AMD Radeon HD 7990 Released: Dual GPUs and 6G of Memory for $1000 189
An anonymous reader writes "Today AMD has officially unveiled its long-awaited dual-GPU Tahiti-based card. Codenamed Malta, the $1,000 Radeon HD 7990 is positioned directly against Nvidia's dual-GPU GeForce GTX 690. Tom's Hardware posted the performance data. Because Fraps measures data at a stage in the pipeline before what is actually seen on-screen, they employed Nvidia's FCAT (Frame Capture Analysis Tools). ... The 690 is beating AMD's new flagship in six out of eight titles. ... AMD is bundling eight titles with every 7990, including: BioShock Infinite, Tomb Raider, Crysis 3, Far Cry 3, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, Hitman: Absolution, Sleeping Dogs, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution."
OpenGL performance doesn't seem too off from the competing Nvidia card, but the 7990 dominates when using OpenCL. Power management looks decent: ~375W at full load, but a nice 20W at idle (it can turn the second chip off entirely when unneeded). PC Perspective claims there are issues with Crossfire and an un-synchronized rendering pipeline that leads to a slight decrease in the actual frame rate, but that should be fixed by an updated Catalyst this summer.
Is it worth it? (Score:5, Insightful)
That card has quite impressive specs and frankly has as much horsepower as a fair number of computers that were being produced as recently as - yesterday. Trickle down tech works wonders and we will see something like this that is affordable for the masses within a few years. For that reason alone I can't knock the card and it's feature set.
The price on this is through the roof and it makes me think that this is a waste of money for 99.9999% of gamers. If you were put in a blind test with this card and a 'mere' $500 card how many people would even be able to notice the difference? This isn't a CAD card meant for workstations and it makes me wonder what the real world benefits of the card are other than bragging rights?
Re:The drivers still suck, so why bother? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since AMD drivers are total garbage, why bother?
Might as well stick with a card I can actually use.
Yeah, shill on.
Windows Drivers are decent nowadays. OpenCL works better on AMD in my experience (some __constant memory bugs were just fixed recently for nvidia, see here: http://bloerg.net/2012/07/19/heterogenous-computing.html [bloerg.net] ). The Tomb Raider hair benchmark, which worked with DirectCompute better on AMD than nvidia also shows that for nvidia only CUDA is the prime citizen ( http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2013/3/6/tomb-raider-amd-touts-tressfx-hair-as-nvidia-apologizes-for-poor-experience.aspx [brightsideofnews.com] ).
FGLRX is ok too, but lags behind nvidia, when looking at the support for new xorgs.
If you consider that AMD also provides some open source support, while nvidia provides none, for me the choice between them is a clear one.
Even if it's not clear for you "Might as well stick with a card I can actually use" is a clear flame.
Re:$1000 for a video card? (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt many people living in "mom's basement" have $1000 to put into a video card. Realistically the people that grew up playing games has continued to go up, and in particular a lot of people who want a video card like this are going to be older (30-45) anyways as a lot of the younger crowd is trending more towards tablet and mobile games.
To a lot of people in that 30 to 45 age bracket $1,000 isn't a whole heck of a lot to spend on a hobby.
375W is good power management? (Score:3, Insightful)
LOL, so at full load you will need pretty much a secondary PSU to run the damn thing... really decent power management I guess! Though I guess considering the stupid 1000$ price tag, you probably don't care about buying a 200$ 1200-1500W PSU I suppose.
Then again if you want to run a crossfire configuration, that's a 750W under load minimum. As a few HD and a high end processor, well you are hitting some PSU limits!
That said if I had unlimited money I might buy it, though even then probably not as it is such a waste.
Also htf did they pick the name "Malta"? I mean at least nVidia had the good sense to call their penis "Titan" for gods sake!
Re:The drivers still suck, so why bother? (Score:2, Insightful)
But he said most games, since that literally covers every game from Pong to Defiance, he can safely say that it is true.
Price/performance isn't there (Score:5, Insightful)
Cutting edge is cool but I always go for the best $150 card I can buy. That gets you a good last-gen card that will still be good for years of service.