I stopped playing benchmarks years ago. I found them...shallow.

Does the card get good performance in the games I play at my monitor's 19x12 res and high detail? That's all I care about.




The Jedi Master

i play 6k by 1k (6048x1080 i think is the bezel corrected res for my setup)

my only peeves about Cat 12.7 so far, which may have been something else...

-Updating to 12.7 from 12.6 Beta 1 wiped my custom settings for Fan Speeds/Overclock, So I had to re-input them in, might have wiped my other CCC settings leading to problems below.
(on the brighter side, I can OC 125 more Mhz stable w/o Voltage increase, but I will stay at my proven 1Ghz (stock volts) on cooler days and factory stock 900Mhz (undervolted) on the hot summer days, didn’t see no temp increase running Furmark @ 1Ghz, but I don’t wanna push the GPU or VRMs in the hot summer days)

- it wiped my Eyefinity group completely
On my System, I set the bezel correction and then set the desktop back to the normal non corrected res., but run the games in the corrected resolutions), after updating to 12.7, I had to re-do all the bezel correction settings and stuff. For some reason it kicked the screens out of eyefinity mode to Extended desktop Mode, and deleted the group. I had to re-build the group, resolution, screen position, preferred screen and bezel correction again.

- Battlefield 3 kept dropping VSync to 30 Frames Sec for no reason... and every now and then back up to 60 Fr/ps (never did that before.)
And on some areas below 20 Frames/sec,never had that problem before either, but I fixed it
I had to change Graphics Preset to AUTO to get it to stay on 60 frames/sec Vsync. then go back to custom and put everything back the way I had it.
After I re-did those settings the Frames Per second instantly jumped back up to the 55-70 range, actually noticeably higher frames/sec across the board (by 5-10%)

- So did AMD sneak in an Adaptive VSync like nVidia's?

-Running the Taskbar on the Center screen only causes conflicts in BF3 and some other games.
In BF3 Bringing up the Map caused a Resolution change, which made all 3 screens go blank and come back, closing the map caused the same thing, quiting out of BF3 also revealed that Windows was having a Fit and Changing the desktop from Aero to Non Aero.

In Thirdwire Flight sims, Changing the View from internal to external caused the same thing.

I Ended up putting the task bar back across all 3 screens and windows stopped doing it, might have been something else causing it, but leaving the taskbar across all 3 screens stopped whatever was causing it.

-Full screening a window on one screen is a pain in the whoo hoo, as 99% of the time it goes across all 3 screens, and that 1 % it doesnt is when you want it too, lol...
Im forced to just manually size everything now. I know there’s gotta be a trick/button sequence to fill current screen or something.

Some Flash Video Websites do not scale properly on the center screen when in full screen. (This has been an issue ever since I started using Eyefinity)
- some youtube videos full screen on the center screen and still go 3 or 4 inches onto the side screens (super wide screen).
- HBOGo/MaxGO, both do no even center properly, the video is half on the left screen and half on the center, the only way to fix is is to not full screen it, or run a 4th monitor as an extended display

I bought a Sapphire 7970 925 GHZ 3BG card and I have to say that I'm very disappointed with it so far. When it works, it performs wonderfully but the drivers seem to be absolute garbage.

Shogun 2 hard locks my PC within 5 minutes of starting the game, requiring me to reboot and I'm not able to salvage any data as to why it crashed. This is a well known issue that has persisted for months yet neither AMD nor Creative Assembly seems willing or able to fix it.

Naval War: Arctic Circle freezes up at random intervals and I have to use CTRL-ALT-DEL to shut it down. Turbo Tape and Paradox are aware of the issue but are quite dismissive of it on their forums.

Sniper Elite v2 hardlocks at random intervals if I plug an HDMI cable into the video card. Shame as I like to use the HDMI to stream Netflix from the PC to the TV.

Skyrim hardlocks at random intervals and requires a reboot of the PC. Again, well known issue but no fix thus far.


I've only had the thing for 5 days and I've already run into tonnes of issues with it regardless of which drivers I install. I contacted NCIX to see if I could swap the card out for a 680 GTX. They said I could, but it'd be a 15% restocking fee. I don't feel like dropping even more money into this PC so hopefully AMD will get their act together and release some proper drivers, but I ain't holding my breath.

12.7 beta is not skyrim's friend.

might give this thread a look and post there:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1196856/official-amd-radeon-hd-7950-7970-owners-thread/12620


Locking on all those games implies a hardware defect, driver error, or mainboard problem/pci-e driver issue.

A New AMD Catalyst 12.7 Beta (newer than Guru3d's leaked build).

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/Catalystbetadriver1.aspx

Thanks for the 12.7 news. I've been using the older 12.7. I'm downloading the new one.

Interesting how we each have a different experience.

Currently, my only issue is once every couple of days when using Firefox. I get a computer "green screen" (apparently a distorted image of my green desktop wallpaper) -- and have to press reset. Did not get this prior to changing to HD7970 plus FX8150 plus SSD for system drive plus Firefox update. I don't really know the problem cause -- as I made all the changes at virtually same time. I suspect the GPU or Firefox, but that's not clear.

Otherwise, all seems to work. However, I don't necessarily play the same games and use the same Applications as others do. For example, I played Skyrim for over 300 hours using HD5870 XFire with only occasional hiccups (did not hurt enjoyment) -- mostly due to the Skyrim code itself which was CPU limited and not helped by XFire. But, I haven't played it recently. I'm working my way through Diablo III with HD7970 which has no CPU or GPU issues -- only DRM issues which have cost me some "deaths" and lost progress (cannot go back to old save with the Diablo III DRM).

FireFox + GPU Acceleration (or Flash w/ Hardware Acceleration).

A lot of people are pointing at Adobe Flash.

I use Google Chrome, and Some times Flash Videos just become un responsive... I have to close and end process and go back to the video.
Heavy Flash Based Sites sometimes crap out, and I have to goto Google.com then go back (a simple refresh wouldnt fix it)

In Firefox, from 12.1->12.4, If I even tried to watch a movie on HBOGo/MaxGO's website the process locked, youtube crashed.

My brother gets the Green screen / Adobe Crashed error every few weeks.

12.6 Beta 1, 12.7 June 12 Beta both Fixed the desktop Tearing for me. But I still get some games with tearing on the right screen (DP) and none on the center/left (DVI/HDMI).

My Beef with AMD now is Lack of Pressure on 3rd parties, they were promising the DP 1.2 MST Hubs will be available a year a go, 12 months later, nothing.

Based on what you say: I noticed Adobe Flash just updated yesterday (for me). Also, the newer 12.7 has a newer version of GPU acceleration (based on what I noticed was changed as I installed the newer 12.7). Maybe that will help the "green screens". Never did have tearing. Used HDMI for center monitor without problems and went to DVI when I got repetitive "green screens" (thought HDMI might be to blame). However that made no difference. So I assume my HDMI connection was not an issue.

So, bottom line, today (with my games and applications) my only known repetitive computer issue is my Firefox "green screen". I do not know what causes it (might not even be my system or Firefox -- might be flash, as you point out).