We've seen
plenty of the Radeon HD 7990 in action with Battlefield 4, but it's taken AMD a little while to
furnish us with full specs and pricing for its in-house reference design. Now
that all the info is here, in the run-up to commercial availability in two
week's time, it's finally possible to judge the pros and cons of what is
arguably a very niche product. Read on past the break and we'll do just that.
The
positives are weighty: over 8 TFLOPS of raw compute power, which is double that
of the Radeon HD 7970 (since there
effectively two 7970 GPUs on this card) and four times that of the PlayStation 4's GPU. This
grunt comes from a New York-sized population of 8.6 billion transistors -- 1.5
billion more than in NVIDIA's Titan -- which can
handle pretty much any current game at 4K resolution and max
detail settings, including Tomb Raider (with flowing locks enabled) and Crysis
3. Both these games happen to be bundled with card, along with Bioshock
Infinite and five other big titles.
Note, however,
that you'll need a pricey CPU to be certain of getting the frame rates shown in
the slide deck, which are based on an Intel Core i7-3960X. It's also curious
that no frame rate is provided for Crysis 3 at 4K and max settings --
only Crysis 2 is shown in the chart below, with a frame rate nudging 40
fps, so we'll definitely be checking out some independent benchmarks.
There's 6GB of
RAM, PCI Express 3.0 support for
ridiculous inter-GPU memory bandwidth in case you were ever in a position to
CrossFire this thing, plus a "massive" cooling system that is claimed
to be 3dB quieter than NVIDIA's Titan and 10dB quieter than the GTX 690.
And the
negatives? Well, those deserve to be addressed in bullet points, even though
there's only one of them for now:
•
$999
To be fair, this
price point is totally in line with the competition and our expectations. But
as to whether the transaction is as straightforward as it sounds, and how
sensible it is relative to paying the same amount for a Titan, we'll wait to do
our regular review roundup rather than risk any expensive errors of judgment. [Source]
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