AMD Radeon HD 7790 Review Feat. Sapphire: The First Desktop Sea Islands
by Ryan Smith on March 22, 2013 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Sapphire
- GCN
- Radeon HD 7000
Final Words
Bringing our review to a close, the launch of the Radeon HD 7790 is another precisely targeted launch by AMD. The 7790 is intended to fill AMD’s price and performance gaps between the 7770 and the 7850, and it does this very well, offering 84% of the 7850’s performance – or 130% of the 7770’s performance – for around $30 less than the 7850. In the world of sub-$200 video cards where every $10 matters, this is exactly what AMD needs to fill in their product lineup.
Meanwhile as the first GCN 1.1 GPU, Bonaire doesn’t greet us with any great surprises, and if not for the new PowerTune implementation it would be indistinguishable from Southern Islands (GCN 1.0). With that said AMD already had a strong architecture in GCN 1.0, so even minor changes such as PowerTune and a new GPU configuration serve to make a good architecture better. The new PowerTune will probably take enthusiasts a bit of time to get used to, but ultimately we’re happy to see AMD moving to using just full clock/voltage states and not relying on their clockspeed-only inferred states, as the former is going to offer more power savings. As for AMD’s functional unit layout for Bonaire – 14 CUs, 2 geometry pipelines, and 16 ROPs – it looks to have paid off handsomely for them. They’ve improved performance by quite a bit without having to add too many transistors or a larger memory bus, making it a great way to iterate on GCN midway between new process nodes.
The big question of course is whether 7790 is worth its $149 price tag, and factory overclocked models like the Sapphire worth the $159 price tag. From a pure price/performance perspective, right now things look pretty good for AMD and their partners. Against the rest of the 7000 series it has a very clear niche to fill, which is does so but without being so good as to make the 7850 redundant. Meanwhile against NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 650 Ti things are still in AMD’s favor but it’s a bit murkier. A 12% performance advantage is distinct, but AMD’s also asking for nearly $20 more than most cheap GTX 650 Tis. At these prices there’s really no concept of a sweet spot since consumers often have fixed budgets, so instead we’ll point out that NVIDIA simply doesn’t have a suitable $150 video card right now; all they can offer are factory overclocked GTX 650 Ti cards.
Speaking of factory overclocked cards, our Sapphire HD 7790 Dual-X OC was exactly what we expected it to be. A 6-7% increase in clockspeeds leads to a 6% performance increase, showing that 7790 achieves the performance scaling necessary to make these cards viable. In this case overclocked cards are a very straightforward proposition: $10-$20 more for 6% more performance and typically a better cooler. This is all rather normal for factory overclocked cards, though we would point out that we have no reason to believe these overclocks aren’t achievable on stock-clocked cards.
Our one concern with the 7790 right now is one of memory size. Adding another 1GB of GDDR5 would definitely have a price impact, and having 2GB of GDDR5 on a 128bit bus would be a bit odd. But on the other hand we now know what the future of PC gaming holds: a lot of ports coming from a console with 8GB of GDDR5 memory. 1GB is going to look very small in a year’s time as those ports start arriving.
Ultimately we’re reminded of a discussion we had with the launch of the GTX 650 Ti last year, when we had the time to look at 2GB vs. 1GB on the 650 Ti and the 7850. Our conclusion at the time was such: “We have reached that point where if you’re going to be spending $150 or more that you shouldn’t be settling for a 1GB card; this is the time where 2GB cards are going to become the minimum for performance gaming video cards.” That conclusion has not changed. The 7790 looks good among the current crop of cards, but the 2GB 7850 is going to be so much more future-proof, at least in as much as a video card can be. At these prices consumer budgets are typically fixed and for good reason, but with 2GB 7850s available at around $180, it’s a very compelling upgrade for the extra $30. In 2013 it’s something worth considering if you want to keep a video card for at least a couple of years.
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silverblue - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
You must've missed the part about them simply not having as much time to test the 7790 as they'd have liked because they were at GTC. Other sites apologised for their lack of time as well.There's a whole load of other reviews out there; only a few have overclocking results (Guru3D notably), and as far as I can see only AT, of the major sites, has both the 7790 and a factory overclocked 7790 in the same test. Guru3D is alone in providing a CrossFire test and though two 7790s perform about the same as a sole 670, there's no power readings. There's a good number of different titles being benchmarked so it's not strictly a list of AMD-says-test-these-titles, plus Tomb Raider, a Gaming Evolved title, performs better on NVIDIA hardware. There's a few bugs with the beta drivers used for the 7790 in these reviews most notably with latencies (a bug that has already been fixed with the next Catalyst release so yes, we will see new drivers soon), however the latency values are so far ahead on average of what we used to see from AMD that this can hardly be classed as an issue. Testing has generally centred on 1920x1080 because that's really the limit where cards like this are supposed to be performing - there's little point in 1024x768 and an equal measure of futility trying for 5760x1080 or whatever; the former is ridiculously low res and the latter is ridiculously ambitious even for a 7970 or 670/680.
Sapphire's blurb about multi-monitor usage via the TweakTown website:
"Working or gaming with multiple monitors is becoming increasingly popular, and the SAPPHIRE HD 7700 series supports this with AMD Eyefinity, now in its second generation. The SAPPHIRE HD 7790 OC Edition has two DVI ports (DVI-I and DVI-D), HDMI and a single DisplayPort output, supporting up to four monitors.
The SAPPHIRE HD 7790 OC Edition model supports the FleX feature, pioneered by SAPPHIRE, that allows three digital displays to be connected to the DVI and HDMI outputs and used in AMD Eyefinity mode without the need for an external active adapter. All four outputs can be used in AMD Eyefinity mode, but the fourth display must be a DisplayPort monitor or connected with an active adapter."
I've heard AMD's launch date for this is today; Guru3D has the following to say:
"But I need to add this little note alright; AMD's Never Settle Reloaded promotion continues. At participating retailers beginning 02 April, 2013, gamers will be able to receive a free copy of BioShock Infinite with a purchase of their new AMD Radeon HD 7790 graphics card. See, now that's great value. The Radeon HD 7790 series cards will be available in stores starting April 2, 2013"
Trusting this is of some use to you...
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, March 24, 2013 - link
I've run 2 flex edition cards, you idiot.Have you ?
Run any MDT nVidia galaxy cards dummy ?
How about all dvi outs so you daon't have to have $100's of dollars of soon to die amd dangly cables ?
Heck a friend just got ANOTHER 6870 he usually runs 4 monitors, but that could only run 2 OOB and he has loads of cables, so he had to buy another cable just to run a 3rd monitor - it took 2 weeks to arrive...
ROFL
AMD SUCKS with eyefinity / multiple monitors and nVidia DOES NOT - nVidia keeps the end user in mind and makes it INEXPENSIVE to set up 3 or 4 monitors !
Amd makes it cost prohibitive.
AMD SUCKS, they lost again, totally.
geniusloci - Saturday, March 23, 2013 - link
You are a pathetically simple little mind, aren't you?geniusloci - Saturday, March 23, 2013 - link
What planet do you come from?This card will run 4 monitors, eyefinity has done this very well, forever. With discrete audio per monitor. Nvidia is really getting handed it's ass by AMD in this category.
This card will spank it's nvidia competition in civ5, since civ uses opencl, and nvidia sucks at opencl (and their current cards even suck at cuda).
Crossfire: there's a crossfire port at the top, genius. It will obviously crossfire.
Too bad Nvidia's 2D quality and video quality is such utter shit. I might have actually used that gtx660 I bought instead of sending it back for a 7870.
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, March 24, 2013 - link
You have your display port monitor or $100 active display cable dummy ? LOL4 monitors MY BUTT.
Another clueless amd fanboy.
eric.zaba@gmail.com - Sunday, March 24, 2013 - link
You obviously dont have a clear understanding of gpu tech so just stop blabbing your stupidity, even most nvidia biased people can admit Check linus tech tips , check your games they all work much better on amd with multimonitor.and no overclock talk maybe because AMD doesnt approve of people tampering with gpus............ and because they want it to seem so good that you dont need an overclock...... and the specific hardware partners can make different port configs so why would you say that?
and maybe comparing ASUS 650tis to this GPU is invalid becuase you didnt specify who made it so the port config advantage is completely irrelevant.
Amd is not bankrupt because of their GPU business. and their CPU business isnt bad i dont think that getting into the gpu and cpu of the top 3 consoles (PS4 Xbox WiiU) is so bad either. and why would game biases not be true if amds drivers and games play better on the amd based systems
eg: Crysis 3. and saying that the civ 5 benches crashed is completely stupid because a good website like anandtech doesnt normally disregard such things. and AMD didnt pay them off if they are bankrupt right? yes it can crossfire because theres crossfire connectors on the top so maybe they assumed things would be implied for the general crowd.
althaz - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
I think it's also worth mentioning that the 7850 is a quite excellent overclocker. At stock I think it's definitely not worth the extra $30, but once overclocking is taken into account, if you can afford the $30 you are crazy not to spend it (assuming you are comfortable with overclocking of course).Bob Todd - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Yeah, I'm curious what the pricing will look like on these a few weeks after introduction. I picked up a 7850 (2GB MSI Twin Frozr) for $170 AR a few weeks ago to put in a HTPC, and I've seen it at that price again already. It will be interesting to see if the regular sales on 7850s decrease once the 7790 is out. Kudos to AMD for offering BioShock Infinite with this.Aikouka - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Given we're talking about gaming cards here, I think it's worthwhile to add that only the 7800s and 7900s come with AMD's Never Settle game promotion. So, if you're interested Tomb Raider and/or Bioshock Infinite, the 7850 may have significantly more value to you. If you're not interested in them, people have been selling the coupons on eBay for about $50-60 each.Bob Todd - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
There's a small paragraph in the article explaining that this card _is_ part of the Never Settle Reloaded program. It's only getting BioShock Infinite since it sits at a lower price point, but still a nice addition. The bundles are a big part of the reason I'm curious to see how the pricing shakes out. I sold a TR/BS bundle and kept about ~$50 in my pocket after fees, so I basically got a very nice 2GB 7850 for $120. You could obviously sell the BioShock code you'd get with a 7790, but if the prices for that card stay at MSRP for too long they'll have some stiff competition from 7850s on sale. Unless of course the 7850 sales dry up since it doesn't have to cover such a large swath of AMD's lineup now price wise.