AMD Radeon HD 7990 Review: 7990 Gets Official

Civilization V

Our other strategy game, Civilization V, gives us an interesting look at things that other RTSes cannot match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry, driver command lists for reducing CPU overhead, and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.

Our fastest cards are starting to outpace Civ 5, even at 2560 with 4x MSAA. Ultimately however the 7990 can’t quite keep up with the GTX 690 here, largely due to the fact that AMD’s drivers don’t support multithreaded driver command lists.