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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.
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?
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!
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.