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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.
Since AMD drivers are total garbage, why bother?
Might as well stick with a card I can actually use.
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?
obvious redundancy is obvious
...how fast can it mine Bitcoins.
I'm going to rush out and buy four of them right away.
My next e-peen's machine will have CPU-integrated graphics, very likely made by Intel due to the current driver situation. (I don't totally rule out AMD but if the decision were made today Intel is the clear winner.) "Integrated graphics in an e-peen machine?" you ask? Yes, because my peen is about stability, freedom, long-term maintenance, security, not a one-trick-pony single metric which costs you pretty much everything else.
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?
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...
What does this do that a $100 card can't? I don't need to drive a billboard or a Jumbotron. Is that what this is for.
No, it depends on a proprietary firmware. Not interested.
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.
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?
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.
i remember playing Tomb Raider on the Sega Saturn in 1996 or 1997. Good memories
nVidia is optimized for CUDA implementations, not OpenCL.
Blood Dragon is DLC , its not a standalone title.
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)
Always go with the Fap Test. Always.
Seriously, a 375 watts, $1000 videocard?
And then you morons bitch about the cost of Apple's computers?
LOL, so at full load you will need pretty much a secondary PSU to run the damn thing... really decent power management I guess! Though I guess considering the stupid 1000$ 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!
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.
How about bundling NO titles with it and knocking a couple hundred bucks off the price?
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.
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.
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.
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'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.)
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!
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?