AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Review

According to EA, Battlefield 3 garnered 3 million pre-orders by the day of its release. It is unknown at present whether these figures are worldwide or just for the US. The pre-order total makes it “the biggest first-person shooter launch in EA history”, according to the publisher. The engine is beautiful on the PC and very demanding of the partnering hardware.

We configured the game to run on three 24 inch monitors at 5760×1080. We also dropped the Texture quality from ultra to high.

EDIT: We updated our results a few hours after publication after we discovered an (as yet) undetermined glitch with the secondary 3960X EE system and the beta AMD driver. We had to reinstall the operating system and the driver as the HD7970 GHZ core seemed to be downclocking when running at 5760×1080 resolution. This was brought to our attention when we noticed 3DMark Vantage scores were dropping below 20,000.

The HD7970 GHZ slots in between the reference clocked GTX680 and the overclocked KFA2 GTX680 LTD OC card at these settings, averaging 76 frames per second.

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