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
Bioshock Infinite
Bioshock Infinite is Irrational Games’ latest entry in the Bioshock franchise. Though it’s based on Unreal Engine 3 – making it our obligatory UE3 game – Irrational had added a number of effects that make the game rather GPU-intensive on its highest settings. As an added bonus it includes a built-in benchmark composed of several scenes, a rarity for UE3 engine games, so we can easily get a good representation of what Bioshock’s performance is like.
We knew from the moment the first reviews came out that we wanted to use Bioshock Infinite as one of our new games, but we weren’t quite sure what to expect. In the end there’s almost a clean split between the relative performance of single-GPU cards and multi-GPU cards. As such while the 7990 and 7970GE CF are clearly in the lead over their NVIDIA counterparts at 2560, the GTX 680 slightly edges out the 7970GE.
In this case AMD is seeing better multi-GPU scaling than NVIDIA, giving the 7990 the edge here in all resolutions, with the 7990 besting the GTX 690 by 6% at 2560 and a very sizable and unexpected 20% at 5760. It will be interesting to see what the FCAT results are like once we have those back in order to confirm whether Bioshock is as smooth on AMD cards as it appears at first glance.
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A5 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
People use OpenCL all the time. You have no idea what you're talking about.bigboxes - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Then you might as well had a double 7990 in your fantasy world.Freakie - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
It's already long been discussed, Nvidia's drop in Compute performance. Nvidia decided to focus their consumer cards on what they are meant for, gaming, and not overly engineer their GPU's to be heavy hitters for compute performance. There a number of instances where the GTX 580 is better at compute than the 680 is. As Ryan mentioned, the price AMD pays for those gains is in much higher power consumption which of course makes it harder for budget minded buyers to get into AMD. Having to spend an extra $30 on your PSU makes a big difference in a $600 build when you're trying to stretch every dollar and Nvidia has shifted to focus quite heavily in the budget build areas and this is one of the ways they are doing it.And no, the synthetics say absolutely nothing about the longevity of a card. Longevity of a card is always the support that the GPU developer (AMD/Nvidia) and game developers give it. Software makes or breaks a GPU's ability to be useful, which is why we have a plethora of Driver updates and game patches and why things are programmed using unified tools and languages and why new GPU's keep certain features of their architecture throughout many generations. There is reason why Nvidia 7xxx and 6xxx series GPU's have suddenly become insufficient when they, at least the 79xx, lasted a VERY long time. Hardware shifted too far away fundamentally from those older cards and so software (games) made for newer cards simply did not have the hardware architecture of older cards in mind and now the utterly fail in some games. If you want longevity in your GPU, then just buy the latest architecture from whichever company you prefer, make sure it's not a rebranded version of a previous series, and you'll get the maximum lifespan out of it.
lmcd - Friday, April 26, 2013 - link
It's pretty irrelevant for this card given that the 7990 posted one significant win over the 7970...xTRICKYxx - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Love the review. With having to compete with the GTX 690 and Titan, this is the correct response AMD provided. I think it should be priced at $849 or something around there to sway buyers.On paper the 7990 is faster than all of Nvidia's products overall, but its high power consumption may be a turn off for some.
On another note, 320.00 is an awesome driver release.
abhishek6893 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
AMD 7990 is much faster than NVIDIA's TITAN.CiccioB - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Yessss.... It also uses twice the power though...Beavermatic - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
LOL.... considering the 7990 is a dual-gpu card, I would hope its faster than a Titan, given titan is a single-gpu powerhouse. But only marginally, which shows how powerful the Titan really is.shing3232 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
where could i get AMD CCC 13.5?Sancus - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
It would be nice if you guys got one of the PNK321 3840x2160 monitors and tested it with this card(and some other setups like CF 7970s, maybe Titans using borderless windowed...). Right now AMD has the only solution for fullscreen 4k gaming at 60hz because this monitor shows up as two displays when you run it at 60hz and thus without 2x1 Eyefinity you can't get a single display surface. Nvidia's only comparable solution is Mosaic but it's only for Quadro cards.Anyway, it would be nice to find out whether 3840x2160 gaming is viable with the 7990.