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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.
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
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
I doubt many people living in "mom's basement" have $1000 to put into a video card. Realistically the people that grew up playing games has continued to go up, and in particular a lot of people who want a video card like this are going to be older (30-45) anyways as a lot of the younger crowd is trending more towards tablet and mobile games.
To a lot of people in that 30 to 45 age bracket $1,000 isn't a whole heck of a lot to spend on a hobby.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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.
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...
>> To a lot of people in that 30 to 45 age bracket $1,000 isn't a whole heck of a lot to spend on a hobby.
Never been married, have you?
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.
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).
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!
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!
"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.
But he said most games, since that literally covers every game from Pong to Defiance, he can safely say that it is true.
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
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.
It actually is a standalone title.
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.
Of course if you want to be this much on the bleeding edge it's not $1000 once every five years, it's every time there's something a little bit better and sell the old one
typically, something like that is going to be annual, and not much more often than that. Plus they can recoup a decent amount reselling it. A gtx590 will still go for $350-450 on ebay.