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.
The real questions is... (Score:5, Funny)
...how fast can it mine Bitcoins.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
...how fast can it mine Bitcoins.
For that price, it had better hash at 1 GH/s! Money, money, money, money! ....MONEY! (at least until the next crash in what will probably be--at the rate that shit is happening--the very near future :-/ )
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
At this point rational GPU operators will drop out.
There's rational bitcoin miners?
Re: (Score:3)
sure, just as there are rational people who pump-and-dump penny stocks. They don't necessarily have to have faith the product they're pumping.
Oh yeah! (Score:2)
I'm going to rush out and buy four of them right away.
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: (Score:2)
Well, you are correct there. A CAD card would cost five times what this little glorified VGA adapter does.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
As they mentioned, it can run all top games in 4k+ resolutions (either a dedicated 4k display or eyefinity configuration), something that your $500 card can't do. But yes, you don't need it to run Crysis 3 at 1920x1080
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
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?
It essentially IS a $500 card, considering it comes with almost $500 worth of games.
Re: (Score:3)
It essentially IS a $500 card, considering it comes with almost $500 worth of games.
I can't find where TFA lists the bundled games, but I imagine if I were the target market for this card, I'd already own them. And since I'm not the target market, I'll probably buy those $500 worth of games for $50 during the next Steam blowout (and then suffer through the crappy framerate).
Re: (Score:2)
Honestly? No. My personal experience has shown that dual GPUs do not pay in the end. Many problems (microstutter, needs compatible games) and performance gains are questionable (performance gain versus cost). Is better, at least to me, to buy a single-GPU card
Re: (Score:2)
Essentially all 'dual GPUs on a single card' products are mostly for e-peen(because of their relatively low production volume, it's pretty common to find 2x of the single GPU equivalents for rather less than the price within a short time, so they only really make sense if you are doing some absolutely nutty 4+ GPU configuration).
However, given the ability to ('eyefinity', I think they call it) aggregate multiple monitors into one virtual monitor(to allow you to paint applications that don't understand multi
Re: (Score:2)
I would agree a $1K GPU is largely a waste for the majority however you are missing WHY someone would even spend $1,000 on a GPU in the first place.
Namely, I recently picked up a GTX Titan for a couple of reasons:
* I run all* my games at 120 Hz** so I can use LightBoost*** on my Asus VG248QE monitor. (I don't care about triple monitor 5760x1080)
* Since it is a single GPU chip I don't have to worry about microstuttering**** issues plague that ALL SLI / XFIRE cards.
* It only uses 250W***** under full load
* It
Re: (Score:2)
Who's being smug about anything? I never criticized gamers or spending money on it as a hobby. I've certainly spent a decent chunk over the years for my own gaming. I have no issue with that and your effectively putting words in my mouth. As for talking to gamers, I think it's a safe bet that Slashdot has many gamers wh
Re: (Score:2)
GPGPU (Score:5, Interesting)
many slashdotters points to the extreme price of that graphic card for gamers. I am more interested in the GPGU performance. The comparison uses OpenCL to be able to compare against nvidia's hardware. But I feel like OpenCL is a second class citizen for nvidia. How much the performance difference would be using a carefully crafted CUDA implementation on the nvidia hardware?
Re: (Score:2)
AMD is decent if you fit into some very specific memory access patterns... If you don't, they slow down to a crawl.
Nvidia with CUDA is far more versatile, and not to mention MUCH more solid drivers(and don't need X under Linux, unlike AMD....)
opencl performance and the future of AMD (Score:2)
375W is good power management? (Score:3, Insightful)
LOL, so at full load you will need pretty much a secondary PSU to run the damn thing... really decent power management I guess! Though I guess considering the stupid 1000$ 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: (Score:2)
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.
For $1000 they should throw in a new power supply as part of the package.
But seriously, there are stories all over the place about PC sales declining and AMD is losing money --- and this is what they do? A $1000 video card? Even if there's a huge profit margin on this thing, how many of them are they really going to sell?
Re: (Score:2)
While they won't sell many, they won't produce too many either.
Re: (Score:2)
Someone mentioned to me that these are already crossfire, so you are really buying two 500$ cards, which isn't as crazy really.
That said, these things were never meant to generate sales, only media and "prestige".
I liken it to car companies making racing cars, even those they only sell a few and loose money on everyone. However for the rest of us shmucks that buy the 30,000$ car that has that race car pedigree... i.e. AMD or nVidia want to prove them against each other at the very highest end, hoping that
'Declining PC sales' == half-myth (Score:2)
But seriously, there are stories all over the place about PC sales declining and AMD is losing money --- and this is what they do? A $1000 video card? Even if there's a huge profit margin on this thing, how many of them are they really going to sell?
That's what they are actually going to sell the best.
PC sales aren't declining because suddenly the public has decided to massively run away from PCs.
PC sales are declining simply because what people have is "good enough". They has an old PC or laptop, and they aren't going to buy a new one anytime soon because it still does the work. They prefere to concentrate their money on other stuff (buying portable devices like phone and tablet, which get completely obsolete very quickly, in fact sometimes even befor
Re: (Score:2)
Good point here, I wonder when they'll start shipping video card with external power supplies...
In their last days, 3DFX actually had a product which was going to do this, the Voodoo5 6000 with a "Voodoo Volts" external power supply. This 4-GPU card was never released because the company went broke first.
Re: (Score:2)
Ummm.... the 7990 is already a crossfire GPU. In case you weren't paying attention, this is a DUAL-GPU card, which means while its single-GPU counterparts might use ~270w (7970 GPU) this one ends up being more efficient since everything is on the same board, whereas you could just CrossFire two 7970 cards and end up with over 500w max load power consumption.
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, I guess that would make sense, sorta, insomuch as a 1000$ video card makes sense. Though at the same time if what you say is true (and I didn't RTFA), then really this is more like bulk buying two 500$ video cards, which realistically have been around for long time as a "reasonable" price point. I think the old nVidia Geforce 500TI started at 500$ and that was like 13 years ago or something.
Anyway there will be fools who want to "quad" these things out, so 750W would still apply. Regardless 375W is stil
Re: (Score:2)
"I think the old nVidia Geforce 500TI started at 500$ and that was like 13 years ago or something."
Back in 2000, nVidia was on GeForce 2 (right after the GeForce 256.)
How are the drivers? (Score:2)
When I was looking for a new computer, I was between the NVidia 680 and the AMD 7950. People were having horrendous problems with 7950 performance on some popular games. It was bad enough that the choice was a no-brainer for me. I'd be interested to see what any current owners might say.
Price/performance isn't there (Score:5, Insightful)
Cutting edge is cool but I always go for the best $150 card I can buy. That gets you a good last-gen card that will still be good for years of service.
Bundled games (Score:2)
Since I already have 6 of those games, and don't want the other 2, I wouldn't pay 1k$ for this card.
By my math (~55$ per game), that's 440$ of games I don't need. $352 if assume a 25% markup.
Thus, I would buy an OEM bundle of the card, for between $550 - $650.
Makes sense to me.
(Ya, I know they get paid to include the games in the bundle...that's not my point)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
As long as this card will mine bitcoins and play Crysis 9 or whatever (for which they will put effort into the Windows driver) it'll sell like hotcakes.
nVidia's drivers have gone downhill of late and they're still better than AMD's.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I cannot believe people still complain about this. In the last five years I've built many a system, some with Nvidia cards and some with AMD cards and frankly I've never seen any serious graphics issues with either brand. The biggest issue I've seen has actually been overheating and that has far more to do with standard case design and default fan settings on the cards...
Re: (Score:2)
Even run them in linux?
The AMD drivers are crashy crap last I tried.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually I have, and the Nvidia drivers did just as bad in my experience. Neither set of binary blob drivers wanted to install and function in 3D. Having said that I haven't used anything newer than a Radeon HD 6970. Maybe it's not true for some newer cards, but my linux 3D experience was a non starter.
Re: (Score:2)
I have not had problems with the Nvidia blobs in a long time.
I can't wait until intel graphics is good enough, too bad that will mean I stop buying AMD cpus, but that is life.
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).
Re: (Score:2)
I only use AMD GFX in my Linux boxes. Can't say I've had a single issue using the stable branch. Nvidia on the other hand, I've had too many issues. I'm guessing it all depends on what other components are in your box, not everything works in perfect harmony together. My best luck is with Asus and AMD 6670, compared with the almost impossible to use GT240 on Linux. Both of those cards have similar performance by the way and are from some of my comparisons.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Still complaining about my AMD cards. The drivers cause the system to bluescreen and boot several times before the system steadies down enough to come up. Once up it seems to be good, although enabling crossfire causes the system to crash and I can't even get into single user mode without opening the box and removing the ribbon cables.
So yea, AMD drivers still suck.
(and you can flamebait it as much as you like, it doesn't change the fact that it does blue screen).
[John]
Re:The drivers still suck, so why bother? (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds like your PSU is inadequate or you have some other kind of hardware issue.
If you are running Vista/7/8 then the graphics drivers crashing should not blue-screen your machine. They run in user space now for that very reason. Blue screens are an indicate that something else is wrong, most likely with your hardware.
In fact even before Vista in my experience most blue screens were due to hardware problems. Back in the 98 days drivers were terrible, but when Microsoft introduced their certification scheme things really did get a lot better.
Re: (Score:2)
Corsair 750W CMPSU-750TX power supply. In monitoring the system using the UPS software, it never gets much above 200W power usage even when gaming (can't speak to boot up though). I've sent the cards back and they've been returned as not having a problem. I've gone through various driver versions, some of which don't let the system come up at all and I have to downrev using ccleaner and other tools to completely wipe out the ati drivers. This has been happening on XP Pro and then Windows 7. The bluescreen d
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah... To be honest if you are using ccleaner and other unspecified tools to uninstall the drivers it's no wonder your system is unstable.
Look, most people don't have this problem, so you need to figure out why you do. It must be something about the systems you are trying. Faulty RAM? Some common bit of "system cleaner" software breaking things? Crap anti-virus software?
Re: (Score:2)
Right, the people that are complaining aren't the brightest tools in the shed if you catch my drift... what i've come across is sometimes a version of a driver will be less than stable on either OEM, but so far I've been able to switch between 1 version back stable & beta and find a compromise where the card is stable. My experience is from using the cards for gaming, I've never had any issues running the basic OS on any driver from either OEM. And of course, you never know when a game update can intr
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I can even set gamma to a value less than 1 on my netbook, forcing me to use the gamma correction from Windows (with some problems)
What happens when you don't do that?
(Do user-choosable errors even count as problems?)
Re: (Score:2)
As gamma "1" is too much bright and washed for my liking so I have to get around using the gamma control from Windows, but it has some problems.
Re: (Score:2)
I can even set gamma to a value less than 1 on my netbook, forcing me to use the gamma correction from Windows (with some problems)
What happens when you don't do that?
(Do user-choosable errors even count as problems?)
Why offer the feature if it's stripped, gimped, and only partially functional? Unless it's ammunition for the Feature Checkbox Wars.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
(Do user-choosable errors even count as problems?)
Of course they do. There's even a specific category for that. [userfriendly.org]
Re: (Score:2)
You can run the open source AMD drivers, they lag behind somewhat in 3d performance (and i dont believe they have opencl support at all) but they are a lot more stable, probably still outperform intel, and continue to support older cards which the binary drivers have dropped support for.
Re: (Score:2)
I did a Google search and it appears that the AMD open-source video drivers are only available for Linux and for an obscure "embedded" version of Windows. Is there a version for standard Windows 7 that I'm overlooking?
Re: (Score:2)
I just had enough good experience with ATI long time ago in a galaxy far away that has ossified my upper hemispheres to extrapolate that Radeons will be good forever. I couldn't imagine that one team (X) will just require KMS without any consultation with other team (FreeBSD) that should implement it.
Re: (Score:2)
FWIW, while FreeBSD does not yet have KMS, it is definitely being worked on. I think the goal is to have KMS entirely running on BSD so all these video drivers can work there too. It's unfortunate that the BSDs are effectively held back now by this, but the driver model did necessitate a change. Devs had wrung out all they could out of the old-style drivers.
Re:The drivers still suck, so why bother? (Score:5, Informative)
nVidia's drivers have gone downhill of late and they're still better than AMD's.
Does anyone other than Intel actually have stable graphics card drivers? Is there a way to get drivers from AMD or nVidia which turn off the hackish "optimizations" and accept slightly lower FPS in exchange for more stability?
Sure!
Step 1. Choose the AMD or Nvidia card you want.
Step 2. Take the price of that card and add ~$1000.
Step 3. Consult list of 'FirePro'(AMD) or 'Quadro'(Nvidia) cards.
Step 4. Purchase the card whose price most closely matches the result you calculated in Step 2.
Congratulations, you now have access to drivers compiled without the -who-gives-a-fuck-about-artefacts-this-is-worth-150-3dmarks and -crashes-under-edge-cases-but-those-overclocker-kiddies-with-bargain-RAM-won't-know-the-difference flags enabled!
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: (Score:2)
Shill?
The same rig that has the Nvidia card is running an AMD cpu. I would love to make it all AMD, but their linux drivers blow last I tried.
Re: (Score:2)
You can always force the correct mode, assuming you are not running windows.
Modifying xorg to deal with lack of DID is pretty normal.
Re: (Score:2)
Steam is available on Linux. Wine works fairly well also.
Believe it or not, some folks do game on Linux.
Re: (Score:2)
Even 1 percent of steam is a lot more than 5 or 6 folks.
The steam console will change these numbers considerably.
Re: (Score:3)
"The only issue I have with Radeon drivers is their inability to deal with unusual monitor situations, especially HDTVs."
In my experience, both nVidia and AMD suck at their HDMI output to HDTVs. Even after you disable overscan and adjust other crap, the image is still off by a couple of pixels.
Never a problem with VGA, though.
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't that more of a problem with the circuitry inside the TV? I remember reading a bunch of stuff by mjg about how the EDID and such inside TVs are a complete joke, if present at all. One anecdote he listed was a 32" 720p-class TV with a Thinkpad (yes, Thinkpad) 4:3 EDID.
Re: (Score:2)
I have zero issues getting a proper EDID off of my Samsung 1080p TV in either Windows or Linux. It's a problem directly with the firmware or software of the GPUs. The PS3 uses the HDMI flawlessly, as does my prosumer camera.
Re: (Score:2)
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/8705.html [dreamwidth.org]
That's the link I was thinking of. I was slightly off too; a commenter had the Thinkpad EDID issue, and it was set to a 5:4 resolution on a 720p display.
Re:The drivers still suck, so why bother? (Score:5, Informative)
Since AMD drivers are total garbage, why bother? Might as well stick with a card I can actually use.
You know, I keep seeing people say this, yet the only manufacturer I've ever had driver trouble with was Nvidia, on both Linux and Windows. So, you know, YMMV.
Re: (Score:2)
That's a small scale personal anecdote though.
I can't speak for ATI in recent years, but certainly between 2000 and 2007 when I worked for an organisation with over 6,000 systems, ATI drivers were a consistent pain in the arse and consistently caused support headaches. Perhaps surprisingly, the only other driver issues that came close were HP printer drivers, which for some time would commonly cause Word to crash in print preview. ATI was definitely a major outlier in terms of high number of support issues
Re: (Score:2)
Bizarre. I just run the latest driver and... games just work.
Re: (Score:2)
well I have been MR NVIDIA since the rivaTNT2, and my machines currently run a AMD6870 and a AMD7950, they offered more bang for the buck and I am very happy with their respective performances.
Drivers? I have had no issues with windows, linux? dont care, dont use it anymore, besides whats linux going to use it for? semi transparent widgets? freeciv and frozen bubble dont even tax a 10 year old intel card.
Re: (Score:2)
What games are you playing that don't support multi-GPU and multi-CPU? Most newer games that I've played support both.
Re: (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.
Re: (Score:2)
What games are you playing that don't support multi-GPU and multi-CPU? Most newer games that I've played support both.
There are a few exceptions that outright keel over and die(Looking at you, Fallout 3, why would a game ever have to not hard-lock every few minutes on machines with more than two cores?); but the real issue is not 'support' in the strict 'is compatible, won't crash horribly' sense; but the 'actually achieves meaningful speedup if you throw more cores at the problem' sense.
Most anything gets a small boost from the second core; because that at least leaves room for everything that isn't the game to stop conte
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.
Re: (Score:2)
>> 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.
Never been married, have you?
Re: (Score:2)
Never been married, have you?
Don't assume that everyone else chooses a life partner as poorly as you. It's entirely possible to be married to a partner who (a) won't resent your hobbies ans (b) has his/her own too.
Re: (Score:2)
Never been married, have you?
Don't assume that everyone else chooses a life partner as poorly as you. It's entirely possible to be married to a partner who (a) won't resent your hobbies ans (b) has his/her own too.
I can't say that my experiences are typical, but among people I know, I don't know any married people who are hardcore gamers. The only people I know who play games a lot are unmarried. Anyway, what are we talking about here? It's one thing to have a spouse who doesn't care if you play 1 or 2 hours a week (especially if you're not telling us that you play while that spouse is gone) and something else entirely to find the 1 in 1000 or fewer who don't care if you play 2-3 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Re: (Score:2)
Anyway, what are we talking about here?
I assumed were talking about spending $1000 on a hobby.
fewer who don't care if you play 2-3 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Well yeah. I think spending that much time on any hobby would mean spending not all that much with your spouse. I suppose it would raise the question as to why you don't want to spend the time with them.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Anything's possible. It does seem harder to locate a life partner that doesn't resent your hobbies though, especially as hobbies aren't static and interests change.
[John]
Re: (Score:2)
It does seem harder to locate a life partner that doesn't resent your hobbies though, especially as hobbies aren't static and interests change.
Do you resent your partner's hobbies?
Re: (Score:2)
>> 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.
Never been married, have you?
I'll one-up you: my wife and I have a four-month-old son. A $3 Android game feels like splurging! But articles like this remind me that the only things I've had to give up are just "stuff," and I don't miss them.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course if you want to be this much on the bleeding edge it's not $1000 once every five years, it's every time there's something a little bit better and sell the old one. You pay a huge premium for getting *the best* of anything simply because it's the best. It is a lot of chest thumping and boasting that you have the most powerful graphics card around, both by the producers and the buyers. There's a certain "Why?" factor if the person doesn't match the equipment, like the 50yos riding carbon bikes to sav
Re: (Score:3)
Of course if you want to be this much on the bleeding edge it's not $1000 once every five years, it's every time there's something a little bit better and sell the old one
typically, something like that is going to be annual, and not much more often than that. Plus they can recoup a decent amount reselling it. A gtx590 will still go for $350-450 on ebay.
Re: (Score:2)
Exactly. I'm 31 myself. I still enjoy gaming - quite a bit when I get a chance, but realistically I can only play very occasionally on weekends and I might play through 3-4 games per year. I don't personally buy $1000 graphics cards, but I have several other hobbies (I shoot a lot of competitive pistol matches, and I'm a private pilot) where dropping $1,000 every other year or so would seem pretty cheap in comparison.
Re: (Score:2)
Who are you to judge how I spend my money?
You're just jealous of the level of my disposal income.
(That said, I wouldnt buy this card at 1K, because I already have those games...so at ~55$ a game, this card is overpriced by about $440)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Gee, if only 3Dfx were still around, since their multi-GPU configs didn't give a fuck which game you ran, as long as the engine supported 3Dfx GLide, you were golden to use multiple GPUs.
And no microstutter.
And an actual 100% increase in frame rates if you added another card.
Re: (Score:2)
Gee, if only 3Dfx were still around, since their multi-GPU configs didn't give a fuck which game you ran, as long as the engine supported 3Dfx GLide, you were golden to use multiple GPUs.
Gee, if you ran an antiquated, crippled API like Glide on a modern GPU, they'd perform just as well.
I worked on dual-GPU drivers years ago and the render performance was roughly 2x over a single GPU. The problem was, as soon as the game did anything complex which required one GPU to read data from the other, the performance dropped to 0.002X as we had to stall the pipeline so it could read that data. The end result was that we added a huge amount of complexity to the driver for a small performance increase.
Re: (Score:2)
I understand very well, and quite honestly, all of what's being done today could've been done ten years ago if people knew how to efficiently program and we didn't have shit like software patents.
Re: (Score:2)
Well what video card do you use then? Please, do share.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Who cares about the performance of the card BEFORE it hits the screen? If it is faster on-screen than the competitor, then it should be considered faster, because what other judgement could be made by the user?
Because it tells you how much extra headroom is available in rendering that screen, and if all the cards render current games at monitor refresh speeds, you can't really gauge how fast they are with respect to each other. Think of it as futureproofing.
Then consider futureproofing as a scam anyway, because no matter how "futureproof" it is, some new feature or extension will come out that won't be supported, even if it required no extra silicon.
Re: (Score:2)