AMD Radeon HD 7990 Malta

[vkl]

AMD HD7990 reviews are up

AMD Radeon HD 7990: Eight Games And A Beastly Card For $1,000 : AMD's Malta Becomes The Radeon HD 7990
AMD Radeon HD 7990 6GB Review - Malta Gets Frame Rated | PC Perspective

The above reviews have touched upon frame latency issue with the radeon and they had AMD's prototype driver to test with which has addressed frame latency issues to much extent.
That prototype drivers are in experimental stage and have implemented frame-pacing mechanism,more matured versions would be available in later versions of catalyst driver.
The below article throws light on the upcoming drivers planned by AMD for fixing the frame latency issues:
Frame Rating: AMD Improves CrossFire with Prototype Driver | PC Perspective
*www.pcper.com/files/imagecache/article_max_width/review/2013-04-22/BF3_2560x1440_PLOT_0.png

*www.pcper.com/files/imagecache/article_max_width/review/2013-04-22/FarCry3_2560x1440_PLOT.png
Orange line indicates frame-time with 13.5Beta drivers and have much more frame runts than the prototype driver.
In many of the tested games the prototype driver seems to address the issue well,making things smoother.

Overall the card(HD7990),crossfire set ups would look markedly better with the frame latency issue addressed with the newer upcoming drivers.
The 8-game bundle is a nice addition to hd7990.

 

[Cilus]

Thanks for sharing this great piece of info. Looks like this babys really worths each doller we're paying for it. Also it looks like AMD is taking the CF related issues seriously and taking all the necessary actions to fix it out. Will be going through the reviews now.

 

[sukesh1090]

^^
AMD told it before that this year they are going to concentrate on driver and performance improvements for their 7XXX cards thats why they are delaying 8XXX so that they can squeeze even last drop out of GCN 1,i guess i read that article in fudzilla. BTW " Holy mother of HELL " 8 games,looks like AMD want to hit very hard this time.

I am reading Toms review and in the first page itself he has mentioned that it is 40nm but isn't that card manufactured in 28nm,if iam not wrong???

Nestled between the two 4.3 billion-transistor chip is that PEX 8747 switch—the same one Nvidia uses to enable inter-GPU communication on the GeForce GTX 690. The 48-lane, five-port device is manufactured at 40 nm and is PCI Express 3.0-capable

 

[vkl]

^^It is correct.The writer is referring to the PLX chip(PEX 8747) used in hd7990.

 

[sukesh1090]

^^
oh yeah first i thought it would be about that chip but that 5 display ports confused me.thanks.

 

[vickybat]

Gtx 690 is still the $1000 card to buy. GCN drivers have still a long way to go to mature. Right now, crossfire should be avoided until the whql version of the prototype driver arrives.
Although it discards runt frames, its still not smooth as nvidia options.

Tomshardware did an extensive test and came up with some impressive results.

AMD Radeon HD 7990: Eight Games And A Beastly Card For $1,000 : AMD's Malta Becomes The Radeon HD 7990

Spoiler

AMD wants $1,000 for this new flagship—the same price as GeForce GTX 690, which yields a higher practical average frame rate in six of our eight benchmarks as it delivers frames more smoothly across the board. The GTX 690 is shorter, set up to exhaust at least some of its waste heat out of your chassis, and significantly more power-friendly. It eschews plastic in favor of metal. And it doesn’t whine under variable loads. Nvidia simply sells a better-built dual-GPU graphics card.

Not only does AMD enable Radeon HD 7990 in a dual-slot form factor with two eight-pin power connectors, but it also addresses my biggest beef with the company’s most recent high-end reference designs: too much noise. Even under load, the 7990’s three fans slice through air quieter than a GeForce GTX 690. It’s only unfortunate that power-related vibrations generate more volume than the coolers themselves. Massive compute performance, low idle power consumption enabled by ZeroCore technology, and some of the fastest 3D performance available make this a very desirable product for certain environments.
But when we combine the quantitative data enabled by video capture-based performance analysis and the subjective judgments of a panel of gaming enthusiasts who simply want to play their favorite titles on the best hardware possible, Nvidia’s thousand-dollar GeForce GTX 690 outshines the similarly-priced Radeon HD 7990. Our early look at AMD’s prototype driver suggests that more evenly pacing the rate at which frames are shown on-screen helps minimize frame time variance, which our gamers definitely noticed. But that release isn’t expected for months—the second half of 2013 is as specific as AMD gets.

If the story ended there, the winner would be clear. However, AMD is working magic with developers, and the Radeon HD 7990’s game bundle looks like the culmination of a serious ISV push. Every 7990 will include a copy of BioShock Infinite, Tomb Raider, Crysis 3, Far Cry 3, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, Hitman: Absolution, Sleeping Dogs, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. That’s $335 worth of software, if you don’t own any of it already. I personally find five of the eight titles interesting, which is some sort of record for a game bundle.

Okay, the bold parts are all that takes to draw a conclusion.Kudos to nvidia for developing a tool like FCAT. Fraps is history now, and was really an unfair way in measuring frames coz it added up runt frames. FCAT has now become sort of a universal tool for benchmarking gpu's. 690 is still the better card from a gaming perspective. But the game bundle is very tempting and maybe a sort
of means for amd to draw customers. But right now, crossfire of gpu's like 7970, 7950 and the likes should be avoided. Read the tomshardware review to know why. At least until that prototype driver makes a general appearance and its gonna take a while for that to happen. Amd still haven't fixed the issues to announce an official release date. Expect towards the end of the year.

About compute, well open-cl is well optimized for GCN as nvidia is for CUDA. For open-cl specific tasks, its still not a deal maker coz open-cl still has a long way to go to match
professional rendering tools like i-ray which uses CUDA. But its moving at a fast pace and now folding@home also has open-cl support. GPGPU still is at its infancy now for general public. GCN has a lot of untapped power as its fairly a new architecture. AMD has a lot of work cut out in the driver level to make the most out of it.

 

[sankar]

is this true ??

AMD Radeon HD 7990 'Malta' Engineering Sample | eBay

$$ 96100

 

[avinandan012]

^ that guy is either filthy rich by his father's money or pure retard buying a $1000 card @ $96000

 

[topgear]

here's the order in chaos
AMD Radeon HD 7990 Malta roundup

 

[vickybat]

Tomshardware review standards have definitely increased with new improved tools. Although hardocp used old standards, they could still feel all the flaws by experience alone.
Read on to know more.

HARDOCP - AMD Radeon HD 7990 - AMD Radeon HD 7990 Video Card Review

 

[d3p]

Looks like a beast, but would wait for some Crossfire reviews & its comparison with HD 7970 CF.

Hope someday Red Camp address those micro-tearing & screen shuttering & frame flickering issues with HD7970 CF.

 

[vickybat]

Looks like a beast, but would wait for some Crossfire reviews & its comparison with HD 7970 CF.

Hope someday Red Camp address those micro-tearing & screen shuttering & frame flickering issues with HD7970 CF.

Read hardocp and tomshardware reviews mate. Its compare with 7970 cf, 680 sli and 690. FCAT has really turned the tables.

*www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7990-review-benchmark,3486.html

Some interesting comments:

Spoiler

Who's the Stutterer?

Quite simply, AMD CrossFire is the stutterer in the room. We have talked about this issue in every CrossFire versus SLI evaluation we have published for years now. We are pleased to say it felt like stuttering has been lessened a bit with AMD CrossFire. However, it is still very much a reality with Catalyst 13.5 Beta2 on Radeon HD 7990 and 7970 GHz Edition CrossFire. First of all, we experienced no difference in stuttering between the single-card Radeon HD 7990 and two-card Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition CrossFire. The amount of stutter or inconsistency felt the same between both configurations while gaming. The fact that two-GPUs are hardwired on a single PCB didn't reduce the stuttering as some might have thought. We feel that driver improvements are slowly getting there. This new driver so far as the "best" experience we've had yet in regards to stuttering.

We did feel a smoothness difference between AMD CrossFire versus NVIDIA SLI. Let me describe a moment I had while gaming on GeForce GTX 680 SLI in Crysis 3 during this evaluation. I had begun my apples-to-apples testing first with the GeForce GTX 680 SLI in Crysis 3 and was running at 5760x1200 with very high settings and SMAA 1X in the game. I started the run-through, and as I was playing through the entire level of "Safeties Off" I was borderline calling it playable at that setting. I didn't know the FPS, as when I'm recording with FRAPS the FPS is not displayed. (We do this purposefully.) Therefore, all I could feel was the game itself and I wasn't burdened with thinking in FPS at all. It was a fluid and immersive gaming experience. The game to me felt like it was playing at 40-50 FPS. Finishing up the run-through I stopped FRAPS and it read an average of 33 FPS.

I was in awe. It felt smooth, really smooth, it felt like it was running at a faster framerate than it really was. If not for some minor lag throughout the run-through, I would have called that very high setting playable based on the experience alone, without looking at the framerate. It was a shock to see the framerate so low, I really thought it was higher as I was playing. This kind of smoothness we often experience with NVIDIA SLI. This cannot be said for AMD CrossFire. It stuttered badly at very high settings and you knew, you could feel it that it wasn't playable as it negatively affected the overall gameplay and immersion. While this is a broad statement, it stands up fairly well even though there are differences using different game engines: It takes higher framerates to get a smoother experience with CrossFire than with SLI.

If hardocp would have used FCAT, then the 7970 cf wouldn't have delivered such high FPS count as they are filled with runt frames. But they could feel the experience.
Crossfire should be avoided now until full proof drivers arrive.

 

[d3p]

Read hardocp and tomshardware reviews mate. Its compare with 7970 cf, 680 sli and 690. FCAT has really turned the tables.

AMD Radeon HD 7990: Eight Games And A Beastly Card For $1,000 : AMD's Malta Becomes The Radeon HD 7990

Some interesting comments:


If hardocp would have used FCAT, then the 7970 cf wouldn't have delivered such high FPS count as they are filled with runt frames. But they could feel the experience.
Crossfire should be avoided now until full proof drivers arrive.

Thanks for the review links.

Edit: I will share the FPS & Frame Time variance issues currently facing with F1 2012 at 3780 x 1920.

 

[vickybat]

^^ That will be great buddy. I wonder how you are facing issues in a single card setup. Maybe its because of the resolution you are currently on.

 

[d3p]

^^ That will be great buddy. I wonder how you are facing issues in a single card setup. Maybe its because of the resolution you are currently on.

dude, its no more Single card setup any more. Its X-Fired since two months now.

 

[vickybat]

dude, its no more Single card setup any more. Its X-Fired since two months now.

Oh my bad. I failed to notice the "CF" in your siggy.

Post info on some other games too like crysis 3 , far cry 3 etc.

 

[d3p]

Oh my bad. I failed to notice the "CF" in your siggy.

Post info on some other games too like crysis 3 , far cry 3 etc.

Sure, make sure to check the Graphics Card Thread on Sunday.

I have Metro 2033, Far Cry 3, Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Crysis 3, F1 2012, Dirt 3, Sleeping Dogs & Mostwanted Reboot in the Hit List. In case i miss some intense game, let me know.

On Topic : 13.4 & 13.5 beta catalyst as released on 24th april, has few good thing to please my eyes on the papers. Lets see, how it performs in the real world.

 

[vickybat]

^^ Sure mate. Do include some VRAM sensitive games like Hitman Absolution and Of Course Tomb Raider.

 

[sukesh1090]

d3p
Hope someday Red Camp address those micro-tearing & screen shuttering & frame flickering issues with HD7970 CF.

the work is already in progress bro and AMD will release the completely stable driver Q2 of this year may be in june i guess.haven't you checked that review which includes prototype driver which improves gameplay experience of 7990 by miles.for now it is only for 7990 but when it will be released for users ,then it will fix things for all the CF solutions.
7990 review with new prototype driver
and one more thing is that AMD is thinking to keep an option in control center to enable/disable that "frame metering" option.as it improves gaming performance in most of the games but in few games things works better without that.
but still i think AMD should have released that card along with that completely stable driver rather than asking users to play with half baked performance.

 

[d3p]

the work is already in progress bro and AMD will release the completely stable driver Q2 of this year may be in june i guess.haven't you checked that review which includes prototype driver which improves gameplay experience of 7990 by miles.for now it is only for 7990 but when it will be released for users ,then it will fix things for all the CF solutions.
7990 review with new prototype driver
and one more thing is that AMD is thinking to keep an option in control center to enable/disable that "frame metering" option.as it improves gaming performance in most of the games but in few games things works better without that.
but still i think AMD should have released that card along with that completely stable driver rather than asking users to play with half baked performance.

I don't have any option other than just hoping. Thing is i never gave up.