AMD introduced the HD 7970, the first graphics card that uses architecture GCN

Right before Christmas holidays, AMD decided to present its new HD 7970th graphics card. For AMD this is the first graphics card with 28 nanometer technique and first that use the GCN (Graphic Core Next) architecture. Another novelty that will be for the first supported on the HD 7970 is Direct3D 11.1.

The new architecture hardware will implement mega texture which first imposed id Software in their game RAGE. This will significantly reduce the time of loading and access to the texture and will allow designers of video games to create large, high resolution textures which later GPU will split into parts as needed.

The graphics processor that uses the HD 7970 is called Tahiti and has 4.31 B which makes this graphics card to have really impressive processing power. Tahiti works on 925 MHz, and theoretically could processed 3.79 TFLOP per second. Consumption is 50 W lower than competitor GTX 580^th.

Despite all the improvements that are made, HD 7970 has 30 percent improved performance from the previous HD 6970 and 10% better performance than GTX 580 on nvidea on the standard resolutions, with resolution of 2560h1600 according the tests of hardOCP, HD 7970 has almost 10% better performance than the best nvidea graphics card currently Galaxy MDT Geforce GTX 580 and more than 30 percent better than the predecessor HD 6970^th.

HD 7970 will officially be on sale from January 9 and given the fact that there is still time until the new GPU appear on nvidea Kepler, HD 7970 at least several months will be the best graphics card market.