AMD's New Flagship HD 6990 Tested

I.M.O.G. writes "Today AMD officially introduces their newest flagship GPU, the Radeon HD 6990. Targeted to counter Nvidia's current generation flagship GTX580, for AMD this is a followup to their previous generation 2xGPU on a single PCB design, the Radeon HD 5970. It represents the strongest entry AMD will release within their 6000 series graphics lineup. Initial testing and overclocking results are publishing at first tier review sites now. As eloquently stated by Tweaktown's Anthony Garreffa, the 6990 'punches all other GPUs in the nuts.'"

Comments

punches all other GPUs in the nuts

[Skarecrow77]

and your wallet too!

$700. ouch.

Hey, if you've got the money to play, lucky you. I'm envious.

Re:punches all other GPUs in the nuts

[sandytaru]

It's about exactly twice as much as the budget I've set aside for building my next PC...

Re:punches all other GPUs in the nuts

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got the money and am in the market for a new graphics card, but I just don't see the point in a card like this. 450W draw is fucking retarded and currently there just aren't games out there that will legitimately make use of a card like this. And in a year or two when the games actually exist, you'll be able to buy a card that can keep up with this one for significantly less money and probably a lower TDP.

Re:punches all other GPUs in the nuts

[Skarecrow77]

I admit I haven't kept up to date on the latest PC games. I was a WoWaholic for a long time, and I've been spending most of my gaming time with my PS3 recently. my GTX 470 has had a nice break the past few months. That said, in just about every generation of games and hardware, there's at least one game that still runs like crap even on the best current hardware when you push all the settings to ultra and run it on a 30inch monitor, be it mass effect, crysis, or what have you. Don't we have one of those this generation?

Re:punches all other GPUs in the nuts

[Ephemeriis]

and your wallet too!

$700. ouch.

Hey, if you've got the money to play, lucky you. I'm envious.

Yep.

I was always kind of amazed at these prices... I'd build an entire computer for $700, and then somebody would come along and tell me how they had two of these $700 video cards in their machine.

I mean... If you've got the money, go for it. But I just can't see justifying $1400 in video cards alone. Especially when we're talking about the consumer-grade gaming cards. Are a few more frames per second in Crysis really worth $1400 to you?

Re:punches all other GPUs in the nuts

[sandytaru]

Doesn't have to be a new game. Older games have been having major issues with new cards, mostly because of DirectX8 incompatibilities. My pet game, FFXI, was utterly broken on GeForce 400s until the latest driver release in January, and is still sub-par on many ATI cards. Nothing like 5 FPS on an 8 year old game on a $200 card to make you angry!

Re:punches all other GPUs in the nuts

[Ephemeriis]

It's about exactly twice as much as the budget I've set aside for building my next PC...

Last computers I built were budgeted at $500 a piece... Whole new systems - motherboard, CPU, RAM, HDD, power supply, LCD monitor, keyboard, mouse, all of it. Came in just slightly over after I was done with shipping and handling and whatnot...

We're still using those computers, too. And we do a good amount of gaming. Obviously I can't crank all the settings up as far as they'll go... But I have yet to see a game that didn't play just fine on this machine.

Re:punches all other GPUs in the nuts

[AnonGCB]

That's called a 'Bad port' and game makers are /SLOWLY/ changing to actually focus on PC development.

I remember when GTAIV came out for PC and it crippled everything by being the worst optimized game I've ever seen.

Re:punches all other GPUs in the nuts

[Skarecrow77]

true that.

Had I that kind of money to waste on a computer, I'm pretty sure I'd be much better off in the long run spending tha tmoney on something like a single upper mainstream (say, gtx 570) card, a 30" monitor, and two solid state drives in raid 0, but that's just me.

Come to think of it, anybody who spent $1400 on two of these probably have the 30" monitor and the two SSDs as well.

Re:punches all other GPUs in the nuts

[John Napkintosh]

Or, he'll still have it in 5 years because his needs didn't require a $700 video card in the first place.

Re:punches all other GPUs in the nuts

[John Napkintosh]

Not only that, it will probably get a die shrink and only require 250w

Re:punches all other GPUs in the nuts

[Belial6]

Just for fun, lets look at his statement and see if it is as silly as it seems. I would guess that his budget is "About $350". And since this card is $700, it is "exactly" twice the $350 number. Thus it is About (his budget isn't exact) Exactly ($350 + $350 = exactly $700) twice as much.

I would say that the sentence is awkward, but accurate. The real question is whether it should be "about exactly" or "exactly about".

Re:punches all other GPUs in the nuts

[Skarecrow77]

pretty sure crysis was ported -to- consoles, not from it, although I could be wrong. Mass effect was released on the xbox first, but since the 360 is running directx 9 I believe, it can't have been that much of a port job.

as a side point, PC ports of console games often get a bad rep for performance compared to their console brethren. The PC version usually has a lot more eye candy in my experience. Aside from the convenience of using a mouse, I can't play the 360 version of mass effect nor the ps3 version of modern warfare 2 after seeing the respective PC versions. MW2 especially looks like a blurry piece of low textured crap on the console compared to the sharp high res textures on the pc (yes, I was running them on the same monitor so I could A/B them).

Re:punches all other GPUs in the nuts

[ChefInnocent]

Maybe it's more because I'm not a serious gamer, but I've been looking at a bank of these cards for GPU computing. More computing power, less space, faster transfer across cards rather than network, and less overhead costs associated with buying more systems. We bought the Radeon HD 5970 & GeForce GTX 580 two weeks ago for comparisons. This week will tell us which platform is better for our needs since we need to move from theory to reality.

For home use, I'd keep using the GeForce 8800 GTX, but I'm the lucky recipient of the card that doesn't win.

Re:punches all other GPUs in the nuts

[jedidiah]

Or that $700 video card becomes more reasonable like $10 or $60 and you just upgrade that bit in 2 years.

Re:punches all other GPUs in the nuts

[chill]

Much more fun to interrupt their proxy-penis waving with a few well placed headshots.

"Dual $700 cards, huh? How come you still suck?" *BOOM* headshot

Re:punches all other GPUs in the nuts

[hedwards]

Because we all know that console gamers never pirate games...

Re:punches all other GPUs in the nuts

[hairyfeet]

Why would you say that? I just finished one up for a customer at right around $500, it has a Phenom II Quad, 4Gb of RAM, 1Tb HDD and an HD4830 GPU. This plays just about any game you can throw at it and the most I figure he'll have to replace within 2 years is upgrade the GPU to a nice 6xxx series when the price comes down.

Ever since the consoles started stagnating the games industry you simply don't need the giant ePeen machine to game anymore. Most games are barely hitting dual core ATM, and with the X360/PS3 GPUs so long in the tooth you just don't need to blow huge piles o' cash to get purty games. Where something like TFA will shine is Eyefinity and GP-GPU work like video transcoding and render acceleration thanks to OpenCL and AMD Streams SDK.

Re:punches all other GPUs in the nuts

[AJH16]

They do last a long time though (performance wise). I just recently (less than a month ago) had a 4870x2 die in my wife's PC and had to replace it (it died because her fan got clogged and it overheated). I got the current top end ATI card (the 6970 which is basically a single GPU variant of the 6990) and the performance of the 6970 that I got a month ago is barely higher than the 4870x2 that I got over two years ago and at the time I think the 4870x2 was only about $550. The thing about modern graphics cards is that they are effectively computers on a chip. Most people really don't have the need for them as you mentioned, but I do 3d graphics and photo/video work and they have started writing that software to utilize the GPU so for me it is worth the price tag. (If my wife's old card had died a month later, I would have been getting a 6990 and whenever the other 4870x2 dies, it will be replaced with a 6990 unless something better has come out.)

Re:punches all other GPUs in the nuts

[hairyfeet]

If you are in the market and want cheap hotness head over to Tigerdirect as they have a refurb HD4850 for just $60! My GF just ordered one for me "to support my inner geek" as she put it and the reviews on the card is awesome. When that card came out it was $200 and it is still listed as an enthusiast card, with 800 stream processors and a 256 bit wide memory path. The only thing is you will either need a PSU with the PCIe connection, or have two molex free for an adapter. But for the price you really can't beat it!

Punches your power supply in the nuts, too

[drinkypoo]

375+ watts. That's more than my whole computer. Oddly enough I have plenty of headroom in my power supply and it only requires a single slot so if I felt the need to punch myself in the nuts by loading drivers written by ATI onto my computer, I could slap it right in there.

Re:Punches your power supply in the nuts, too

[Anonymous Coward]

I was ATI-only from 2000-2009. Thought the same thing about their drivers. Then I went Nvidia again because of my dislike and... nope, no difference.

If you're planning on Linux though then yeah, Nvidia is obviously much better. ATI-on-Linux will make you want to hang yourself with a sock.

Re:Punches your power supply in the nuts, too

[Ephemeriis]

375+ watts. That's more than my whole computer. Oddly enough I have plenty of headroom in my power supply and it only requires a single slot so if I felt the need to punch myself in the nuts by loading drivers written by ATI onto my computer, I could slap it right in there.

Holy hell. I've only got a 500w PSU in my box... I don't think I could even run one of those.

Re:Punches your power supply in the nuts, too

[Beelzebud]

Since AMD took over ATI, their drivers have massively improved, even in Linux.

Re:Punches your power supply in the nuts, too

[saleenS281]

I disagree. I was running a pair of 4850's in crossfire for almost 2 years. There was a bug that would make the mouse cursor icon go all corrupted that they never bothered to fix despite knowing it was there. I switched to a pair of nvidia 460 GTX's in SLI and haven't had a problem since.

Re:Punches your power supply in the nuts, too

[hedwards]

And they're releasing source as their legal department signs off on it. So at least in theory they should be better integrated at some point in the future.

Re:Punches your power supply in the nuts, too

[MarkRose]

I recently bought new motherboard, and the Nvidia drivers wouldn't work in Linux. Not at all. It would practically lock the system with interrupts (it would pin one cpu core dealing with them). I even tried a completely different Nvidia card, working in another system. Same thing.

I then bought an AMD card. And it just worked.

AMD/ATI is worth looking at now.

Re:Punches your power supply in the nuts, too

[Hatta]

This has not been my experience. I bought an HD4350 for an HTPC build. Open source drivers flicker every 10-20 seconds, that's unwatchable. The closed source drivers are another story entirely. They installed fine, and judging from the Xorg logs they were working. Except that *nothing* was displayed on the screen. No errors, no warnings, X correctly determined which displays were connected. Yet all I got was empty blackness.

The card is completely useless in Linux. I can't see myself ever buying an ATI card again. No one is doing anyone any favors by calling non-functional garbage "massively improved".

Re:Punches your power supply in the nuts, too

[tenchikaibyaku]

I'm not a fan of ATI's drivers in general (I use the open source r600g at the moment and it's working fine for me), but obviously "empty blackness" is not the norm - not even for the closed source drivers.

Another possible related thing: "Empty blackness" would be what you get with X nowadays before any window manager or similar is started (did you try clicking somewhere if you were using twm?). I can see why they removed the pretty horrible patterned background that was the default earlier, but there are some drawbacks..

Re:Punches your power supply in the nuts, too

[Hatta]

Here is the cry for help I issued on the Arch forums. I didn't really expect any help, since the Catalyst drivers were exiled to AUR. For good reason it seems.

Anyways, if you see any clues I missed, or if you know of a better place to ask for help, please let me know.

Re:Punches your power supply in the nuts, too

[saleenS281]

No, they really aren't. This isn't some new technology. They've been out forever, and there's absolutely no excuse. Crossfire with dual monitors is not some exotic setup. The mouse going nuts during normal desktop usage on a regular basis isn't something that should slip by QA... ever. And it definitely isn't something that should go unfixed once they're aware of the problem. My older nvidia cards never had an issue, and the new ones don't either. It's just another case of shoddy drivers by ATI/AMD.

Re:Punches your power supply in the nuts, too

[Beelzebud]

I didn't say they were perfect now, just that they were massively improved, which they are. I'm using an HD5770 and the drivers from the past two months have been awesome. They even fixed the tearing issues with the Tear Free feature in the control panel.

Re:Punches your power supply in the nuts, too

[Beelzebud]

Hmm, have you added 'fglrx' to the 'modules' section in the rc.conf?

Re:Punches your power supply in the nuts, too

[drinkypoo]

Since AMD took over ATI, their drivers have massively improved, even in Linux.

This has not been my experience. For instance, they have abandoned R690 chipset already. No fully working graphics drivers newer than Vista. I think my next CPU will be intel. My current video card is from nVidia and everything I hoped it would be. I've owned several Radeons and all were total nightmares. I've never, repeat NEVER had a problem with an nVidia card that wasn't solved with a driver update. That's just because I'm lucky with hardware I guess, but the ATI problems weren't hardware ones.

When my R690M laptop can be used in Linux without video corruption then we can talk about ATI. It was NEVER covered by the closed ATI driver, which had abandoned its architecture before it even shipped. It has never worked with the free ATI driver, which has always produced corruption. I can use it on Windows 7 with a driver which says it will not work, but suspend/resume doesn't work (I think it might work once.) The only supported OS is Vista.

From my standpoint, since AMD took over ATI, their drivers have become not just mostly useless to me, but completely useless. I MAY buy another AMD CPU, although I'd like to see them contribute more CPU support (why did I have to wait so long for proper k10 thermal support?)

Re:Punches your power supply in the nuts, too

[drinkypoo]

Not that I don't sympathize but Crossfire and SLI are one of those areas where driver bugs are to be expected.

Not only do I not agree, except perhaps in the case that I expect bugs in drivers from ATI, but nVidia seems to have been able to figure it out.

feels hollow

[Stele]

I don't know - the card is certainly fast, but when all you can do to beat your competition's single-GPU card is to stick two of your slower GPUs on it, it just feels hollow to me. All Nvidia has to do is come back with a $800 card with two 580s on it to decimate AMD's nuts in return. Is this *really* all that amazing?

Re:feels hollow

[div_2n]

You say that as if it's a trivial thing to do.

Re:feels hollow

[click2005]

All Nvidia has to do is come back with a $800 card with two 580s on it to decimate AMD's nuts in return. Is this *really* all that amazing?

Thats the 590. Its out in a week or two.

It makes me laugh that most sites reviewed it on a single screen system, most at 1080p. Most of the current top-end cards can easily do modern games at maximum detail even on 30" screens. These kinds of cards are only really worth it for multi-monitor gaming. The problem is 3 x 30" screens starts to fill that 2GB
of video memory quite quickly.

I hope the 7990 has better memory use. Use HyperTransport or some kind of NUMA setup and let the GPUs access all the memory.

Re:feels hollow

[Nemyst]

AMD's offerings usually have lower power consumption and heat generation. While I'm sure nVidia could come up with something, they'd probably have a hard time using the 580 as a basis, because it runs so hot already. I mean, the 6970 consumes a whole ~140W less than the 580 (!), yet they still had to notch it down so it fit in the standard and add that clever switch. AMD's current offerings are just far more power efficient than nVidia's, which means they'd need to underclock their dual-GPU card more than AMD had to. Heat would also be a concern requiring underclocking.

Re:feels hollow

[Khyber]

The memory on a GPU card is typically MUCH faster than the system memory.

Re:feels hollow

[LoudNoiseElitist]

Why does screen size matter? Or did you actually find something that big that wasn't still 1080p?

Re:feels hollow

[Bergs007]

You don't understand a whole lot about caches, memory controllers, die area considerations, power planes, load balancing, or system I/O, do you?

Re:feels hollow

[gstoddart]

It makes me laugh that most sites reviewed it on a single screen system, most at 1080p. Most of the current top-end cards can easily do modern games at maximum detail even on 30" screens.

If they're both at 1080p, then the size of the screen doesn't matter, does it? It doesn't take more memory if the pixels are bigger but the same in number.

Or, are you talking about running at resolutions higher than 1920x1080? I didn't think you could easily get monitors at much higher resolution.

Re:feels hollow

[Skarecrow77]

I wouldn't buy a monitor bigger than 24" that only supported 1080p.

TV sure.

Computer monitor no.

Re:feels hollow

[Tr3vin]

He is going off the sort of standard resolutions for monitors of that size. Once you get past 24", most decent monitors increase in resolution past 1920x1200 or 1920x1080. A good 30" monitor is normally 2560x1600. This of course assumes you are buying a computer monitor and not a TV.

Re:feels hollow

[gstoddart]

I wouldn't buy a monitor bigger than 24" that only supported 1080p.

I can only guess at what something like that would cost and where you'd buy it.

I've never seen such a beast. That's not to say they don't exist, but it seems a fairly exotic thing.

Re:feels hollow

[Chris Burke]

It should be trivial to do something, from the point of view of someone who isn't doing it, and has no idea what is involved in doing it.

Are you a manager, perchance?

Re:feels hollow

[the_banjomatic]

I assume he was referring to the 30" lcd's that run at 2560x1600 resolution... which are awesome for the record

Re:feels hollow

[TrancePhreak]

3 screens would be (3 * 1920) * 1080. So technically running at a much higher resolution.

Re:feels hollow

[gstoddart]

I assume he was referring to the 30" lcd's that run at 2560x1600 resolution... which are awesome for the record

*drools on keyboard*

Wow! Seriously, wow! How much does something like that cost? This seems like you're way beyond gaming rig here -- and, if you're really talking about running 2 or 3 of these for a gaming machine (like some people are), well, then I strongly suspect you don't really care that your video card(s) cost. You've already spent a small fortune on monitors.

Re:feels hollow

[Anubis350]

I wouldn't buy a monitor bigger than 24" that only supported 1080p.

I can only guess at what something like that would cost and where you'd buy it.

I've never seen such a beast. That's not to say they don't exist, but it seems a fairly exotic thing.

Exotic? Really?

On the consumer/normal workstation end of things off the top of my head you've got the Dell U2711, IPS, res. 2560x1440 (list 1k, but frequently on sale for ~$700) plus Apple's *only* display, in the same price range with essentially the same panel (glossy though, and LED backlight).

On the true high end Eizo, NEC, and others make even better displays. Not to mention that with slightly lower DPI you cna get the same 2560x1440 resolution on nearly every 30" computer monitor made in the last few years (including Apple, Dell, HP, Samsung, etc)

Re:feels hollow

[Skarecrow77]

I've got an i-inc (rebranded Hanns-G) 28" 1920x1200 on my desk that cost me $250 from compusa/tiger direct?

I really do prefer the 16x10 ratio for computer monitors. The thing about 1080p is that the vertical resolution on it is really about the same as the 19" crt I had on my desk 10 years ago, it's just wider.

I will agree that getting to 2560x1600 does seem to take a big paycheck though.

Re:feels hollow

[the_banjomatic]

Yeah, I can't imagine having 3 of these... 1 takes up a good amount of desk real estate as it is, I got my Dell 3008 refurbished for about $1200 I think a year and a half ago with full warranty, etc.

Re:feels hollow

[billcopc]

The big problem with dual 580s is peak power draw would be around 750w, just for the GPUs. They would have to make certain sacrifices to fit any reasonable power envelope.

If these GPUs keep sucking more and more power, they will have to start seriously considering making them external. You'll have your PC, a GPU box beside it with its own kilowatt power supply, and just an interface board and cable between the two. There is simply no sense in cramming more heat and power into the PC chassis, just to play random games or join some hippy-dippy folding project.

Re:feels hollow

[Jeffrey_Walsh VA]

I found six with "Recommended Resolution" of 2560 x 1600 from $1-3k.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=Property&Subcategory=20&PropertyCodeValue=1099%3A25153

Re:feels hollow

[gstoddart]

I found six with "Recommended Resolution" of 2560 x 1600 from $1-3k

Don't know about you, but I consider a "$1-3k" monitor to be exotic and pricey.

Sure, they sound absolutely awesome, but you're talking about more money than I'd be willing to spend on a computer.

Definitely 'niche' market kinda stuff.

Re:feels hollow

[hedwards]

You're frequently better off getting a second screen than going larger than 24". Hell even with a 20" screen it's likely better to get a second one. Unfortunately, most systems don't seem to handle multiple monitors very well. Meaning that if I'm playing a game on my primary screen, the OS doesn't know to put a screen saver on the other and restrict the mouse to the game screen. I haven't seen any WMs that handle that well, regardless of OS. And don't get me started with times when the screens aren't the same size.

Re:feels hollow

[hedwards]

Except that monitors tend to last a lot longer than video cards do. Even during the 90s, the monitors would typically outlast several generations worth of videocards. It was a bit less one sided when the LCDs first came out, but at this point there's little point for most people to upgrade again if they buy a quality monitor.

Re:feels hollow

[jdoverholt]

An Apple fanboi friend of mine has their 30" cinema display. It's absolutely gorgeous from all angles, is probably one of the 6 GP refers to, and retails for about $1600. I think our staff graphics artist has one too.

Re:feels hollow

[Raenex]

You're frequently better off getting a second screen than going larger than 24". Hell even with a 20" screen it's likely better to get a second one.

Better in what sense? I've never liked working with multiple monitors, but I really like working with my 24" widescreen. No annoying gap in the middle, fewer wires, more desktop space, and no interface issues like you described.

Re:feels hollow

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Seems like AMD simply decided that designing two slower GPU ASICs was better than one large hot ASIC like Nvidia is doing.

In fact smaller ASICs increase the yields, and allows building two consumer products out of the same ASIC (single GPU card, and dual GPU card). This translates to cost savings, which is why the ATI division of AMD is doing much better financially than Nvidia these days.

Re:feels hollow

[hierophanta]

from a consumer point of view, they could just add some more magic dust and or make it run on magnets

Re:feels hollow

[Sique]

I have one at 1920x1200 which was on sale for 159 €. A 24" at 1920x1200 currently sells for 225 € here around.
It's not easy though to get a monitor with a decent ratio (4:3 or 5:4) though. Ironically it's cheaper to buy a 24" at 1920x1200 than a 20" at 1600x1200, even though the last one has about the same dpi and less pixels.

Re:feels hollow

[Chris Burke]

Indeed, anyone who doesn't respect someone else's work and assumes it is trivial, because they don't understand it, is inferior.

Re:feels hollow

[Jellodyne]

You're probably also not in the market for a $700 video card, which is about the same level of exotic and pricey as a 30" monitor. Or, better yet, a pair of $700 video cards and a 1200 watt power supply to feed them.

Re:feels hollow

[Skarecrow77]

jesus, they're down to $210. maybe I should get another one.

http://www.mwave.com/mwave/SKUSearch.asp?px=NT&scriteria=AA98799

Re:feels hollow

[(H)elix1]

This is a handy chart for figuring out the number of pixels. When you start getting into the larger 16:10 monitors, you really need a lot of horsepower. Add in three large monitors...

2400 x 600 . = 1,440,000 pixels | Triple 4:3
1680 x 1050 = 1,764,000 pixels | Single 16:10
1600 x 1200 = 1,920,000 pixels | Single 4:3
1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 pixels | Single 16:9
1920 x 1200 = 2,304,000 pixels | Single 16:10
3072 x 768 . = 2,359,296 pixels | Triple 4:3
3840 x 720 . = 2,764,800 pixels | Triple 16:9
3840 x 800 . = 3,072,000 pixels | Triple 16:10
4080 x 768 . = 3,133,440 pixels | Triple 16:9
3840 x 960 . = 3,686,400 pixels | Triple 4:3
4320 x 900 . = 3,888,000 pixels | Triple 16:10
3840 x 1024 = 3,932,160 pixels | Triple 5:4
2560 x 1600 = 4,096,000 pixels | Single 16:10
4200 x 1050 = 4,410,000 pixels | Triple 4:3
5040 x 1050 = 5,292,000 pixels | Triple 16:10
4800 x 1200 = 5,760,000 pixels | Triple 4:3
5760 x 1080 = 6,220,800 pixels | Triple 16:9
5760 x 1200 = 6,912,000 pixels | Triple 16:10

Re:feels hollow

[uninformedLuddite]

This is the 2011 version of /. understanding has no place here

Re:feels hollow

[hairyfeet]

Actually it is a damned smart thing to do and here is why: If you look up the talks that AMD released right after they bought ATI one of the things they stressed is how they would change development by instead of sinking huge amount of R7D into the "ePeen card" and then having to figure out how to selectively cripple it to fit the lower markets they would instead focus on the mid market chip where the vast majority of sale are and then simply add memory, a bigger pipe, a second GPU, etc to ramp UP to the ePeen instead of ramping DOWN.

Now what this does is give them a BIG advantage over Nvidia in that they aren't having to cook up an uber expensive GPU and then cripple it, which still costs you a top o' the line GPU, but instead by focusing on the MOR chip it costs less per chip and makes it trivial if you do need to cripple for a lower niche as you aren't having to change that much.

So I would say it is a damned smart business move, as they can sell more chips without alteration and can simply add features to make higher cards than taking features away which is usually harder to do. This equals big savings which AMD has been passing onto the consumer in the form of plenty of baddass MOR cards in the $150 or less market, which is the biggest market by far.

why?

[Charliemopps]

My $150 card I bought a year ago can play every game on the market right now. Why do I need a $700 card?

Re:why?

[Gr33nJ3ll0]

Exactly! Mod parent up. Right now the video game market is being driven largely by the consoles that have video cards from ten years ago. There's really not much to max out a ePenis like this card.

Re:why?

[ustolemyname]

Triple display + 3d. need > 120fps with at least 3 times the resolution that your monitor has. And if you consider the cost of such a setup, 700$ is a reasonable proportion of the cost. Not saying it's a good use of money, just saying there are systems that can use this power.

Re:why?

[TeknoHog]

IMHO, the only sensible use for these monster GPUs is parallel computing (OpenCL etc). For many problems they are the best bang per buck, as well as per power consumption. It seems that the HD5000 series maintains the lead in this sense; for example the HD6990 has fewer stream units than the HD5970, and the extra texture units are not generally used in computing.

Re:why?

[Gaygirlie]

Exactly! Mod parent up. Right now the video game market is being driven largely by the consoles that have video cards from ten years ago. There's really not much to max out a ePenis like this card.

It isn't about some specific need per se; overclocking and tuning is a hobby, an expensive and not always such a smart hobby, but nevertheless there's some even worse hobbies in the world. It just happens to be fun to see how far you can push your PC, how much more you can squeeze. Is it useful? No. Does anyone need such power for anything? Not really, atleast home users don't. And games simply have trouble taking advantage of it all even as it is. It STILL is fun.

That said I personally would not buy such hardware even if I could afford it -- and I definitely can't -- and rather just buy cheap parts that I know will overclock well and/or are easily modified and thus still get a decent gaming rig.

Re:why?

[Krazy Kanuck]

Well I would imagine you are not running your $150 card at 5760 x 1200 (across three 24" monitors) with 4X AA and 16 AF now are you?

There IS are market for this performance, and granted it may not include you, but some people are more than able to bring cards with these specs to their knees.

As for console ports, granted there are quite a few, but I seriously doubt my GeForce 3 Ti500 (2001) could have have run any of today's games.

Re:why?

[Skarecrow77]

It isn't about some specific need per se; overclocking and tuning is a hobby, an expensive and not always such a smart hobby, but nevertheless there's some even worse hobbies in the world.

As an example from another of my hobbies, the price of this card would get you halfway towards a top-of-the-line set of headphones... not counting of course the top-of-the-line amp to go with it... which put together are WAY cheaper than an equivalent speaker setup... which in turn is WAY cheaper than an offshore boat... which is of course way cheaper than manipulating the world financial markets for shits and giggles.

That last hobby scares me.

Re:why?

[Ephemeriis]

My $150 card I bought a year ago can play every game on the market right now. Why do I need a $700 card?

Hell, the $150 card I bought about two years ago still works fine.

Obviously I can't crank all the settings up as high as they'll go... But I have yet to run into a game that doesn't run well.

Just finished playing through Dead Space 2 - it ran fine and looked great.

Re:why?

[MozeeToby]

There's a difference between being able to play a game and running the game on ultra high settings. My laptop can run any game on the market right now, but I wouldn't say it would be the most pleasant experience and it certainly wouldn't be at anything more than medium to medium-low settings. Some people like the new shiny that PC games offer. While I (and apparently you) don't think it's worth the extra money just to be able to run the latest Crisis expansion across three monitors with the graphics up to ultra-high, other people apparently disagree, and them being willing and able to pay the price improves innovation for everyone down the road, which is kind of a nice bonus.

Re:why?

[Gr33nJ3ll0]

And exactly how many titles support this please? I'm going to guess very few. Frankly, I wish it was the other way around, but for now it appears that this is just bragging rights.

Re:why?

[Gr33nJ3ll0]

I've got a $200 video card that appears to run everything on the ultra settings, including the original Crysis. That being said, even the reviewers are forced to run the same 5-6 titles again and again because there are so few titles that really stress video cards anymore. So why pay $500-1500 for less than a half dozen titles?

Re:why?

[Anonymous Coward]

{{cite}}

I want to know what $150 card from two years ago plays your current games at max settings.

Re:why?

[gstoddart]

As an example from another of my hobbies, the price of this card would get you halfway towards a top-of-the-line set of headphones... not counting of course the top-of-the-line amp to go with it... which put together are WAY cheaper than an equivalent speaker setup

And, of course, the rest of us are convinced you're daft to spend that much money on a set of headphones.

You may actually be able to hear the difference, or at least believe you can. To most of us, it seems like you're spending several times more, for a tiny, almost non-existent difference.

Seems like diminishing returns on investment.

But, hey, I've known audiophiles, and they seem to be mostly OK spending outrageous amounts of money on such things.

Re:why?

[Kjella]

Wait, I think I heard the exact same thing yesterday in the Intel Extreme cpu comments. Why? Because you can. This is luxury, like drinking a 70$ wine over a 15$ wine, nobody needs to do it but it's to spoil yourself. It's not necessary to be able to crank the quality settings all the way up to enjoy a game, but if you can afford it it's the little extra.

Re:why?

[jedidiah]

....if you can't answer, then you're not the target audience either.

Re:why?

[The End Of Days]

Your opinion needs a little more humble in it. The only use you can see and the "only sensible use" have absolutely nothing in common. You just aren't that important.

Re:why?

[asto21]

You don't seem to get the point? If there is even ONE title that supports such a configuration and if I want to play that title in such a fashion, I would need a graphics card like this. Yes?

Re:why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because mine does it with higher quality settings and with more than enough FPS to not have any slowdowns during high intensity moments, while yours doesn't.

Re:why?

[VGPowerlord]

I've got a $200 video card that appears to run everything on the ultra settings, including the original Crysis. That being said, even the reviewers are forced to run the same 5-6 titles again and again because there are so few titles that really stress video cards anymore. So why pay $500-1500 for less than a half dozen titles?

You don't have to pay $500-1500... the low end cards in this generation sell for as low as $250. Those cards being the AMD Radeon HD 6950 and nVidia GTX 560 Ti.

Re:why?

[Gr33nJ3ll0]

I think you and I disagree on the definition of the word "need".

IMHO, it's not worth it, or a "need" since it's far, far outside my normal usage, or most of the people I'm familiar with.

Unfortunately, this is a consumer electronics component, so they need more than a very few fanatic people with 3 monitor setups to sell these cards. However, in recent years the number of titles that support these extremes has grown less, shrinking the pool of people who could potentially be interested. We've gone from "You need this card to play" to "You need this card to get good quality graphics" to "You need this card to max out the settings on three monitors for a few titles" with the pool shrinking at each step. When you're down to one or two titles, which could be played on much much cheaper equipment, with little loss in quality, you've got a very very small pool.

Seems like a very poor decision when you want to sell thousands or millions of units.

Re:why?

[Gr33nJ3ll0]

You don't have to pay $500-1500... the low end cards in this generation sell for as low as $250.

I was referring to the mythical three monitors + video card setup. As I stated earlier, I've got a $200 video card that I'm very happy with.

Re:why?

[Skarecrow77]

I can hear the difference between my old Sennheiser HD650 headphones and my new Beyerdynamic DT880s. I can hear the difference between my wife's HD580 headphones and my HD650s. I don't see any reason to suspect that I wouldn't be able to hear a difference between the HD650s / DT880s and a set of HD800s or Tesla T1s.

That said, you are correct that there are diminishing returns for your money, but that's true of any hobby.

Say you've got an old 1991 5.0 mustang. completely stock, it's going to probably run a high 14 second quarter mile. Getting it into the 13s would probably take you all of $200 or $300 if you put it in the right place.
12s? more like $1000
11s? More like $3000 or $4000
10s? now we're talking easily well into five digit price tag land to do it right, assuming you don't want to blow the engine every other pass, twist the frame into a pretzel, etc.

if you want a car that can consistently run in 8 second land or faster, you're probably at the $100,000 mark.

Each time you go up that next tier, it costs correspondingly more... or the corollary to that, you get smaller returns for your money the further up you go.

Re:why?

[Atzanteol]

You don't. It also won't help you with the kids on your lawn, understanding "rock and roll" or with your shouting at a cloud.

p.s. I read your post in Grandpa Simpson's voice.

Re:why?

[drooling-dog]

Why do I need a $700 card?

For the same reason that they're selling it: It'll arm you for your next dick-wagging contest.

OTOH, as the price drops the mid-range cards will get cheaper too, so I can't complain...

Re:why?

[SirMasterboy]

You have been living under a rug in terms of computer gaming I guess.

All games support these new multi-monitor setups because it's been built into the video card drives for about a year now. The drivers present the game software a single combined resolution which I've never seen any game not support. Yes even stuff like Quake 1 works across 3 monitors like this.

Also some people want to run 3D setups where it must render the game twice at different angles and it takes roughly double the GPU power.

http://www.amd.com/US/PRODUCTS/TECHNOLOGIES/AMD-EYEFINITY-TECHNOLOGY/Pages/eyefinity.aspx
http://www.nvidia.com/object/3d-vision-surround-technology.html

Re:why?

[Gr33nJ3ll0]

Actually I was thinking of the second approach, which in my experience is much more limited. The ability to fool the game into going across multiple monitors by extending the desktop has existed since NT 4.0, when I put it into the NT drivers we were releasing for the Matrox G100 chips. However, having a cross hair right in the middle of the two monitors is a serious pain! :)

Re:why?

[SirMasterboy]

Yeah, its really meant for 3 monitors or an array of 3x2 for some types of games without a crosshair.

The drivers now even have bezel compensation that increases the resolution so it can render the scene where the monitor bezels are.

Of course the downside is it's more to render and also you can't see what is "behind" the bezel but in a game in motion and relatively small bezels, the missing pixels is minor.

The upside is that there is no distortion when graphics move across the bezels. For example, a diagonal line will seem to connect "behind" the bezel instead of "teleport" across the bezel onto the next screen.

Re:why?

[gstoddart]

I don't see any reason to suspect that I wouldn't be able to hear a difference between the HD650s / DT880s and a set of HD800s or Tesla T1s.

I believe intellectually someone might be able to distinguish from one of those alphabet soup things which might impress me if I knew (or cared) what it was.

However, as a practical matter, I just find it unlikely that everybody who claims to have such golden ears actually does. It's just hard not to believe that there's a bunch of people who have shelled out crazy amounts of cash for something which neither they, nor anybody else, can actually tell the differences between.

And, really, if you're not aware of why the rest of the world is looking at your zillion dollar audio purchase and going "WTF" by now, you have likely not been paying close attention to your friends and family when you tell them about this stuff.

We've all heard the snake-oil pitches -- this cable is made of super-conducting miracle material which was formed from the exfoliated skin from the inner-thighs of virgins at extremely low temperatures, and which is guaranteed to make your music sound smooglier and parumphier than before.

Sounds good ... but is it real? To those of us who can't hear this supposed difference, there's just a degree of incredulity at the notion of paying $2k or so for headphones or $100k for speakers.

Re:why?

[Skarecrow77]

Oh I certainly don't have golden ears. That's why I'm confused that people can't hear the difference between quality headphones and not-so-quality.

I'm honest and right up front:
I can't hear the difference between LAME 160kbps and FLAC.
I can't hear the difference between audio cables (I really want to, but I can't)
I can't hear the difference beween 24bit audio and 16 bit audio

I can easily hear the difference between different headphones. I've got 3 sets of headphones right now, Sennheiser HD650s, Beyerdynamic DT880, and Alessandro MS1s. They're all quite different from one another. If you aren't hearing the differences between them, it's probably you. You probably just don't care. That's fine. Doesn't bother me any.

To go back to the car analogy, it's like someone saying they can't tell the difference between a mitsubishi evo, a chevy camaro, and a VW GTI. They're all very different cars to anybody who cares about such things, yet at the same time there are probably also people out there who would get in them and say "they all have a steering wheel, 4 wheels, and a stereo. they get you from point A to point B. they're the same thing. why do you get so worked up about it."

You can make the same arguement about damn near anything. what's the difference between programming languages? you write code to take input, process it, and provide output. same thing. What's the difference between political parties? they all take donations, try and get themselves elected, and then try and stay in office any way they can. same thing. What's the difference between vodka and scotch? Both alcohol. same thing. ps3 and xbox? both video game consoles, same thing. coke and pepsi, showtime and hbo, slashdot and ars technica, android and iphone, etc. the list goes on and on.

To people who aren't involved in what the finer details and nuances of the differences are, there are no differences. To people who care, there's a world of difference. What's your particluar hobby? I'm sure that there's people who think that there is no difference between item A and item B in your hobby either.

Re:why?

[Kyusaku Natsume]

Thats exactly the use for my GTX460 and a Radeon 6850 that I have in my BOINC computer. This machine alone does several times the computations that used to do on 3 desktops and one laptop before.

Re:why?

[toddestan]

This is a terrible card for future-proofing. In a few years, it'll perform no better than the $100 cards, but will still be the same huge, hot, loud, power-sucking beast it's always been. Cards like this one are really only good for a couple of years, after that they're generally more trouble than their worth. Generally, it's the low-end video cards I have that I end up using the longest - obviously not in my main PC but they're the ones that get a second life in some secondary role.

Re:Wonder how long before someone realizes.

[Skarecrow77]

ATI and Nvidia have been doing this dance since 1998 I believe. I don't think they're going to change anything soon.

Also, I'm a bit confused by your logic, as GPU clock speeds haven't advanced anything like CPU clock speeds in the same time period. GPUs have mostly been going for the massively parallel multi-core architecture design ever since the Voodoo2, which CPUs have only really started doing in the past few years. Hell, I think my GTX478 has something like 448 cores or something like that, clocked -lower- than the GTS 8800 I had before it.

Ouch...

[Mortiss]

"the 6990 'punches all other GPUs in the nuts." ...and steals your wallet at the same time. Aside from the epeen factor, realistically which currently available games require such a hardware. AFAIK, all the currently released games (e.g. Bulletstorm) run comfortably on the Nvidia 260, 280 cards at the highest settings (1920x1080 resolution) So a simple question, why bother...

Re:Ready for Doom 4?

[Ephemeriis]

Honestly.... what games are even going to stress this card in the foreseeable future?

The obvious joke is Crysis 2...

But, seriously, something like this is pure overkill.

I've got a two-year-old video card that I bought for $150 at the time, and it still plays everything just fine.

Re:People still buy stuff like this?

[John Napkintosh]

There are people that buy stuff like this just to say they have it, so they can go around on interwebforums posting their synthetic benchmark results and bragging about it.

Some of them will probably never actually play a game with it.

What ever happened to VR?

[wisebabo]

Whatever happened to VR? (Virtual Reality) A decade or two ago, it seemed to be (short of direct neural interfaces) where user interfaces were heading. I even remember going to a Disney mini-theme park where they had some true VR rides (you wore a tracking headset) so that you could ride Aladdin's carpet.

Back then it seemed as if the main thing keeping this technology back was the room-sized SGI supercomputer required to render a reasonable scene in real time. I remember a presentation by the CEO of SGI saying that all they needed to get to was 60M triangles/sec, then VR would be achieve mass appeal. (Then again, he also dismissed delivering video from computers by saying computers wouldn't become video "jukeboxes" so maybe he wasn't so good at predicting the future.) Anyway, I don't know the latest spec's but I'm sure a modern video card could blow away one of those old SGI "Reality Engines".

So why aren't we all wearing goggles (and wearing spandex) and looking like the characters in "The Lawnmower Man"? Is it because micro-displays never got good enough? Or something else?

Re:What ever happened to VR?

[DigiShaman]

Two major problems in order.

1. Socially unacceptable. Not a technical issue, but a social/psychological one. It's hard to interact with friends in a home where everyone decides to blind themselves from reality. Ironic, I know.

2. the HUD visor or helmet were (still?) exceedingly expensive due to the tiny LCDs spec-ed at SVGA and XGA resolutions. Proper marketing and economies of scale could resolve this.

Re:What ever happened to VR?

[sandytaru]

Honestly, if I stare at 3D virtual reality for longer than a few minutes, I get nauseous. I think augmented reality is more likely to take off. Instead of viewing a fake world, view additions to the real world via the glasses.

Re:What ever happened to VR?

[GlassHeart]

the HUD visor or helmet were (still?) exceedingly expensive due to the tiny LCDs spec-ed at SVGA and XGA resolutions.

Apple ships millions of phones with 3.5", 326 ppi screens that iSuppli estimates to cost $28.50 each. Maybe they underestimated, so let's say a pair would cost $80, which is still in the price range of a cool video game add-on like the Kinect.

Re:What ever happened to VR?

[19061969]

Quoth: "So why aren't we all wearing goggles (and wearing spandex) and looking like the characters in "The Lawnmower Man"? Is it because micro-displays never got good enough? Or something else?"

Because Apple haven't released a product with it causing all competitors to shit themselves?

Re:What ever happened to VR?

[x14n]

It really does seem that the goggles just aren't there, which is probably a function of (lack of) demand, which in turn is a function of (lack of decent) goggles. It all goes back in part to the killer app question.

For the last 5-odd years, a pair of 240*320 res goggles have been available at the mall, ala Sharper Image and its ilk. For ~$500. Now you can buy a ginormous HD flatscreen TV or 2 nice monitors for the same price. Which would you prefer? Given lack of demand for said goggles, they stay expensive and crappy.

With 3D coming into play in hardware and ultimately game design, I hope there will be more impetus for hardware manufacturers to get onboard. Flatscreen prices didn't really tumble until a year or 2 into mass-market, when yields really got good at the fabs and volumes got high. Stereo microdisplays at HD? Sounds expensive at current fabs.

Form-factor is another unanswered question. The active 3D TV glasses look stupid, and aren't very comfortable. I wear glasses, and hate the whole "glasses on glasses" thing. If the 3D TV folks can figure this out, maybe the form factor can follow for goggles. For example, should goggles block out all ambient light? That plus bluetooth headsets sounds like the true beginning of the zombie apocalypse!

Re:What ever happened to VR?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those VR goggles sucke(ed?). They tracked head motion but not eye motion. It was very un-natural having to move your head left to see something slightly more to the left...

Re:What ever happened to VR?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eye strain and the weight of the displays.

Head tracking VR headsets are used by flight sim buffs, and they normally take the video feed direct from a normal desktop GPU. The problem is that the headset itself is either low resolution (bearing in mind how far it is from your face, we're talking about pixel densities rather than the absolute number of pixels, although that's normally low as well - 640x480 or so) or too heavy to wear for extended periods without inducing neck strain.

It's not just a problem for consumer level hardware - the look-back/shoot-back headsets for the Eurofighter Typhoon (basically a hud that follows the pilots view) suffered from the weight problem as well and had to be redesigned. If the military have trouble with this stuff... well, you can see where it might be a problem. :)

The target consumer for these cards.

[SirMasterboy]

For those who are asking who would need a card with such power.

Simply take a look at the benchmarks from various recent game titles.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4209/amds-radeon-hd-6990-the-new-single-card-king/7

If you run a 1920x1200 or higher monitor, especially 2560x1600 then much less than this card wont cut the 60fps that most gamers need to be able to compete well (thinking about multiplayer FPS games)

This card gets 64FPs average running a newer game like Metro 2033 at 1920x1200 with "very high settings". When you crank that up to 2560x1600, it only achieves 44.5FPS average and thats only a single 30" monitor.

I have more than one friend with triple 24" or 30" gaming monitor setups they would likely get 2 of these cards to drive new games at 5760x1200 or 7680x1600. Right now they use 3 GTX 580s which costs $1500. Even with 2 of these new cards, current games wont be able to run at high settings and achieve 60fps average.

Plus we haven't even thrown 3D monitors into the mix yet. Running in 3D mode takes about twice the power since it has to render the scene twice at different angles.

That audience is who these video cards are targeted at. People who have a hobby in computer gaming who want the greatest immersive experience possible and beyond outstanding graphics.