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AMD Radeon HD 7990 Released: Dual GPUs and 6G of Memory for $1000
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.
...how fast can it mine Bitcoins.
This. Crossfire has been a joke since it was introduced and most games do not support multi-GPUs. Just like they don't support DX11 and multicore CPUs for that matter.
I'm going to rush out and buy four of them right away.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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?
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 ). 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 ).
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.
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...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
If you think paying $1000 for a video card is a good idea, maybe you should just save that money and move out of your mom's basement.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
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.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Even run them in linux?
The AMD drivers are crashy crap last I tried.
Multi-GPU soulutions are only good for benchmarks and a handful of a-list FPS "bro gamer" games. Each game requires hand tweaking from the game maker AND the GPU maker because there is no universal way to make multi-gpu scaling work for each game, or even game engine.
If all you run is Crysis, console ports of muddy colored military themed FPSs, and 3dmark then go for it. Load your rig up with a bunch of cards and have fun waiting for patches and driver updates every time a new game launches.
Otherwise, get the best single GPU card card in your budget. .. There is a reason Nvidia makes the GTX titan, you know.
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.
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?
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?
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 caused on this pretty large sample size of systems (that were actually split pretty evenly in terms of graphics between ATI, nVidia, and Intel).
We did have nVidia issues too, but they weren't anything out of the ordinary relative to faults with Intel graphics and other hardware.
Maybe things have changed since then, but certainly in that era there seemed little question that ATI had major quality control issues with it's drivers and those issues persisted for at least the full 7 years I worked at that organisation.
The opencl performance really speaks for the direction AMD is going with their APU's in the future. The design of this chip will be directly imbedded into AMD's next generation Kaveri APU where the GPU and CPU share the same cache, which should allow all sorts of crazy performance optimizations in everything from Programming languages http://news.softpedia.com/news/AMD-and-Oracle-Team-Up-for-Heterogeneous-Computing-on-Java-295882.shtml and databases: http://pbbakkum.com/db/ I know the database link deals with sqlite and CUDA, but that should be SLOW compared to what an AMD Kaveri APU will be able to perform as the latency from a CPU operation to a GPU operation should next to nothing.
The only issue I've run into with the Radeon 7750 I snagged last year for my home theater PC has nothing to do with 3D rendering. For some reason, there is a very occasional glitch with the card's HDMI audio during video playback that causes a weird, harsh, and intermittent kind of sound artifacting, and after a couple of seconds the audio rolls off into silence... and then goes back to normal. If the problem persists after a fresh install onto mostly new hardware (goodbye Athlon X2 5050e, hello Ivy Bridge Celeron), I'm just giving up on the HDMI audio altogether and going back to a mini-stereo cable. Overall I'm pretty happy, but that's an irritating unpolished edge on what's otherwise been a terrific bargain and a reliable performer. It sure as hell didn't make me eager to grab a Radeon for my Linux workstation...
i remember playing Tomb Raider on the Sega Saturn in 1996 or 1997. Good memories
Well, intel drivers are stable but crappy too. As example, 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)
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
nVidia is optimized for CUDA implementations, not OpenCL.
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.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
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.
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You don't really need this card for anything, but I would assume that 1920x1080@120Hz gaming with full framerate needs a lot of muscle.
The only issue I have with Radeon drivers is their inability to deal with unusual monitor situations, especially HDTVs.
If anything is slightly off. Nonstandard res, refresh rate, DID issues... Nothing. Your monitor is completely useless and there is nothing you can do. Monitor handling is really janky in general.
Nvidia handles HTDVs (which can have really bad or noexistant DID reporing) a lot more gracefully. In other cases, the drivers let you force a mode that you know will work even if the drivers aren't sure.
Game performance and stability, no problems there.
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.
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).
Blood Dragon is DLC , its not a standalone title.
This linux-centric narrative is exclusionary and offensive. Take your intolerance and get out.
Seriously, a 375 watts, $1000 videocard?
And then you morons bitch about the cost of Apple's computers?
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 ~$1000.
Step 3. Consult list of 'FirePro'(AMD) or 'Quadro'(Nvidia) cards.
Step 4. Purchase the card whose price most closely matches the result you calculated in Step 2.
Congratulations, you now have access to drivers compiled without the -who-gives-a-fuck-about-artefacts-this-is-worth-150-3dmarks and -crashes-under-edge-cases-but-those-overclocker-kiddies-with-bargain-RAM-won't-know-the-difference flags enabled!
LOL, so at full load you will need pretty much a secondary PSU to run the damn thing... really decent power management I guess! Though I guess considering the stupid 1000$ 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!
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?
I was stupid enough to buy a Radeon notebook only to find that it has 2 videos, one of which is simple, economic and old as mammoth's feces, and second one - a supermegagigateracard which is NOT supported in FreeBSD but with NO means to turn it off and burning my hands when I touch this monster. FreeBSD trouble report didn't help, as a result that book collects dust. And as I know Radeons need KMS, and I have no idea about it's implementation in FreeBSD. Next time I bought a simple Geforce and use closed (and buggy) Nvidia drivers since I have no other choice.
Don't recommend to migrate to Linux, please, or I'll ask "to WHICH Linux?" When I met Unix, Linus was 11 years old.
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?)
No sig today...
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]
Shit better not happen!
You can always force the correct mode, assuming you are not running windows.
Modifying xorg to deal with lack of DID is pretty normal.
"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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You might check if it's a known issue with your 'downstream' devices, since HDMI has all sorts of potential gotchas, especiall if it's using HDCP.
Just my 2 cents though.
What games are you playing that don't support multi-GPU and multi-CPU? Most newer games that I've played support both.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Okay, more details. The standard gamma is "1", I like to use "0.75" on my desktop (which uses a Nvidia GPU). But on the netbook - which uses Intel GPU - the gamma can only be set above 1 (eg: 1.5, 1.8) and never below 1 as I can do on the desktop.
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.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Yeah, I've been wondering about that. The configuration's pretty vanilla: the Radeon uses an HDMI cable to connect to a late 2011-era Philips HDTV that hasn't given a pinch of trouble otherwise, and there aren't amps or optical audio to complicate the pipeline any at this point. While the glitch appears during video playback, it's surfaced in both Netflix (where I'd expect Silverlight to be a possible culprit of a DRM snafu) and VLC (where I definitely wouldn't). Fingers crossed hoping the issue disappears going into a clean install, and fingers crossed extra-hard that AMD finally releases the first official, non-beta driver in months soon...
Who the fuck in their right mind would buy a $1000 gaming card for Linux?!? You want to make sure that Half-Life 1 and the Humble Bundle can run at 4000fps or something?
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 introduce an incompatibility or bug, so even then it's not always the graphics card's fault for a crash.
In regards to heat, I used to fix this with a little $10 PCI turbo fan from newegg that pushed out the hot air I can't find a link to anymore, as with all things that actually work and are cost effective, it's been replaced by a bunch of flimsy fans that doesn't look like it will work nearly as well on the site.
Maybe you should actually do some research before purchasing a system with non-modifiable hardware? Everyone with a brain knows that laptops are designed with specific hardware with specific drivers for the specific operating system that machine is running, and everyone with a brain knows that FreeBSD has shitty driver support compared to Windows so all that specific hardware is going to be useless, and everyone with a brain knows that laptop BIOS' are awful custom hackjobs that have no settings that any power user would like
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.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Well what video card do you use then? Please, do share.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
But he said most games, since that literally covers every game from Pong to Defiance, he can safely say that it is true.
Steam is available on Linux. Wine works fairly well also.
Believe it or not, some folks do game on Linux.
(Do user-choosable errors even count as problems?)
Of course they do. There's even a specific category for that.
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.
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.
More Twoson than Cupertino
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.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The PC market collapses as the major players charge more for PC parts than ever before. For instance, Nvidia and AMD both act as if they are trying their best to kill the discrete GPU market.
This 'new' (actually available for many months already from OEMs) 7990 card is massively overpriced, for instance. It uses two mid-end sized graphics chips and a bunch of GDDR memory that costs a fraction of what it once did when first introduced. It uses a truly horrific method to combine the rendering of two separate subsystems to one output, requiring constant driver updates to function reasonably with new games.
AMD will drop driver support of this card once their new chips are out at the end of this year. Sure, they'll CLAIM the new drivers work, but AMD will no longer be fixing 7990 crossfire performance for games released after 2013. For these games, the 7990 will act like a single chip part.
With less than a year of useful life (if you intend to continue playing newly released games), the desirability of this card is lower than most of you realise. Even at 500 dollars, the card would be badly over-priced against where prices should be, given the real cost of the build. Sadly, Nvidia and AMD have worked in combination to drive prices to an historic high. This in turn has created a collapse of demand, made worse by the fact that most PC games are efficient ports from now obsolete consoles, and run well on even old/low-end graphics hardware.
When Sony's super-idealised PC based console arrives later this year, even die-hard PC-gaming fans will consider switching to the PS4. When coded to the metal, the PS4 will run far better than any current high-end windows based PC which uses a SINGLE chip GPU solution. This for a console Sony will be selling for less (probably much less) than 450 dollars.
AMD is in the Sony too, but certainly can't get even a tiny fraction of the margin it so greedily makes with the 7990. There is a middle-ground between these two extremes of margin and profit per GPU, but neither AMD nor Nvidia seems to wish to find it.
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 contending for the same core that the game is hammering on; but the list of games that continue to gain as you add cores(and the degree of performance increase per additional core) is shorter and less exciting.
Multi GPU, similarly, has mostly outgrown the bad old days where it was substantially more likely to crash to desktop if the driver didn't have special shims for the exact game you were playing; but the linearity of the performance scaling as you add GPUs often leaves something to be desired.
This is so true! From my experience I can only confirm what Linus Torvalds said:
Nvidia ist the worst company regarding linux support. Period.
The released 319.12 Beta Linux driver is a joke. Labtops with Nvidia Optimus are not supported in linux. Nvidia doesn't care!
As an example:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA#.27.2Fdev.2Fnvidia0.27_Input.2FOutput_error
the "/dev/nvidia0 Input/Output error" exists since January 2011. No fix is availiable. Not even an official statement from Nvidia. F U Nvidia.
They don't; they dual boot. Means they tinker with Linux and use Windows when they need to get anything done (or play games).
Could be the DTS Bomb...
http://www.highdefdigest.com/blog/dts-bomb-cars-2/
This was happening with me and I needed a firmware upgrade for my receiver to fix it. You may want to look to see if it is only happening during DTS-MasterHD audio films.
How about bundling NO titles with it and knocking a couple hundred bucks off the price?
And 2007 was 6 years ago now. The newest cards have always had issues with Linux. It did not matter who they were from. I usually go by the second newest generation of cards for Linux. Actually I look at last gen for my gaming use as well. Usually the last generation (6000 series for AMD in this case) has been out. The drivers have ha the bugs worked out. The cards are more stable for any OS use. I do not game on my Linux systems. The AMD 6670 I have works fine for what I am doing with it. I am not taxing the Linux system. It is basically a regular desktop with a little coding use and DVD ripping. The second account is used when people visit and they want a computer to use. The Linux machine is the one that is connected to the TV. I can't speak for sound over the HDMI cable. I have the computer's sound go straight to the surround sound system. The picture is fine. I have all my movies ripped and we watch them using the Linux system. I never get tired of the look on people's faces when I tell them the computer is running Linux not windows or OSX. I have had a few converts to Linux since for most of their needs Linux works fine.
On a side note I need to check on blue ray on Linux again. Be good to watch/rip blue ray movies. I do have all the movies that I rip. I just happen to have friends with little kids. They like to throw the disks around when we are not looking. I have picked up the pieces of a disk a number of times. Ripping the movies saves me from having to buy the movie again.
Because the feature works on Nvidia and ATI, and works well? And, because is usefull for me (standard 2.2 gamma is too washed to me)? Well, I learned my lesson. The next time I buy a netbook, I will only buy if the gpu is Nvidia or ATI.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I cannot believe people still complain about this.
The graphics in my R690M chipset still work for shit in Windows and don't work at all in Linux, when I bought the machine new fglrx told me my graphics were too old to be supported and the ati driver just trashes the display even if I disable all acceleration. I've had problems with literally every ATI card I've ever had, but this is a case where it's just shit and no effort was made to fix it and no effort will be made to fix it. I've been trying ATI every third card or so for a while, but this is the last straw. Especially since they keep claiming to be giving away enough information to support the old chipsets, when they clearly aren't.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I haven't met an ATI graphics card that could render smoke without dragging the frames per second to a crawl, usually when walking into smoke or cloud, or sniping zoomed in with smoke out the barrel in front of my view. This applies to either Windows or Linux. Any thoughts?
Cheers
Armando
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.
If you feel like spending $1,000 for daily BSOD and terrible micro stutter, then this is the card for you. Oh, and they bundle 8 games with it to truly show off how terrible the performance is of a dual GPU board. EVERY DUAL GPU CARD THAT HAS EVER BEEN MADE WAS TERRIBLE.
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 before the expiration of the plan they were bought with).
If you create just mid-range graphic cards you are targeting a very vast market, but you're aren't going to sell much of them, because that vast market isn't interested in upgrading, its needs are already fulfilled by the previous mid-range you sold to them.
If you create ultra-high-end graphics cards, you're targetting a much smaller niche (hardcore gamers who ask to crazy insane resolutions and framrates, and scientists wanting to do number crunching. And bitcoin miners, too), but this smaller niche market is pretty well motivated to upgrade their hardware on a regular basis.
And AMD covers pretty well these use-cases. They hardware is more-or-less equivalent game-wise (well you could spend a long time arguing frame fluidity, "hardware-vs-practical fps", "runts and drops", etc... Or whether it is completely idiotic to run with Vsync disabled, or whether all this debate about 'frame-pacing' will still matter now that Carmack and other are pressuring 'conditionnal Vsync' into standards)
And due to the shift from VLIW MIMD to RISC SIMD architecture, the number-crunching scientific (and bitcoin mining) communities are more that satisfied.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Warning: if the cooling system fails, the cores may burn a hole through the chassis as well as the floor and all the way to the center of the earth.
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.
YMMV based on one person vs thousands? I don't think so.
64 bit only?
My NVidia GeForce 570 runs every game I throw at on max settings just fine and all I have is a sandy bridge cpu, 8gb of ram. I don't need even a 590, let alone this AMD monstrosity. That card is 100% useless for the vast majority of pc users, including gamers. Only thing I could think of it that it would help would be hardcore flight simulators, but even that would mostly be in the RAM and CPU Id imagine.
Judging by the way pc gaming is now this is also a huge waste of money as no game will take advantage of it. 96% of all pc games are console ports or indie games. Neither of which require even half of what this GPU is offering. And 1000 bucks for a video card? That's a couple hundred bucks shy of what I could build a entire kick ass pc rig that would run any game on the market using all name brand top quality parts.
Lets not forget the fact AMD drivers suck. They have for the past decade. So yeah 1000 bucks for a GPU you will not take advantage of and has bad driver support.
seconded... and nvidia drivers make you do the driver shuffle... oh this game needs THIS version. that game needs THAT driver version.
When i was using nvidia products and playing pretty much every game that came around.. Old and new. Paid and pirated...
I had about 6 different versions of nvidias drivers. And spent a fuckload of time swapping around depending on what i wanted to PLAY that day.
The final straw tho was nvidias NON support who basically told me "yeah even tho your problem is 100% with our driver on your cards tv out... you should go buy our NEW card which fixes that issue."
And that was the last nvidia card i ever bought... ATI and now AMD and no more driver shuffle.. Actually got support that fixed my issue the one time i had one.
All in all... Fuck nvidia.. I don't fanboy for anybody. I just want shit that works, is supported, at a good price. and that's not nvidia.
Those kids sound absolutely horrible. They need to learn discipline and respect ASAP.
Don't need more future criminals...
Bizarre. I just run the latest driver and... games just work.
Considering I'm seeing anything against ATI being modded down, and anything for modded up, I have to wonder if /. has an ATI bias.
Btw, the drivers do suck. This is a documented fact.
The problem isn't just surfacing for DTS Master HD films - my Blu-ray player connected via HDMI to the same TV grunts through everything fine, and the audio problems have happened with AAC and Dolby Digital from Netflix streaming as well. We'll see what happens after I rebuild the system.
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)
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
And if Steam (or, more accurately, the requirement to activate a game YOU FUCKING BOUGHT ALREADY) is not wanted, then that's eight shiny coasters.
Smashing.
On linux, I've found the Intel drivers to be anything but stable. They caused periodic unrecoverable freezes. Not under load, or under stress, just basic desktop usage. Had to hard reboot the box to get to anything, couldn't even get to a virtual terminal CLI.
Installed an nVidia card and haven't had a problem since.
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.
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.
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.
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
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.
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
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 does occur and shows the ati driver as being at fault, not to say it's not blowing chunks because of something else of course.
I recently came into a different system and intend on putting the ATI cards in it to see if it has problems as well. Different motherboard, etc just the video cards to be swapped out.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
I'll tell you why AMD 3D sucks under Linux. They rev the xorg and AMD will not update their drivers for cards below Radeon HD4500. Do you realize how many AMD cards out in the wild are now busted under anything but ancient distributions of Linux? I'm not sure who to be pissed off at, I guess the xorg developers and AMD. I have an HD3450, that I'd love to use Linux with. I'm not using some old distro because 3D breaks. Stuck with Windows7. (The free direct rendering drivers for AMD have terrible performance. Worthless for 3D games.)
They don't; they dual boot. Means they tinker with Linux and use Windows when they need to get anything done (or play games).
Which then leads to the question: why do they care of the 3D performance under Linux sucks? If you're tinkering with Linux -- or using it as a server, dev platform, etc. -- and not using it for Linux gaming, it's kinda irrelevant. Use the bundled 2D drivers and be done with it.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Believe it or not, some folks do game on Linux.
Here's the results of a recent Steam hardware survey from December 2012:
Ubuntu 12.10 64 bit - 0.29%
Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS 64 bit - 0.26%
Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS - 0.13%
Ubuntu 12.10 - 0.12%
So all in all, the Steam Linux usage is just at about 1% with Windows platforms dominating about 95% of this gaming platform. It takes considerable expense for AMD and nVidia to crank out drivers for these platforms. The economic rewards for satisfying the needs of less than 1% of the gaming market simply don't make any sense. If you want to game in Linux, don't blame the hardware companies for ignoring you and the other five or six people in the world gaming with you.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Even 1 percent of steam is a lot more than 5 or 6 folks.
The steam console will change these numbers considerably.
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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Who needs a video card? He just needs something simple that runs emacs, which can then run any liberated software he needs.
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/8705.html
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.
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
more resources for linux driver development. the open source driver should support all features of the cards as they are released (not a year and a half later) and the current devs are doing amazing things but need more support. some of us have shunned nvidia. please don't make us suffer for it!
In fallout.ini:
bUseThreadedAI=1
iNumHWThreads=2
Works for me.
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.
I got a 3 gig Direct CU II, 7970 (7890? I don't remember, doesn't matter) that's running on 5 screens. I bought this thing almost a year ago for a little over 400 dollars. I can't see 1,000 dollars justifying it. Wouldn't that 6 gigs be split to an effective 2 gigs? Isn't this essentially just SLI? Either way, at over 10 million pixels I get by without an issue. I leave anti-aliasing off (who would need it? unless it's FXAA, which I leave on) and, again, I don't get any serious slowdown from it. This card seems like it's designed for a crowd with more money than sense.
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
They might want to check their systems themselves if they have any SecuROM shit installed.
That happened when I got Spore Creature Creator. As soon as it was installed, my display shit itself and went to 1600x1200 (it's a native 1920x1080) and refused to work properly until I wiped the system clean and re-installed Windows.
This is in fact listed in my old lawsuit against Electronic Arts.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The Nvidia drivers can be used to run the blender cycles engine both using OpenCL and Cuda. The AMD fails at both with the latter being obvious and the latter being unacceptable. Also with the 7000 HD, msi 7750 series at least, there seems to be a problem running an analog lcd together with anoter lcd, I tried many possible connections, displayport->vga+hdmi->hdmi, dvi->vga+hdmi->hdmi,displayport->vga+dvi->vga, (The driver has problem unloading it seems).
On Linux I am connecting one of the two monitors using the onboard Radeon card. This is a little buggy, but I just don't do things that I know will crash it.
I've gone from an x800 to a 5850 and now to a 6970 and I've never had an issue.
nvidia and amd don't release linux drivers for gamers.
they release them for video production companies (who almost exclusively use linux render farms) and for high-end massively parallel number-crunching / research applications that use CUDA or OpenCL.
enabling gaming on linux is just a side-effect.
(this may change with steambox or android game consoles, but even so it's still very much a seconday purpose)