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Review: Sapphire HD 7970 in three-screen Eyefinity

by Tarinder Sandhu on 9 January 2012, 13:14 4.0

Tags: Sapphire

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Benchmarks - Battlefield 3

Review: HEXUS.net/qa7yc | Where2buy: amazon.co.uk

Battlefield 3 is one of the most popular PC games of the year and features breathtaking visuals and an absorbing multiplayer component.

Normalised 5760 performance HD 7970 HD 6970 HD 5870
100% 68.4% 37.0%

5760 vs. 1080 performance HD 7970 HD 6970 HD 5870
64.5% 58.3% 33.6%

Analysis

Sapphire's HD 7970 puts daylight between it and the HD 6970 in both resolutions. It is both comfortably faster than the Cayman card and also keeps more of its performance intact from 1,920x1,080 to 5,760x1,080, and the upshot of this is that the higher-resolution performance is almost 50 per cent higher.

The Eyefinity setting needs a 1GB-plus framebuffer; we know this because the HD 5870's performance trails off far more than the other two cards. Again, the 30FPS average of the HD 7970, which rarely dips below this figure, means the game is playable at these lush settings.