The AMD Radeon HD 7970 is nearly two years old and if you calculate that in ‘gamer years’ it would be easily considered past its prime. Video cards don’t get better as they age, so you would think that this card would be obsolete by now. The funny thing is that the Radeon HD 7970 is still a very competitive graphics card and was just re-branded this month as the lower cost Radeon R9 280X at $299. The AMD Radeon HD 7950/7970 and even some of the Radeon HD 7870 cards were powered by the 28nm Tahiti GPU that had 2048 stream processors and 3GB of GDDR5 memory in its full form. The AMD Radeon HD 7970 was designed in a time period where the largest resolution monitor available was 2560x1600, but now we have massive 4K Ultra HD monitors at 3840x2160 readily available and falling in price. In order to get more performance, AMD had to tape out an entirely new GPU called Hawaii for the Radeon R9 290X at the $549 price point.

Read on to see how it performs!