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
The Test
For today’s review we will be using the latest rendition of our game benchmark suite, first introduced in our review of the GeForce GTX Titan. We still expect to add another 1-2 games to this suite in April after the last of the major Spring game releases hit next week. As a reminder, our 2013 benchmark suite is much more 1080p centric on the low-end, as 1080p sales have eclipsed even cheaper, lower resolution monitors. As AMD is promoting the 7790 as an entry-level 1080p card anyhow, this ends up working well.
On the driver side of things we are using AMD’s 12.101.2 press drivers for the 7790, and their Catalyst 13.2 beta 7 drivers for the rest of our AMD cards. For our NVIDIA cards we are using 314.21.
Unfortunately we only had a very short period of time to spend with this card due to AMD’s launch schedule conflicting with NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference this week. As a result while we’ve been able to put together our usual analysis and data collections, we’ve only been able to compare it to around half a dozen other cards – the relevant AMD and NVIDIA cards above and below the 7790, and for a historical perspective we’ve thrown in the Radeon HD 6870.
Similarly, because of a short period of time to write this article our performnace commentary will be lighter than usual, so our apologies on that. But the fact of the matter is that the 7790 results will speak for themselves as we’ll see in our charts. Against AMD’s lineup the 7790 is comfortably in between the 7770 and 7850, offering 130% of the former and 84% of the latter on average. While against NVIDIA’s lineup the 7790 is 11% faster than the GTX 650 Ti, beating the 650 Ti – sometimes by quite a bit – in everything but Battlefield 3. The question, as is often the case, is not performance but price.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.3GHz |
| Motherboard: | EVGA X79 SLI |
| Power Supply: | Antec True Power Quattro 1200 |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung 470 (256GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1867 4 x 4GB (8-10-9-26) |
| Case: | Thermaltake Spedo Advance |
| Monitor: | Samsung 305T |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 7850 AMD Radeon HD 7790 AMD Radeon HD 7770 AMD Radeon HD 6870 Sapphire HD 7790 Dual-X OC NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 314.21 AMD 12.101.2 7790 Press Beta AMD Catalyst 13.2 Beta 7 |
| OS: | Windows 8 Pro |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
107 Comments
View All Comments
silverblue - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Not at 176GB/s, unless they're clocking that GDDR5 VERY high. The 7790 is good for 96GB/s.Shut up and drink - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Sony's previous two consoles (PS2 and PS3)have traditionally favored high frequency/bandwidth proprietary Interconnects between components (see Cell's EIB) so this is likely where the "secret sauce" Sony R&D came in, thus facilitating the 176GB/S.AMD was quoted (can't find link) that said Sony engineering would be excluded if/when they release a PC variant of said APU.
Spunjji - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Very, very interesting indeed. It tallies well with the numbers. There was me thinking they had bolted Pitcairn onto the side of their CPUs but this combo might make more sense (and yet also less sense).lopri - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Totally agree with memory size. At this performance and price level, 2 GB should be default.lopri - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Then again, it would be strange if AMD doesn't release "larger" cards based on this updated GCN core.silverblue - Friday, March 22, 2013 - link
Perhaps the reason for the lack of a 2GB version would be that it would be too close to the 7850...?CeriseCogburn - Sunday, March 24, 2013 - link
NO it SLOWS THE CARD DOWN with it's crappy amd core...Haven't you been paying attention for like the YEARS you've been here ?
My apologies if you're an epileptic.
Tams80 - Monday, April 1, 2013 - link
I don't understand why you haven't been banned yet. You add nothing to the discussion with your posts other than vitriol. Please either be civil and logical, or go away.CeriseCogburn - Sunday, March 24, 2013 - link
AMD always releases 1GB models and 2GB models so the amd fanboys can quote the 1GB model cheapo powercolor low end price, claim it wins price perf, then go on raging about how the 2GB model covers the high end ...ROFL - That's what they do - they even do it when comparing to a 2GB nVidia, suddenly forgetting amd makes crapster 1GB they swore off years ago, even though that's the screamer amd fanboy price "they pay" because "it's such a deal! Man! "
Brainfart Bart they should be called.
R3MF - Monday, March 25, 2013 - link
Actually, they didn't with the 7770.Your constant whining is about as welcome as a bout of herpes, scram.