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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Torrijos - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
I guess you didn't understand me!My point is, no matter the excuse, if FCAT results weren't available to provide the potential consumers with the proper information on what he would be purchasing, the article shouldn't have been published.
They say the results are coming in a week...
Good! Let's wait a week.
Instead we get superlatives and plots about how great the card is doing, except that some other site (PCPer) had the time to present FCAT result and as of right now you would be trowing money out the window.
Good news though that same site tests the experimental drivers and show that AMD might be on a path to a solution, BUT no release date for that driver, so NO IDEA WHEN this 1k$ card would FINALLY be useful!
There is no excuse, if you have an ounce of scientific integrity, to present a paper/article without the proper data. That is embarrassing!
rocky12345 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
What I find funny is that a year ago you would have taken these numbers & most likely ran to the store with cash in hand to be the first in line to buy one of these cards. But because someone somewhere was bored & decided that straight Frame rate numbers was so 90's & decided to make some crap software that breaks things down to each & every frame you now can not decide if a card is good or not withoout these fcat numbers. If any given card produces smooth frame rate in a game at the monitors res & refresh then it is a good card. But if all your looking at is unlocking the refresh & spending all of your time bench testing then enjoy your beloved fcat. myself I tend to enjoy actually playing the games I will let others spend their time worrying about the fcat numbers if that is all that is important to them.Like I said if a given card can hold its frames at my monitors refresh then that is all thats important.
rocky12345 - Thursday, April 25, 2013 - link
I may have been a bit harsh in my last post. I went to that site read the review on the 7990 & then read the fallow up review about the prototype 2 drivers http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Frame-... and AMD is indeed on the right path on sorting this out.I myself have never noticed these issues in my games because I am normally to involved in the action or story to notice the tiny glitches or runt frames as everyone is pointing out.
Klimax - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
I'd like to ask what mode was Titan in for compute tests? Was it Single or double precision. (Can't test it yet unfortunately as I do have Titan myself)Ryan Smith - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
SP mode for everything except FAH's double precision tests.yannigr - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
No comment about the game bundle in the conclusion? 8(not one or two) NEW and FREE and TOP(most of them) games don't count when deciding about a $999 card? I don't think that everyone is downloading games from torrents.A5 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
There's a comment earlier. It's not really worth mentioning in the conclusion.R0H1T - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
I'd think that over the lifetime of this card one would/could easily recuperate his/her expenditure with bitcoins & as such given the possible improvements in performance especially with future driver updates this dual GPU card is a much better deal over the titan or GTX 690, again over a long(er) period of time not counting the short term drawbacks !A5 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Don't peg your cost/benefit analysis to Bitcoins. That's dumb.R0H1T - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Umm did you miss the part where the game bundle is worth ~350 $ in itself ? The bitcoin mining is an added advantage & unless you think its asinine for one to go down that route, FYI the bundled games are also resold, it's disingenuous for anyone to suggest that mining bitcoin isn't worth it !