AMD Radeon HD 7990 Review: 7990 Gets Official
by Ryan Smith on April 24, 2013 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Radeon HD 7000
- Tahiti
Sleeping Dogs
Another Square Enix game, Sleeping Dogs is one of the few open world games to be released with any kind of benchmark, giving us a unique opportunity to benchmark an open world game. Like most console ports, Sleeping Dogs’ base assets are not extremely demanding, but it makes up for it with its interesting anti-aliasing implementation, a mix of FXAA and SSAA that at its highest settings does an impeccable job of removing jaggies. However by effectively rendering the game world multiple times over, it can also require a very powerful video card to drive these high AA modes.
Sleeping Dogs is one of the games targeted by NVIDIA’s latest driver update, and as a result the performance gap between AMD and NVIDIA setups has narrowed since when we first started using it. Ultimately this is still a game that AMD does better at, and the 7990 is always ahead of the GTX 690 by at least a few frames per second, never mind the much greater lead over Titan. We generally value single-GPU cards for their consistency, but in times like these Titan pays heavily for it compared to the likes of the 7990.
Meanwhile at 5760 we’re once again seeing the 7990 trail the 7970GE CF by quite a large degree; the gap is now 18%. So at the highest and most demanding settings there is still a clear performance advantage for two-card CrossFire setups, as we’re seeing here.
Something about Sleeping Dogs at lower resolutions holds back AMD CF setups, which means the 7990 gets impacted here too. 55fps is reasonable enough for playability purposes, but this is a good example of why multi-GPU scaling isn’t an infallible solution.
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Plattypus - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
There's a typo on the Specification Comparison chart, you put 7970 instead of 7990 for the first one.Great review!
deestinct - Thursday, April 25, 2013 - link
There is no typo. It IS 7970 CF. CF stands for CrossFire, which means two 7970s. Therefore the comparison makes sensedeestinct - Thursday, April 25, 2013 - link
Ah sorry ignore my previous comment....i misunderstood what you saidjust4U - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
One thing that bother's me about this and Nvidia's offering. You sort of "hope" (expect.. would be better..) that these types of cards would bring something more to the table besides just a dual stack of their top end card. Higher clocks, better memory.. something.jeffkibuule - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Power savings compared to 2 cards in SLI/CrossFire. Ability to fit in a smaller chassis. Use of the best binned chips possible. But yeah, it really is for the 1%.mr_tawan - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Single card also means no need for SLI/Cross Fire mainboard (which save money a bit).Rookierookie - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
I don't know if you are spending $999 on your graphics card that saving money is really an issue. You are not likely to be using a low-end motherboard, and many of the high end motherboards support SLI/Crossfire anyway.just4U - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
The power draw appears to be (in my opinion) partially due to the lower speeds. The cards are for a select crowd but I don't see the draw. There should bring something new to the table which would help to entice buyers.Ktracho - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
There is a fair amount of variability in power consumption from one chip to another. Always choosing two chips that are on the low power side makes a significant difference compared to two chips chosen at random, because in the latter case, the design has to account for the worst case - two chips that are on the high power side.stren - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
5 real monitor outputs and SFF is what it's about for those with unlimited cash, otherwise you'd be better off with mulitple lightnings or matrix cards. Until they support 2D lightboost then I'll be sticking with Nvidia.