After successfully launching its first 28-nanometer GPU last January, AMD continued to release a whole family of Radeon HD 7000 GPUs over the following months. The last GPUs in the series were the Radeon HD 7850 and 7870, enabling AMD to claim the single-GPU performance crown. Nvidia's next-generation flagship GeForce GTX 680 followed closely, however, snatching the fastest-in-the-world crown from AMD.
AMD tried to deal with the fierce competition by cutting the price tag of its 7900 and 7800 series lineup, but Nvidia's GTX 680, also known as Kepler, still enjoyed more popularity. In fact, the GTX 680 was so popular that it became like a rare precious jewel, going almost completely out of stock. Even today you need a fair amount of luck and ambition to grab a GTX 680 for $499. Moreover, Nvidia also released the GeForce GTX 670 a couple of months later, touting an even more attractive price tag: $399. The GTX 670 provided essentially the same performance as the Radeon HD 7970, but for a lower price tag.
While the GTX 670 provided the same performance as the Radeon HD 7970, Nvidia's flagship GTX 680 was five percent faster on average that AMD's offering, with brief peak moments where it achieved a 30 percent faster performance than the HD 7970. Facing such competition, AMD cut the price of the 7970 from $549 to the current $449 price tag.
Now, however, AMD seems anxious to reclaim its crown for the single fastest GPU on the market, and came up with the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. As the name implies, the new offering features a core clock speed of 1GHz, and overclocked GDDR5 memory running at 1500MHz. The new graphics card is basically the same Radeon HD 7970 with a little factory overclocking, along with a higher price tag - $499.
The HD 7970 GHz Edition raises the previous edition's core clock speed from 925MHz to 1GHz, boosts the memory clock from 1,375GHz to 1.5GHz, and drives data rates and memory bandwidth to 6Gbps and 288GBps, respectively. There is also a 3GBs GDDR5 frame buffer, as well as support for AMD CrossFire multi-card setups, and support for manual overclocking.
According to AMD, the GHz Edition brings an increased compute performance of 4.3 teraflops compared to the 3.79 teraflops in the regular edition, along with increased fill rate of 134.4GTps compared to the 118.4GTps in the regular edition. Pixel fill rate has also jumped from 29.6GPps to 33.6GPps. Ports include one dual-link DVI, two Mini DisplayPort connections, and one HDMI.
