(1) Looks like what we have already known is true: HD5870 is heavily penalized against the 6970 in modern games due to 1GB of VRAM and poor tessellation.
"The first comparison at 1080p favored the HD 6970 over the HD 5870 by 36%, and at 2560x1600 this margin was blown out to 76%, which is a much larger gap than we recorded in our December 2010 review."
(2) 7970 GCN was able to stretch its wings against VLIW 6970, which wasn't possible to show during 7970 launch since there weren't enough advanced games/game engines at that time.
"Moving from the HD 6970 to the HD 7970 saw massive performance gains -- 66% at 1080p and 71% at 2560x1600 -- whereas back in December 2011 we found the 7970 to be on average 42% faster than the 6970 at 2560x1600"
Also, impressive that in the demanding titles R9 290X is now about 32-36% faster than the 7970Ghz.
"Given that the 7970 GHz Edition retained the performance crown for longer than the standard 7970 did, we used it to measure the next-generation performance jump to the R9 290X, which was 32% faster at 1080p and 36% faster at 2560x1600."
The 6970 vs. 5870, 7970 vs. 6970 and 290X vs. 7970Ghz examples all show that as games become more demanding, future GPUs tend to extend their lead a bit while perhaps early reviews might have more CPU bottlenecking in less demanding games. That's why it's pretty important to visit more recent reviews and not rely as much on launch reviews as time moves on. This is ironic because for a lot of mainstream PC gamers, they tend to remember launch reviews more than more recent reviews.
(3) Some overall highlights from the 2 articles also kinda show that it's better to buy 2nd best AMD/NV card and upgrade faster as buying expensive flagship cards is often a waste of $ in the long-term:
- HD 5870 was 25% slower than the
GTX 480
- The 6970 was 15% slower than the
GTX 580
- 7970 was able to match the
GTX 680 with the GHz Edition being 8% faster
- R9 290X stood evenly with
GTX 780 Ti
- 290X was 15% slower than the
GTX 980.
Looks like outside of GTX480 vs. 5870, spending extra for a flagship NV card wasn't very fruitful long-term, as one would have been better off just upgrading sooner and making their next gen upgrade cheaper with the $ saved -- something I tend to recommend a lot for some posters who want to buy a $550+ card and keep it for 4-5 years or think it's better to pay $80-100 now for a 970 for 5-6% more performance. The review of 5 NV and AMD generations shows that's not the case as moving across generations nets the most gains!
This article also once again highlights that the larger lead of the 980 over the 780Ti and 290X being evenly matched with a 780Ti in modern titles tells us about the priorities of driver optimizations that NV/AMD have today.
Performance was pretty good though.
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