While many crave for Radeon HD 7970 performance but can’t afford it, AMD has the answer with the Radeon HD 7950 which offers slightly lower performance at the lower price point of US $449 which should soon drop to US $399. With the unified shader count dropped from 2048 to 1792, the TMU (Texture Mapping Unit) dropped from 128 to 112 and the ROP (Render OutPut unit) count staying at 32, the HD 7950 is a moderately crippled HD 7970.
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Clock speeds on the Radeon HD 7950 also take a hit from 925 / 5,500 MHz (1,375 MHz actual) for the core and memory speeds respectively down to 800 / 5,000 MHz (1,250 MHz actual), one may be forgiven for thinking that the HD 7950 will be a good deal slower than the HD 7970. However, this is not the case. Unified shader and TMU count, along with core speed, have dropped about 14% and this translates to almost exactly a 14% drop in performance as seen exclusively by FlyingSuicide. We will respect the wishes of those who showed us the card to not give exact figures but rather percentages.
3DMark Vantage shows a 14.01% drop in performance
3DMark 11 shows a 14.79% drop in performance
As previously reported, the Radeon HD 7950 will also feature two 6-pin PCI-e power connectors against the HD 7970′s 6-pin and 8-pin design, as well as a 6+1 phase VRM design. The centrally located top-flow fan is also significantly quieter than the hamster-cage fan of the HD 7970, although it’s at the cost of not exhausting hot air out the back of the case. Jonathan Horne
