14 DAY TRIAL // After the specs of the Radeon HD 7970 were revealed at the end of last week, a new series of slides detailing some of the key features of AMD’s Radeon HD 7900 series were leaked online.
These confirm the support for PCI Express 3.0 as well as the introduction of a new power-saving technology called ZeroCore by AMD.
ZeroCore is quite an interesting approach to power saving as it allows the card to be completely turned off when not in use, such as when the operating system shuts down the monitor in idle.
The technology also works when more than one GPU is installed inside the system in a CrossFireX configuration, by turning off the non-primary graphics cards in 2D mode.
The result is up to a tenfold decrease in idle power consumption, AMD claiming that HD 7900 cards can draw less than 3W when ZeroCore kicks in.
In addition to this new power-saving technology, AMD has also improved the card’s Eyefinity support which has now reached the second revision and adds DDM audio and HD3D to its feature list.
DDM audio is a special directional audio system that outs independent 7.1 channel audio streams through each of the HDMI and DisplayPort connectors, according to TechPowerUp.
This means that when one moves an application window from one display to another, the audio accompanying this app is automatically directed towards the new screen.
As far as the HD3D support is concerned, things are pretty self-explanatory but it’s important to mention that AMD’s drivers will now compensate for the display angle according to user's perspective and bezel.
AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 is based on the Tahiti XT core and a recent leak revealed that it would feature 32 Compute Units, for a total of 2048 streaming cores, 128 texture units, 32 ROPs and a 384-bit wide memory bus.
This will be connected to 3GB of GDDR VRAM working at 1.37GHz (5.5GHz effective), while the GPU will be clocked at 925MHz. The card is expected to be announced on December 22, with availability being scheduled for January of 2012.
