Gigabyte Radeon HD 7870 OC review

Tessellation - HD3D - DirectX 11.1

Improved Tessellation

The latest iteration of the architecture in the AMD Radeon HD 7000 GPU features a brand new generation of Tesselator (Gen 9) in its Geometry Engine. This features optimizations such as; increased vertex re-use, off-chip buffering improvements and larger parameter caches. This helps improve performance at all tessellation factors up to 4x the throughput of AMD Radeon HD 6900 series graphics (Gen 8).

Stereo 3D - HD3D

First off let me state this, the Stereo 3D feature will get expanded to Eyefinity as well. So with the upcoming driver update you will get the option to play games in 3D on multiple monitors.

But there is far more interesting news. AMD expanded on the HDMI 1.4a specification and is now going to support frame packing for Stereo 3D. And that will allow for far greater framerates. The 7900 series GPUs will and are the first to support 3GHz HDMI with frame packing support for Stereo 3D. See, typically you'd be limited to HDMI 1.4a restrictions. ie. the highest resolutions for 3d gaming are 720p60 or 1080p24. You couldn't do 1080p60.

The new spec allows you to set up the screen over HDMI to 1080P and get a good 60Hz per eye, that's thus 120Hz in total. This in the past was not possible as over HDMI you'd get 24/30 Hz (and thus FPS) per eye at 1080p. Which is great if you are a fan of seizures. For HD3D gaming you'll be reliant on an external partner like DDD for your 3D game experience though.

DirectX 11.1

AMD's Radeon 7000 series cards will support DirectX 11.1 as the hardware is compatible. It's way too soon to even talk about it really, as DX 11.1 is due to be released alongside Windows 8.

New primary features in this update will be:

• Target independent rasterization
• Flexible interoperability between graphics compute and video
• Native Stereo 3D support

AMD's Unified Video Decoder

Inside each AMD Radeon GPU there's some separate core logic dedicated to video encoding and decoding. This is called the Unified Video Decoder. The Radeon 7000 series will see a small update to it. Obviously it will keep all the features its predecessors had, however MVC (Multi-View Codec), MPEG-4 and DiVX are now supported in hardware. Also, a small feature called Dual Stream HD+HD has been added.

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