So... in a long running angry RMA with Gigabyte, I finally got a 7870 back. Originally, I sent a 6970 in for a RMA roughly two months ago. I got a defective video card back after a month and took another week to get them to 'upgrade' me to a 7850, which wasn't a upgrade at all, and then finally to a 7870 for their error. Two months in RMA using a 4870 while all this is happening is a long time.
Anyway, after getting it back, I noticed the responsiveness of my card is roughly the same as my old one. It was producing more frames, but didn't feel all that responsive. Which sorta corresponds to the results in the latest benchmarks. AMD cards have more variance and tend to produce more spikes. Spinning the camera in Guild Wars 2 for instance does this a bit. It was better then my old graphics card, but not by much (GW2 isn't a shining example of a smoothly coded game though). I was playing around in my overdrive options because I disliked the fan speed settings... Well in addition to finding out I can run the thing at 20% and it only gets up to 62c under full load, apparently turning up the power control settings to +20% makes the card super responsive.
I was honestly pretty amazed. Even more so when I started up WoW today and realized that the game is so fluid it's like **** water. TR hasn't addressed this at all and it makes me wonder if they've even tried it lately. While this may not be a traditional avenue to persue, I could see this making a very big difference in benchmark results, especially those focused around latency. Looking at GPUZ running in the background it adds less then 1amp onto power draw if I'm reading it right (VDDC in). Most gamers don't give a crap about power envelopes and I would say most don't even know about this setting or what a big difference it makes. I'm guessing the 7xxx series has some issues with power throttling when it's being pegged, specifically around very intense scenes... generally those where you need performance the most. The more I'm using it like this, the more I'm finding out the card is generally more responsive in both games and on the desktop; overall use has improved quite a bit.
Keep in mind my framerates haven't improved at all, but what has most definitely improved is the overall fluidity and responsiveness of the games I'm playing.