD is all out of options and thats why they push out a rebrand 8970M?

 

Knowing AMD the poor performance of the early tests is somewhat down to poor drivers, we may see better results after the card has been out for a while, not that it makes the card any more desirable at the moment

 

Nope it is down to the fact that they paired it with the rubbish A10 CPU. To promote their poor cpu's they underwhelmed us with the 8970M.

The reality probably is that the 8970M will fair much better even paired with my old 920xm! 780M scores are out with the latest 4th gen i7 cpu's. Hopefully we can all see what AMD has to offer with a proper CPU paired with it.

The 780M looks very fast indeed. I believe the 8970M will probably be again 5-10% slower than this card. Stock vs stock. Prices maybe 1 third cheaper lol.

 

Well the MSI GX70 is now officially announced by MSI. We should see benchmarks on the 8970M pretty soon

http://www.msi.com/product/nb/GX70-3BE.html

 

I love graphs. They make ~10% look so impressive.

 

My 5853 is running scared Of course firestrike is totally GPU bound so you could pair it with an atom and get similar results :/

 

I have seen worse

 

It's that factor.

 

Such massive performance difference. I bet it rivals the GTX Titan.

 

sigh. With the the A10 cpu no doubt. Great job AMD!! I am gonna have to snag one of these if nobody else does to put it with a real CPU lol

 

haha yeah. Atleast thats the impression you get from the graph I made

Anyone who pair a 8970M with a AMD CPU deserve a proper spanking

 

Want a real mobile 7970/8970/W9000 (or mobile Titan/K20, the big 384bit card) for compute.

 

Maybe next year. With the current jumps between generations. 384 bit might be just around the corner for mobile.

 

As long as they don't push 384bit to a sub-high-end chip and release that one instead.

Neither AMD nor NVidia has real high-end mobile GPUs at this point, which is kinda unfortunate for someone who don't really care about maxing out games.

 

Unless you have a notebook with 1600p screen, I`d say both Nvidia and AMD delivered this time around