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.
GPGPU (Score:5, Interesting)
many slashdotters points to the extreme price of that graphic card for gamers. I am more interested in the GPGU performance. The comparison uses OpenCL to be able to compare against nvidia's hardware. But I feel like OpenCL is a second class citizen for nvidia. How much the performance difference would be using a carefully crafted CUDA implementation on the nvidia hardware?
Re:The drivers still suck, so why bother? (Score:5, Interesting)
so last you tried was 3 years ago?
they've improved drastically, even if most linux graphic drivers are far from perfect in wine (but pretty good overall).
Skip this one (Score:4, Interesting)
Massive coil whine issues. No matter of HSF replacement or chassis sound proofing/dampening will get rid of it, the coil whine will be the loudest part of your computer when you're playing a game.
How can AMD release a 1000 dollar card that has such a massive issue? The dual GPU ASUS card did not have this problem.