Overall System Performance
PCMark and PerformanceTest take into account the entire system performance. For graphics cards 3D/Gaming, 2D, Video and Compute are considered. The usage scenarios especially in PC Mark are supposed to be indicative of typical use of a PC from a consumer standpoint especially with web and video. We would have liked to see a bigger lead from the Radeon in all three tests but we must wait for updated drivers and software.
As for the significant difference in PC Mark 7, analysis of the complete data sets for the benchmark confirmed to us that Video Conversion is the issue here causing the lower score. In the DirectX9 gaming portion of PC Mark 7, the HD7970 was approximately 10 FPS faster than GTX460 SLI. Once AMD enable their Video Conversion Engine then perhaps we can get a real taste of the true capability of the HD7970.
| PC Mark 7 Video transcoding – downscaling | NVIDIA GeForce GTX460 OC 768MB in SLI | AMD Radeon HD7970 3GB |
|---|---|---|
| Video transcoding - downscaling iteration 1 | 6329.09 kB/s | 1619.23 kB/s |
| Video transcoding - downscaling iteration 2 | 6753.16 kB/s | 1620.15 kB/s |
| Video transcoding - downscaling iteration 3 | 6711.08 kB/s | 1628.00 kB/s |