AMD Radeon HD 7990 Review: 7990 Gets Official
by Ryan Smith on April 24, 2013 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Radeon HD 7000
- Tahiti
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.
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Nfarce - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Uhm, that Bundle is only "worth $350" to those who would USE it, as in those who haven't already purchased the games, let alone those who wouldn't play them (I never was a Tomb Raider or Bioshock fan, and I already have Crysis 3 and FC3). Think a little bigger next time.Nfarce - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Oh, and those are downloads only, which are NOT resalable...unless you like passing along your personal information to the buyer.R0H1T - Thursday, April 25, 2013 - link
The point still stands regardless of the game bundle, its like saying the free accessories you get with your phone/tablet are useless because you have a better pair of headphones at home ! The same goes for bitcoin mining, like discount coupons you don't necessarily have to use them but they certainly aren't worthless for people who actually do care about every penny they spend !nathanddrews - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
GPU Bench 2013 - broken linksEvery selection I make under DX11 brings me to the following page:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/2
Speaking as one of those wackos that still plays games on a CRT, I have to admit that the entire state of GPUs is pretty bad. You've got to spend a mortgage payment just to get over 120fps @ 1080p maxed out on recent titles. Software seems to have evolved tremendously, offering cinematic levels of detail, but GPUs have not kept pace. The move to 60Hz LCD has sadly let GPU manufacturers off the hook. If we're looking at mainstream 60-120fps 4K displays this year and 120fps 8K displays following close behind, then AMD and Nvidia have their work cut out for them. They need to push a LOT more pixels MUCH faster than they are now. I can tell you right now, I'm not going to be impressed by 4K @ 30Hz.
iMacmatician - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
I noticed that too. Hopefully they fix it.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
The web devs fixed it this morning.nathanddrews - Thursday, April 25, 2013 - link
Fantastic, thanks!Wreckage - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Late, not faster than the 690 and it uses a lot more power. Throw in the stuttering issues and this may be the biggest hardware disappointment of the year.eanazag - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
NVidia needs to up the power and VRAM on the 690 part. I am sure that the additional VRAM accounts for some of the additional 75W AMD is working with. Maybe 10W; 20W at most. NVidia needs to flex that 690 since they have the TDP room and spank AMD. I saw a lot of game favoring in the review. Luckily for Nvidia that compute isn't a big deal for today. AMD smokes it in compute.iMacmatician - Friday, April 26, 2013 - link
In a few months (given the 770 and 760 Ti rumors), they might be able to do a refresh with revised GK104s and give 8 GB of RAM and clock bumps over the 690 in the same TDP.