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 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

[Beelzebud]

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

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

[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

[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?

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?

[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?

[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]

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: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: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.

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

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?

[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: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.