Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Testing Ultrawide Resolutions with the 7900 GRE Steel Legend!”.
This is my Linux testing machine in the fractal Tera with a 7900 GRE that has ample room for clearance, there’s not negative 1 millimet, there’s all kinds of millimeters of clearance. Yes, the steel Legend 7900 GRE 16 gigs of vram azrock, special AI utilities, AI quick set for Linux and windows, ack doing special stuff for Linux. We’Re also going to do ultrawide testing 3840, x600 and 3440 X 1440 on our GRE graphics card 16. Gigs. Is it going to be good enough? Yes, it’s going to be good enough because it can do 4K, but that goes without saying: uh, let’s dive in steel Legend, all right. Let’S talk 7900 GRE, the steel Legend. This is the smallest 7900 steel legend that I’ve tested. I don’t have the reference version of the 7900 gr. It’S may be a little smaller, but it has a weird V, bios overclock lock, which is strange as rock is sort of positioning the steel Legend series, whether it’s motherboards gpus, whatever as kind of like this, is the value bang for the book.
Like give us your money and we will make sure you get the most value possible for your money, but you’re still kind of an Enthusiast. So you want overclocking, and you want everything else – maximum boost clock on this with my overclock 2425 and it would basically stay at that boost clock in most games pretty much continuously. I did have to tweak the power Target and I did have to ramp the fans and these three fans can get quite loud at their maximum setting. You don’t really need to do that, though, between hyper RX and other features in amd’s Adrenaline software.
You mostly don’t have to do that if you missed our GRE launch day coverage, you should really check out our GRE launch day coverage, because we have the full Benchmark breakdown using this GPU, as it was at launch for 4K, 1440p and 1080p spoiler alert. The GRE is basically good enough for 4K gaming, maybe not with the absolute highest texture pack they’re pretty darn close, but these monitors behind me. They can do 100 HZ and Beyond, and maybe that’s what you want. Maybe you want to run at 3840 x600 Ultra wide, but 144 FPS and you’re going to have to use FSR and you’re going to have to use some upscaling technologies and you’re not going to get that with rate racing, no matter which team you want to buy. A graphics card from you’re going to you’re going to need upscaling technology for really high resolution, because the monitors do look really good when you run at a native resolution, so okay, fine, outputs on this card, one HDMI and three display port. The HDMI is not fully functional under Linux because of the HDMI Consortium. The HDMI Consortium needs to get with the program the open source. This is a pretty standard rant.
That’S going to appear in in most of my videos. Basically, AMD did all of the work bent over absolutely backwards to support HDMI 2.1 with Linux and open source drivers and the HDMI Consortium will not get with the program because it’s 2024, the entire planet, runs on Linux, except for desktop computers. Basically phones, routers servers. Basically, everything except desktop computers and the HDMI Consortium is like we, we don’t know, people might steal our content again, they’re living in the 1960s Andor.
It’S the really the worst version of capitalism, as explained by Cory, Doo like they just they want Moes and – and it’s not really about intellectual property controls or protecting things. It’S really just being able to charge you money to have the little HDMI sticker. I really like the way that Intel uh dealt with this situation, which is all of the outputs on their GPU, are display port in hardware and then they add a built-in HDMI adapter.
So, there’s a display port to HDMI adapter chip on the PCB that does display port to HDMI conversion, to avoid the HDMI Consortium Shenanigans, because Intel knows that a lot of people using open source are going to be really interested in their gpus. There is no solution like that that I know of from any board partner uh from AMD because, like as an electrical engineer like thinking about it from their perspective, that’s literally the dumbest thing on earth, like the the physical silicon and the GPU, is capable of speaking Hdmi signals: why would why would we do that and idiot greedy people inside of the Consortium who are decidedly non-technical, have decided that, oh, we can’t release the drivers to use the hardware that we already have so HDMI should go away. Display port is the superior technology.
Anyway, okay widescreen gaming – I was a little skeptical, I mean okay, about a million of you have written in to ask hey what about benchmarks for widescreen gaming and I kind of get it now in the beginning. I was a little skeptical after having games for a while, for this video to you know play some games for a little while in a widescreen mode. I kind of like that.
The you know, non 16×9 aspect ratios line up a little bit better with your peripheral vision, but I still like 4×3 aspect ratios or even portrait aspect ratios for programming and and everything else. I have a really hard time getting behind 21 by9 or even 30 2×9. We didn’t get into 32 by9 for this video, but I have a really hard time getting behind it in general, but I get it, but that’s just me so that you know where I’m coming from.
As I give you these numbers, because this was more interesting than I thought – Assassin’s Creed – Mirage – okay, 1080p – you can expect 161 FPS average in the same configuration you’re going to drop off to 136 FPS when you take it up to 1440p and from 136 to 110. Fps to go to 1440 3440 by 1440, that is more of a drop off than I expected it’s a very similar performance to 3840 x600. You know 101 to 110 FPS and 3840 by 2160, that is 92 FPS. So basically, if you’re doing 3440 by 1440, it’s really not a lot different than 3840 by 2160, which is surprising, cyberpunk. Okay, this is exactly the opposite. Result makes no sense: 159 FPS at 1080p, 104 FPS at 1440p, 3440 X, 1440, Ultra wide 76, 3840, x600, 61, 43 FPS at 3840 X 2160.
This kind of doesn’t make sense to drop from 61 to 43 FPS. Why? What’S going on here in 3440 by 1440? Subjectively buttery, smooth on this configuration cyber Punk’s just a weird game in general, but this this performance fall off is what I would expect, basically just based on the number of pixels, except for 3840 by 1600 versus 3840 by 2160, like we didn’t give up that many Pixels, why does the performance fall off that dramatically? Shadow with the Tomb Raider is kind of similar 118 FPS at are 3840 x600 versus 88 FPS at 3840, X, 2160 just standard 4K. You you get a pretty significant performance bump if you’re gaming at 3840 x600.
Can we configure a 3840 by 2160 monitor to actually run at 3840 x600 with black bars in the top and bottom, that might be the secret to high performance gaming when we’re talking about 21 by9 aspect ratios balers Gate 3, not really a lot of difference. 3840. X600 and 3840 X, 2160, basically, the same performance while 3440 X 1440 is quite a significant performance fallof from 2560 by 1440.
In fact, 3440 X 1440 really not a lot different in terms of gameplay experience than 4K. That is a little bit of an unexpected result for balers Gate 3, Borderlands 3, an ancient title: this is just a game to get our bearings and yeah. This breakdown is kind of sort of what I would expect.
144. 108. 91.
84. So really not a lot of performance difference between Ultra wide 21 by9 3840 and you know 3840 X, 2160. 4K. I’M surprised that the performance falloff is as much as it is between 2560 X, 1440 and 3440 X, 1440 ultrawide. I wouldn’t expect that much, and these are the specific games that I picked out of a huge uh, probably about 30 games. These are the ones that I played the most in order to try to uh see what it felt like.
These are the ones that behave. The most differently – and so you know you can’t just look at a particular game and say this game is going to behave this way or this game is going to behave. That way, I think, Assassin’s Creed Mirage is one of the uh worst case scenarios that you can expect.
Basically, when you move up to uh 21 by9, it’s going to perform terribly Borderlands 3 is a pretty good example of uh. Your worst case scenario, which is when you move Beyond 2560 by 1440, the performance fallof, is really sharp and it doesn’t really matter what resolution you’re running beyond that. The performance is is roughly equivalent to 4K or within spitting distance of 4K.
I mean okay, 34 40 by 1440. 108 is way better than 84, but I would have expected it to be a little better. So there you have it ultrawide gaming. I think there probably should be a lot more content on ultrawide gaming based on this a larger database just running at Ultra wide resolutions. Uh, you could also use Technologies like xes and FSR 3. They behave a little differently when you’re talking about ultrawide resolutions.
You don’t always get a really amazing result. The same that you would on a 16x 9 aspect ratio display it matters more than I thought it would, and it matters more than it did historically find that very interesting have more work to do. I think now, in terms of off label uses, ASRock is leaning hard into the AI thing.
They’Ve created two pieces of software, one for Linux and one for Windows to help you lean into AI as well, that will work on their gpus, and that is AI. Quick set, this gives you stable diffusion and a large language model and a comic book / manga translator, which uses AI. So if you download the original PDFs, you can translate it to English, because again, intellectual property controls.
It’S like okay, here’s the translated thing. How do we upload that, so somebody can enjoy it, that can’t read the native Lang? Well now we can just solve those problems with AI, so this is a download and it’s pretty easy to run. I’Ve actually got AI quick set running over here on my Linux machine, generating lots and lots and lots of uh material. I don’t know if you’re watching this and you don’t have an ASRock G GPU, but you still want to play with AI on an AMD GPU cuz. You do have an AMD GPU cuz AI is the new hotness check out amd’s Rockham blog because they just changed the blog for how they do Ai, and this is the place to go to keep an eye on AI happenings on AMD rdna Hardware. Cdna is the commercial Enterprise workstation class stuff rdna? Well, there does exist rdna for workstation as well, but rdna for gamers. Yes, you can.
Finally leverage AMD gpus for AI uh AMD is catching up fast, so you can run stable diffusion. If that was your reason for you know, buying a GPU, you can now do that on AMD as well and get more vram 16 gigs of vram 20 gigs of vram pricing. For this, at the time I’m doing the video is around $ 600 us this seems to be sort of the new upper high-end uh. You know Echelon if you want to play games natively at 3440 by 440 at a really high frame rate 7900. Gre is probably your best bang for the buck.
Uh Nvidia doesn’t really have anything in the same price class. Although Nvidia has been adjusting their pricing the last couple of months, I guess AMD finally has their attention and AMD is also facing a lot of pressure at the low end from Intel with the their gpus, because uh Intel is, is very, very hungry. For this GPU market and Intel’s driver team is really catching up fast to AMD amd’s drivers. Historically, you know everybody would sort of r on them, but AMD drivers have actually been really good for a couple of years now and GPU, open and other stuff. That AMD is working on for game developers and that Gamers will indirectly enjoy, has benefited the industry tremendously and it really underscores how far AMD has come and how close AMD is to parody with Nvidia. When we’re talking about drivers.
When you look at where Intel’s drivers are and how far Intel’s drivers have come since the a770 launch, I mean Intel’s performance is like plus over 100 % in some games. Since launch amd’s driver team has gone through some growing pains in the past. Let’S say but they’ve come a long way and AMD has really got a lot of Polish in their driver.
These days adrenaline and Hyper RX, and it’s so good that Nvidia recently changed it. So that to get all of the same kind of like game enhancement, let me help you configure your games and save time features Nvidia used to force you to sign in to get those features. Nvidia has taken that out because people are tired of signing in and getting spammed and it’s a story for another day.
Anyway. That’S been a quick look at the steel Legend 7900 GRE from azrock I’m going. This is level one.
If I missed anything or you have any questions or you want to see anything Linux specific, let me know and we’ll take a look all right. I’M signing out I’ll see you later .