AMD Radeon™ HD 7950 Graphics 

Overview 

System Requirements 

• PCI Express® based PC is required with one X16 lane graphics slot available on the motherboard
• 500W (or greater) power supply with two 75W 6-pin PCI Express power connectors recommended⁸
• 750W (or greater) power supply with four 75W 6-pin PCI Express power connectors recommended for AMD CrossFire™ technology
• Certified power supplies are recommended.  Refer to http://ati.amd.com/certifiedPSU for a list of Certified products
• Minimum 4GB of system memory
• 8GB (or more) of system memory recommended for AMD CrossFire™ technology
• Installation software requires CD-ROM drive, a keyboard, a mouse, and a display
• DVD playback requires DVD drive and a DVD
• Blu-ray™ playback requires Blu-ray drive and a Blu-ray disc
• For an AMD CrossFire™ system, a second AMD Radeon™ HD 7950 GPU, an AMD CrossFire™ Ready motherboard and one AMD CrossFire™ Bridge Interconnect cable is required
• Use of 3 or more displays with AMD Eyefinity technology requires a DisplayPort-capable panel or an AMD Eyefinity-validated dongle. See http://www.amd.com/EyefinityDongles for a list of validated DisplayPort dongles.
• 64-bit operating system highly recommended
• Not for professional or commercial use. Please see AMD FirePro™ products for these applications.

Specifications 

• 850MHz Engine Clock (Up to 925MHz with Boost) 
• 3GB GDDR5 Memory
• 1250MHz Memory Clock (5.0 Gbps GDDR5)
• 240GB/s memory bandwidth
• 2.87 TFLOPS Single Precision compute power
• 717 GFLOPs Double Precision compute power
• GCN Architecture
  • 28 Compute Units (1792 Stream Processors)
  • 112 Texture Units
  • 128 Z/Stencil ROP Units
  • 32 Color ROP Units
  • Dual geometry units
• Dual Asynchronous Compute Engines (ACE)
• PCI Express 3.0 x16 bus interface
• DirectX® 11.1-capable graphics
  • 9th generation programmable hardware tessellation units
  • Shader Model 5.0
  • DirectCompute 11
  • Accelerated multi-threading
  • HDR texture compression
  • Order-independent transparency
• OpenGL 4.2 support
  • Partially Resident Textures (PRT)
    • Ultra-high resolution texture streaming technology
• Image quality enhancement technology
  • Up to 24x multi-sample and super-sample anti-aliasing modes
  • Adaptive anti-aliasing
  • Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA) 2.0
  • DirectX® 9/10/11 Super Sample Anti-Aliasing (SSAA)
    • Automatic LOD adjustment (Requires AMD Catalyst™ 12.4 or higher)
  • 16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering
  • 128-bit floating point HDR rendering
• AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology⁴
  • Up to 6 displays supported with DisplayPort 1.2 Multi-Stream Transport
  • Independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls, and video overlays
  • Display grouping
    • Combine multiple displays to behave like a single large display
• AMD App Acceleration³
  • OpenCL 1.2 Support
  • Microsoft C++ AMP
  • DirectCompute 11
  • Double Precision Floating Point
  • AMD HD Media Accelerator
    • Unified Video Decoder (UVD)
      • H.264
      • VC-1
      • MPEG-2 (SD & HD)
      • MVC (Blu-ray 3D)
      • MPEG-4 Part 2 (DivX/Xvid)
      • Adobe Flash
      • DXVA 1.0 & 2.0 support
    • Video Codec Engine (VCE)
      • Multi-stream hardware H.264 encoder
      • Full-fixed mode: 1080p @ 60 FPS encoding
      • Hybrid mode: Stream Processor-assisted encoding
    • Enhanced Video Quality features
      • Advanced post-processing and scaling
        • Deblocking
        • Denoising
        • Automatic deinterlacing
        • Mosquito noise reduction
        • Edge enhancement
        • 3:2 pulldown detection
      • Advanced video color correction
        • Brighter whites processing (Blue Stretch)
        • Independent video gamma control
        • Flesh tone correction
        • Color vibrance control
        • Dynamic contrast
        • Dynamic video range control
• AMD HD3D technology⁵
  • Stereoscopic 3D display/glasses support
  • Blu-ray 3D support
  • Stereoscopic 3D gaming
  • 3rd party Stereoscopic 3D middleware software support
• AMD CrossFire™ multi-GPU technology⁶
  • Dual, triple or quad-GPU scaling
• Cutting-edge integrated display support
  • DisplayPort 1.2 HBR2
    • Max resolution: 4096x2160 per display
    • Multi-Stream Transport
    • 21.6 Gbps bandwidth
    • High bit-rate audio
    • Quad HD/4k video support
  • HDMI® (With 4K, 3D, x.v.Color™ and Deep Color)
    • Max resolution: 4096x2160
    • 1080p60 Stereoscopic 3D
    • Quad HD/4k video support
  • Dual-link DVI with HDCP
    • Max resolution: 2560x1600
  • VGA
    • Max resolution: 2048x1536
• Integrated HD audio controller
  • Output protected high bit rate 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI with no additional cables required
  • Supports AC-3, AAC, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio formats
• AMD PowerPlay™ power management technology⁷
  • Automatic power management with low power idle states
• AMD PowerTune technology⁷
  • Intelligent TDP management technology
  • Dynamic clockspeed/performance enhancement for games
• AMD ZeroCore Power technology⁷
  • Ultra-low idle power when the system’s display is off
  • Efficient low power mode for desktop work
  • Secondary GPUs in an AMD CrossFire™ technology configuration power down when unneeded
• AMD Catalyst™ graphics and HD video configuration software
  • Software support for Windows® 7, Windows Vista® and Windows® XP.
  • AMD Catalyst™ Control Center - AMD Catalyst™ software application and user interface for setup, configuration, and accessing features of AMD Radeon products.
  • Unified Graphics display driver - AMD Catalyst™ software enabling other PC programs and devices to use advanced graphics, video, and features of AMD Radeon™ products.

Footnotes 

Additional hardware (e.g. Blu-ray drive, HD or 10-bit monitor, TV tuner) and/or software (e.g. multimedia applications) are required for the full enablement of some features. Not all features may be supported on all components or systems - check with your component or system manufacturer for specific model capabilities and supported technologies.

1. In tests by AMD as of May 22, 2012 on single-GPU graphics cards, the AMD Radeon™ HD 7950 showed higher average performance than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 in the following games/apps: Formula 1 2010, Civilization V, StarCraft II, Just Cause 2, Unigine Heaven, Left 4 Dead 2, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, DiRT 3, The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Crysis Warhead, Metro 2033 (4xAA), and Hard Reset (MLAA). All applications were evaluated at 2560x1600 with 8xAA and 16xAF unless otherwise noted. System configuration: Intel® Core™ i7-3960X (3.33GHz), MSI X79A-GD65, 16GB DDR3-1600 and Windows® 7 x64. AMD Radeon™ HD 7950 evaluated with AMD Catalyst™ 8.973. NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 680 evaluated with NVIDIA® ForceWare™ 301.10 WHQL. [GRDT-16]
2. AMD PowerPlay™, AMD PowerTune and AMD ZeroCore Power are technologies offered by certain AMD Radeon™ products, which are designed to intelligently manage GPU power consumption in response to certain GPU load conditions. Boost clockspeeds via AMD PowerTune (if applicable) may vary by application, system temperature and/or user system configuration. Not all products feature all technologies – check with your component or system manufacturer for specific model capabilities.
3. AMD App Acceleration is a set of technologies designed to improve video quality and enhance application performance. Full enablement of some features requires support for OpenCL™, DirectCompute or DirectX® Video Acceleration (DXVA). Not all products have all features and full enablement of some capabilities and may require complementary products
4. AMD Eyefinity technology works with games that support non-standard aspect ratios, which is required for panning across multiple displays. To enable more than two displays, additional panels with native DisplayPort™ connectors, and/or DisplayPort™ compliant active adapters to convert your monitor’s native input to your cards DisplayPort™ or Mini-DisplayPort™ connector(s), are required.  Support for six simultaneous displays may require complementary products compatible with DisplayPort 1.2 Multi-Stream Transport. Maximum number of configured displays may vary - check with your component or system manufacturer for specific model capabilities and supported technologies.  SLS (“Single Large Surface”) functionality requires an identical display resolution on all configured displays.
5. AMD HD3D is a technology designed to enable stereoscopic 3D support in games, movies and/or photos. Requires 3D stereo drivers, glasses, and display. Not all features may be supported on all components or systems – check with your component or system manufacturer for specific model capabilities and supported technologies. A list of supported stereoscopic 3D hardware is available at http://www.amd.com/HD3D.
6. AMD CrossFire™ technology requires an AMD CrossFire Ready motherboard, an AMD CrossFire™ Bridge Interconnect (for each additional graphics card) and may require a specialized power supply.
7. AMD PowerPlay™, AMD PowerTune and AMD ZeroCore Power are technologies offered by certain AMD Radeon™ products, which are designed to intelligently manage GPU power consumption in response to certain GPU load conditions. Not all products feature all technologies – check with your component or system manufacturer for specific model capabilities.
8. Minimum recommended system power supply wattage is based on the specific graphics card and the typical power requirements of other system components. Your system may require more or less power. OEM and other pre-assembled PCs may have different power requirements.

Reviews 

AnandTech.com “With the 7950 AMD can deliver performance similar to if not better than the GTX 580 while consuming significantly less power and enjoying all the temperature & noise benefits that provides, making it a very attractive card.” –R. Smith, Anandtech “Outside of a few corner cases the 7950 renders the GTX 580 irrelevant…” –R. Smith, Anandtech

HardOCP.com “Now if you are making a bigger leap in your upgrade path, you would be hard pressed to buy a single GeForce GTX 580 today. The AMD Radeon HD 7950 is kicking the GTX 580’s ass and taking names.” –B. Justice, HardOCP “The AMD Radeon HD 7950 is what many gamers have been waiting for…” –B. Justice, HardOCP

HotHardware.com "The card offers cutting edge features, excellent power consumption characteristics, performance is strong, and the thing is highly overclockable. We suspect anyone who springs for a Radeon HD 7950 will be very pleased by what it has to offer." -M. Chiappetta, HotHardware “In the vast majority of tests, the Radeon HD 7950 outperformed a reference      GeForce GTX 580…” -M. Chiappetta, HotHardware

LANOC.com “Our notorious Metro 2033 benchmarks show the R7950 outperforming the GTX 580 considerably also.”

LegitReviews.com “From our performance numbers it looks like the AMD Radeon HD 7950 should have no problem beating the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 video card.” –N. Kirsch, LegitReviews

Neoseeker.com "Overall the HD 7950 is an excellent graphics card, and we expect the performance to increase as the drivers mature.” “When looking at the whole package, the HD 7950 offers superb gaming power, overclocking headroom and performance-per-watt, making it the best graphics card currently available with an MSRP of $449 USD.” “In addition to the impressive stock performance, the HD 7950 was designed for overclocking.”

PCPerspective.com The AMD Radeon HD 7950 3GB graphics card based on the same Southern Islands architecture and Tahiti GPU that we first tested with the Radeon HD 7970 3GB looks to be another success.  AMD now has two different GPU options available for consumers that are faster than the best single-GPU options from NVIDIA…” –R. Shrout, PC Perspective “The HD 7950 3GB is faster than the GTX 580, uses less power, offers more features, has twice the frame buffer capacity for higher resolutions and multi-display gaming and costs less” –R. Shrout, PC Perspective

Rage3d.com “Once again AMD have proven they know how to make great engineering; Tahiti is awesome hardware.” –J. Prior, Rage 3D

The Tech Report “Since the 7950's power consumption is ridiculously, remarkably lower than the GTX 580's, there's little left to do but declare the 7950 the clear winner. That's before one even figures in the new bells and whistles built into the Tahiti GPU, including a hardware H.264 video encoding engine and support for PCI Express 3.0, neither of which the GTX 580 can match.” –S. Wasson, The Tech Report “Any way you slice it, the Radeon HD 7950 does what it set out to do: undercut the GeForce GTX 580 in price while trumping it in performance” –S. Wasson, The Tech Report