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
Crysis 3
Our final benchmark in our suite needs no introduction. With Crysis 3, Crytek has gone back to trying to kill computers, taking back the “most punishing game” title in our benchmark suite. Only in a handful of setups can we even run Crysis 3 at its highest (Very High) settings, and that’s still without AA. Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to driver games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2013.
If the concept of karma exists for GPUs, then it would seem to be in full force here. While AMD has an easy time pulling ahead of NVIDIA’s cards in Crysis 1, in Crysis 3 it’s almost exactly the opposite. At both 1920 and 2560 the 7990 trails the GT 690 by around 10%, only to finally pull even at 5760 thanks to AMD’s better multi-monitor handling.
Meanwhile it’s interesting to note just how much rendering performance it takes to feed the beast that is Crysis 3. With everything turned up short of anti-aliasing, the mighty 7990 is the bare minimum needed to clear 60fps at 1920, and Very High quality is out of the question at 2560 and higher. It will probably be another year or two before we have a single cards that can smoothly play Crysis 3 at its highest settings; in the meantime it will take multiple high-end cards to make that happen.
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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.