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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They bring a fantastic cooler that prioritizes silence and convenience to have SLI in a system that doesn't have two PCIe slots available for them. Plus, you always had the option of quad-SLI that's a little harder to do with four 680's.
That said, I think anyone buying a 690 over a Titan now is pretty stupid. It's not about the speed difference. It's that if you're in the market for a $1k GPU, go for the one that won't be running out of memory with next year's PS4/next Xbox ports.
In the desktop tests? No. We keep the tests capped at 10 so that it's a manageable load when we need to redo everything, such as with the 7990 launch. At this point the desktop benchmark suite is set for at least the immediate future.
What a mediocre review! In your conclusions, you mention nothing about how AMD absolutely spanked NVIDIA in compute performance and synthetics! It is 75 watts more power hungry, and in exchange you get substantially more memory and a total win on compute and synthetics! I know synthetics aren't actual gaming numbers, but they're indicative of how the card will stand up to future games. The fact that the card has far better synthetics says a lot about it's longevity. The card looks like a great card (although quite late)! I'm no fanboy, but why can't people just write a legitimately upbeat and positive review about an amazing part?
Ryan typically has a slight undertone of NVIDIA bias; it can be found in most of his articles. That being said, the GTX 600 series are some amazing cards. I'd love to have a GK104-based card to replace my aged 6870 1GB.
This kind of compute benchmarks based on OpenCL are quite useless. No professional applications use OpenCL and nvidia doesn't really put all its efforts in optimizing their OpenCL drivers. You may be surprise to know that REAL applications that really need GPU assisted computation use CUDA. And thus you have the option to use nvidia GPU computation or nothing else. That's for how good is OpenCL. It may be open, it may be something AMD needs to show good (useless) graphs, but in real word none is going to use it for serious stuff. 3D renderers are a meaningful example: apart the useless SmallLuxMark benchmark, professional engines use CUDA. AMD is not there with whatever "devasting" computational solution you may believe they have. That's why nvidia holds more than 80% of the professional market and it's the only one having GPUs solutions for HPC while AMD just struggles to sell consumer products.
By the way, goo review, though a double Titan solution may have been added to make it more interesting (especially for power consumption) :)
It's already long been discussed, Nvidia's drop in Compute performance. Nvidia decided to focus their consumer cards on what they are meant for, gaming, and not overly engineer their GPU's to be heavy hitters for compute performance. There a number of instances where the GTX 580 is better at compute than the 680 is. As Ryan mentioned, the price AMD pays for those gains is in much higher power consumption which of course makes it harder for budget minded buyers to get into AMD. Having to spend an extra $30 on your PSU makes a big difference in a $600 build when you're trying to stretch every dollar and Nvidia has shifted to focus quite heavily in the budget build areas and this is one of the ways they are doing it.
And no, the synthetics say absolutely nothing about the longevity of a card. Longevity of a card is always the support that the GPU developer (AMD/Nvidia) and game developers give it. Software makes or breaks a GPU's ability to be useful, which is why we have a plethora of Driver updates and game patches and why things are programmed using unified tools and languages and why new GPU's keep certain features of their architecture throughout many generations. There is reason why Nvidia 7xxx and 6xxx series GPU's have suddenly become insufficient when they, at least the 79xx, lasted a VERY long time. Hardware shifted too far away fundamentally from those older cards and so software (games) made for newer cards simply did not have the hardware architecture of older cards in mind and now the utterly fail in some games. If you want longevity in your GPU, then just buy the latest architecture from whichever company you prefer, make sure it's not a rebranded version of a previous series, and you'll get the maximum lifespan out of it.
Love the review. With having to compete with the GTX 690 and Titan, this is the correct response AMD provided. I think it should be priced at $849 or something around there to sway buyers.
On paper the 7990 is faster than all of Nvidia's products overall, but its high power consumption may be a turn off for some.
On another note, 320.00 is an awesome driver release.
LOL.... considering the 7990 is a dual-gpu card, I would hope its faster than a Titan, given titan is a single-gpu powerhouse. But only marginally, which shows how powerful the Titan really is.
It would be nice if you guys got one of the PNK321 3840x2160 monitors and tested it with this card(and some other setups like CF 7970s, maybe Titans using borderless windowed...). Right now AMD has the only solution for fullscreen 4k gaming at 60hz because this monitor shows up as two displays when you run it at 60hz and thus without 2x1 Eyefinity you can't get a single display surface. Nvidia's only comparable solution is Mosaic but it's only for Quadro cards.
Anyway, it would be nice to find out whether 3840x2160 gaming is viable with the 7990.
One of our goals this year is to get a 4K monitor. But if so it will be a bit more mundane; something cheaper and more accessible, and something that can do 4K off of 1 DP 1.2 connection and present itself as one monitor.
Not all graphic cards are bought for gaming.... And certainly in the future, compute for GPU will be more and more important. Have you looked at the graphs? AMD has a GIANT leap over Nvidia.
I think the compute benchmarking may be flawed. How many people who buy the Titan for compute will use OpenCL? I suspect almost all would be using CUDA. Since CUDA isn't available on AMD cards, I think a better benchmark would be HPL, which is a common benchmark in the HPC world. This would allow each manufacturer to show how much sustained performance a given card is capable of achieving, without being limited by the constraint of having to use OpenCL or DirectCompute, or whatever. Without such benchmark results, all that can be concluded without reservation is that if you must use OpenCL, then you really should limit yourself to AMD (at least for now).
Lets be clear, you went live without FCAT results, which are singularly the most important aspect of reviewing this card as every other site has shown. Instead you chose to go with single FPS numbers, again.
Pages upon pages of useless numbers, because the card doesn't actually display those frames. Using an older driver would have been better than using a prototype driver users aren't expecting to use for at least another month.
I agree, the data set in this review is of very limited import, especially for a CF-on-a-stick solution.
You probably should have devoted more time to getting frame times into your workflow, and less time benchmarking so many games using less than relevant methodology.
Looking forward to your write up of the frame time data, but this article is a serious waste of time on your part, I'm afraid.
Obviously we planned to have full FCAT data for this, but fate wasn't so agreeable. In any case FCAT is meant to augment our FPS data, not replace it. So we needed to have the FPS numbers before we could dig into FCAT for the full breakdown.
And as a point of clarification, we aren't using the prototype driver for these results. We're using Catalyst 13.5b2, which should see a public release in the very near future. The prototype driver is another driver entirely, which we aren't using for these tests.
I said a week or two ago you'd find an excuse to leave out fcat...LOL. You did. Even come up with a problem nobody else has, and show a large boost to AMD that places like tomshardware don't show while showing NV cards slower than their benchmarks in the exact same games and resolutions.
Just like the percent gains in the driver post a few days ago (as I posted all of your %'s were lower than NV's own page which I linked to), you have NV scoring lower than other reviews. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6913/nvidia-r319-ser... Read the last comment people...They seem to lie a lot here and it's not surprising AMD chose to talk ONLY to this site recently and avoided access even to these guys to the driver team working on the "ISSUES" AMD has.
Heck toms last page title is this: "Can The World’s Best Bundle Save Radeon HD 7990?" ROFL...That pretty much sums up what they found...AMD sucks currently when FCAT is thrown in the picture.
But even leaving that out they put 5 gamers in a pepsi/coke style blind play test. ALL 5 CHOSE NV 690 gtx as the better card. They even note both Titan and 690GTX gave a better gaming experience.
It's funny you didn't mention what tom's found with noise: "It’s only unfortunate that power-related vibrations generate more volume than the coolers themselves." hmmm.... I guess you guys will keep claiming something about fcat problems until AMD solves their issues just as I've said before. This site is really losing credibility. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7990...
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Ra... "Perhaps they are using multiple displays for Eyefinity/Surround setups - in that case, the HD 7990 has different but equally traumatic problems. In our testing, nearly every other frame generated by all of our games tested are dropped and never shown to the gamer, resulting in frame rates at about half of what they should be and half of what is being reported by some other testing methods. That's just not acceptable. We are working on another story that directly compares the issues of Eyefinity and Surround that we hope to have up by next week along with some videos to demonstrate those complicated issues. "
Other people draw the exact OPPOSITE conclusions from this site's conclusions...LOL. “traumatic problems” in multi-monitor setups is a pretty harsh thing to say correct?
But then you come up with this zinger: "As we’ve seen in the past AMD does a bit better than NVIDIA at multi-monitor resolutions, so while the 7990 trails the GTX 690 at 2560, it immediately jumps ahead at 5760." From your shogun page...How much does AMD pay you guys to say complete opposites of other review sites using FCAT results? Are they completely funding your site at this point or what?
"It’s not a problem at this moment, but 2GB at multi-monitor resolutions in particular is going to be a wall very soon, and 2560 may not be too far behind. 2GB per GPU was reasonable in 2012, but now it’s a year later and things change. So for as little as we can predict something to be future-proof, AMD certainly seems to have an edge." Yeah, get back to me when you're not making up stuff that isn't happening. As toms 5 gamers showed, NV was better all around and all 5 chose NV without knowing which was which. That kind of data matched their FCAT results exactly, even with the beta2 latest driver and the Prototype driver that won't be out until who knows when. After Q2 isn't specific...that could mean 2014. While the prototype driver helped at toms they still had issues and the gamers still chose NV even after testing again with prototype.
“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.”
Also, you tested all the way to 5760...Memory isn't a problem and won't be for a long time (don’t forget the titan has 6GB!). They don't program games for cards that barely exist. I'm guessing this is a limited run just like asus' card only had 1000, unlike NV's first titan run which was 100,000 and is sold out still today after more runs...LOL.
Without the games as incentive toms gives this on the conclusion page: “And so we’re faced with a card that represents a huge improvement over its predecessor, but still comes up shy of its competition, and is priced like an equal.”
The games get old or I already have them. But I have to live with the card itself (especially at these prices) for probably 4-5 years or maybe more.
“For buyers that have faith in multi-GPU scaling and AMD’s ability to deliver timely profile updates the 7990 can and will handily surpass Titan by about 20%”
Umm…Have you read Hardocp’s driver review of AMD’s situation for the last year? They were 6 months late on some game optimizations and it took them a year to get drivers even near right and Enduro still sucks according to notebookcheck’s 7970 rehash review. http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/03/04/2012_amd... They paint a pretty POOR driver picture for a year for AMD. While you’re there read their review of the 7990 which also points to multimonitor problems: “We have sent our experiences to AMD, and hopefully there will be a fix in the future and then we can bring you TressFX performance under Eyefinity and CrossFire.”
LOL. But you think it’s all good with multi-monitor’s and think the memory future proofs it eh ryan? Everyone else thinks it sucks and has issues. Comically they found a slide showing AMD claiming to be able to do 3840x2160 in tombraider. They couldn’t get it to run there at all: “AMD is claiming playable performance in Tomb Raider with TressFX enabled at a resolution of 3840x2160. We wanted to test this ourselves, and found where Tomb Raider stores its graphics settings in the registry. We attempted to force 3840x2160, unfortunately the game would not start at this resolution.” Followed by this little gem, “Therefore, we find it highly unlikely that AMD's claim is valid.” Well ok then. They made the same claim for crisis 3…Which again Hardocp attempted to prove (right or wrong): “Above is our run-through at "max settings" at 3840x2160. You can clearly see that performance is very poor on the AMD Radeon HD 7990. The minimum framerate is 10 FPS, and the average is 19.4 FPS, well under 30 FPS. This level of performance is not playable in Crysis 3.”…Well ok then…Another lie shot down eh? “This claim is clearly invalid.” Yeah, we hear you loud and clear. Two AMD claims, two AMD lies. It didn’t even work with 1.3mil pixels less res of 5760x1200 for them. They got below 30fps. Farcry note: “GeForce GTX 680 SLI has the lowest framerates, but the smoothest overall experience thanks to SLI's non-stutter gameplay compared to CrossFire in this particular title.” Yeah, that’s kind of what tomshardware and their 5 game players said. No stutter=BETTER gameplay.
And when they found your memory claim kicking in: “Hitman is sensitive to VRAM capacity. In this case, the AMD Radeon HD 7990 and Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition CrossFire have the advantage thanks to the larger 3GB of VRAM per GPU. GeForce GTX 680 SLI only has 2GB per GPU.” “The drops in performance make gameplay not possible because it hitches and lags behind as you are playing.” So when your situation actually happens, it isn’t playable already anyway…LOL Not the minimums on all cards were under 3fps…LOL. That’s not a type man, it’s they all scored 1, 2 & 3 fps…ROFL. But you keep trying to help AMD any way you can ryan…They need it…LOL. Their conclusion page: “Hopefully after reading this evaluation you've come to the same question we have, "Where's the missing performance?"….So the card sucks then there too? They even manually turned up powertune 20% and got the same results. And again another site saying it: “Quite simply, AMD CrossFire is the stutterer in the room.” Yeah we know the 5 gamers said the same at toms. His 680 GTX experience however is described as this on the same page: “I was in awe. It felt smooth, really smooth, it felt like it was running at a faster framerate than it really was.”…Yeah kind of why the 5 gamers at toms picked it too. He calls the 7990 a “BAD VALUE”.
Again, 80 pages of complaints at notebookcheck’s forums don’t lie either. People need to take all the AMD driver complaints into major consideration. Who here thinks AMD’s drivers are great and on time? We’ll be waiting months for them to fix a problem they’ve had for a year+ and enduro has had issues for as long also (notebookcheck’s first review was awful and the second fixed some but not everything, they still say it has a ways to go compared to NV). Just google 7970m & notebookcheck you’ll get there people. It’s laughable hardocp crashed trying to prove AMD’s driver claims.
PCPER’s review conclusion page says the same about drivers: “With its performance completely dependent on CrossFire technology, the HD 7990 as a $1000 graphics card has a very hard time justifying its price. With our early testing of the Catalyst prototype driver showing positive results though, there is yet hope for CrossFire to be fixed in this generation, at least for single monitor users! But until that driver is perfected, is bug free and is presented to buyers as a made-for-primetime solution, I just cannot recommend an investment this large on the Radeon HD 7990.”
LOL…HOPE…At least for SINGLE monitor users. Ryan Shrout says TITAN for multi-monitor and 690GTX for single monitor. It seems everyone says quite the opposite of you Ryan Smith. I could keep going but hopefully people get the point. NOBODY sees it like anandtech.
Check out Techpowerup’s review also people…Shows a TON of games these guys leave out. Skyrim, Assassins Creed 3, F1 2012, Borderlands 2, StarCraft2 Heart of the Swarm, Diablo3, COD Black ops2, and World of Warcraft (awful scores for radeons on WOW). The 690GTX basically wins everything at nearly ever res. Guess that’s why NONE of these are tested at anandtech even though they are all HUGE sellers compared to crap like Warhead, Dirt Showdown. Nobody PLAYS Warhead based on server checks, and which nobody bought in the case of showdown. Makes you wonder why these two games get tested here don’t it people? Why leave out multi-million units popular sellers like these that they leave out? It’s because you’d get a very clear picture of why NV owns 65% of the gaming market. Overall in their 20 or so games Titan was 4% faster and GTX 690 was 14% faster. The negatives they state?: • High price • Annoying coil noise • Requires CrossFire game support to reach proper performance • Many games do not scale properly in CrossFire • Very high multi-monitor and Blu-ray power consumption • Slim performance gains from overclocking • Long card Again with the COIL NOISE and of course they note all the games with crossfire issues in their review.: “Out of eighteen titles, five did not scale, or worse, showed negative scaling. These are not small titles, but big AAA games: Assassin's Creed 3, Batman: Arkham City, F1 2012, StarCraft II, Skyrim, and World of Warcraft. What really surprises me is that this long list is the same as the one we had with our reviews of HD 7990 "New Zealand" implementations by board partners, like the ASUS ROG ARES II and PowerColor Devil 13. So either AMD does not care or can't fix CrossFire support with these games millions of people play.”
Jeez…5 out of 18 games running like CRAP and they’re all AAA titles. Is this why they are all OUT of Anandtech’s gaming suite ryan? Again I ask, how much is AMD paying you guys or do you just really love them that much? “What is a major issue, though, is the extremely annoying coil whine the card emits as soon as it runs a 3D application.” He notes the 690 GTX and Titan have no such issues. Also notes it OVERPOWERS the fans just as Toms said. Forget to mention this did you ryan? “In order to overcome the frametime issues some of our colleagues reported, AMD is working on a new driver to improve things, and has provided us with it, but it's only for Windows 8 and sacrifices some performance for more constant frame delivery.”
So win7 users won’t even be expecting this HOPE driver then? OF course it slows things down also. I hope you’ll be benchmarking it rather than just telling us how AMD smoothed out play…But I doubt it. You’ll forget to mention what they already found…IT’S SLOWER WITH THE HOPE DRIVER. Nuff said I guess...Read other reviews people and judge Ryan Smith yourself.
“For buyers that have faith in multi-GPU scaling and AMD’s ability to deliver timely profile updates the 7990 can and will handily surpass Titan by about 20%”
That doesn't sound like he'd go against it as all the others I've shown flatly did. Raise your hand if you have faith in ANY amd drivers, or them being on time. Read the stuff I linked to, every site made driver comments. Look at Ryan Shrout's comment on them ignoring millions of users and still having crap drivers. Heck he basically is recommending it for "future proof" memory crap. HOGWASH. Titan has 6GB and as hardocp showed to tap out memory you end up at 3fps or less. What good is future proof crap if you can't play when at 30fps when the future kicks in?...LOL
Also, he said FCAT article coming last week. AS I said they won't write one until AMD fixes their issue. Where is this magical article? Every other big site has dealt with FCAT but this one. Strange yes?
It's damn late to the party to still lose to the 690 in games. I have nothing against AMD, I just wish they'd step it up, or maybe price this thing to compete.
If they won't sell price will drop soon enough, If they sell there's not reason to lower it. This is possible an attempt to get a bit more money on their quite underpriced flagship GPU. nvidia sells a smaller GPUs for a higher price, meaning that AMD is not getting all the potential they could with such a solution. However I do not know how many of these cards they can sell. AMD is famous for the no-quality of their crossfire (stuttering) and for its support (there are still many games where their crossfire do not scale at all), so spending such an amount of money for something that won't deliver a good enough experience is quite useless. It is much better a solution made up of 2 discrete cards, so you can easily get rid of them once you (soon) become disappointed with AMD crossfire support.
Now we can compare which company comes aorund with the LESS BUGGY dual GPU $999 "hopefully it will show twice the performance - unfortunately it rarely does" mess of a product...
It's the perfect card for the 1%, because they don't have to worry about price, power draw, noise or pretty much everything else (they sure as hell don't soil their hands with manual labor, but have them assembled for a few grand extra). My suggestion is to make both of them into "limited editions" by replacing every plastic part possible with solid gold...
You could've taken like 5 minutes to read the article to see why there aren't any FCAT results and saved yourself some embarrassment. They're coming soon.
My point is, no matter the excuse, if FCAT results weren't available to provide the potential consumers with the proper information on what he would be purchasing, the article shouldn't have been published.
They say the results are coming in a week... Good! Let's wait a week.
Instead we get superlatives and plots about how great the card is doing, except that some other site (PCPer) had the time to present FCAT result and as of right now you would be trowing money out the window.
Good news though that same site tests the experimental drivers and show that AMD might be on a path to a solution, BUT no release date for that driver, so NO IDEA WHEN this 1k$ card would FINALLY be useful!
There is no excuse, if you have an ounce of scientific integrity, to present a paper/article without the proper data. That is embarrassing!
What I find funny is that a year ago you would have taken these numbers & most likely ran to the store with cash in hand to be the first in line to buy one of these cards. But because someone somewhere was bored & decided that straight Frame rate numbers was so 90's & decided to make some crap software that breaks things down to each & every frame you now can not decide if a card is good or not withoout these fcat numbers. If any given card produces smooth frame rate in a game at the monitors res & refresh then it is a good card. But if all your looking at is unlocking the refresh & spending all of your time bench testing then enjoy your beloved fcat. myself I tend to enjoy actually playing the games I will let others spend their time worrying about the fcat numbers if that is all that is important to them.
Like I said if a given card can hold its frames at my monitors refresh then that is all thats important.
I may have been a bit harsh in my last post. I went to that site read the review on the 7990 & then read the fallow up review about the prototype 2 drivers http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Frame-... and AMD is indeed on the right path on sorting this out.
I myself have never noticed these issues in my games because I am normally to involved in the action or story to notice the tiny glitches or runt frames as everyone is pointing out.
I'd like to ask what mode was Titan in for compute tests? Was it Single or double precision. (Can't test it yet unfortunately as I do have Titan myself)
No comment about the game bundle in the conclusion? 8(not one or two) NEW and FREE and TOP(most of them) games don't count when deciding about a $999 card? I don't think that everyone is downloading games from torrents.
I'd think that over the lifetime of this card one would/could easily recuperate his/her expenditure with bitcoins & as such given the possible improvements in performance especially with future driver updates this dual GPU card is a much better deal over the titan or GTX 690, again over a long(er) period of time not counting the short term drawbacks !
Umm did you miss the part where the game bundle is worth ~350 $ in itself ? The bitcoin mining is an added advantage & unless you think its asinine for one to go down that route, FYI the bundled games are also resold, it's disingenuous for anyone to suggest that mining bitcoin isn't worth it !
Uhm, that Bundle is only "worth $350" to those who would USE it, as in those who haven't already purchased the games, let alone those who wouldn't play them (I never was a Tomb Raider or Bioshock fan, and I already have Crysis 3 and FC3). Think a little bigger next time.
The point still stands regardless of the game bundle, its like saying the free accessories you get with your phone/tablet are useless because you have a better pair of headphones at home ! The same goes for bitcoin mining, like discount coupons you don't necessarily have to use them but they certainly aren't worthless for people who actually do care about every penny they spend !
Speaking as one of those wackos that still plays games on a CRT, I have to admit that the entire state of GPUs is pretty bad. You've got to spend a mortgage payment just to get over 120fps @ 1080p maxed out on recent titles. Software seems to have evolved tremendously, offering cinematic levels of detail, but GPUs have not kept pace. The move to 60Hz LCD has sadly let GPU manufacturers off the hook. If we're looking at mainstream 60-120fps 4K displays this year and 120fps 8K displays following close behind, then AMD and Nvidia have their work cut out for them. They need to push a LOT more pixels MUCH faster than they are now. I can tell you right now, I'm not going to be impressed by 4K @ 30Hz.
Late, not faster than the 690 and it uses a lot more power. Throw in the stuttering issues and this may be the biggest hardware disappointment of the year.
NVidia needs to up the power and VRAM on the 690 part. I am sure that the additional VRAM accounts for some of the additional 75W AMD is working with. Maybe 10W; 20W at most. NVidia needs to flex that 690 since they have the TDP room and spank AMD. I saw a lot of game favoring in the review. Luckily for Nvidia that compute isn't a big deal for today. AMD smokes it in compute.
In a few months (given the 770 and 760 Ti rumors), they might be able to do a refresh with revised GK104s and give 8 GB of RAM and clock bumps over the 690 in the same TDP.
The card I don't understand the price/performance/name of is the Titan. Looking at these charts shouldn't Nvidia have called it the GTX780? Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but it doesn't look like much more than the standard generational change we normally get once a year from Nvidia/AMD, and follows on from 2012's 6xx series. Charging a grand for it seems a little offensive, in my opinion.
3 fans? Oh please, you can do better than that. For that price I want at least 9 whizzing fans because I simply love my quiet workroom to sound like a busy airport.
I know the whole mindset of put it out on release, but I really don't see a reason to read this article without FCAT information. Anyone who would be considering a purchase will be waiting until this data comes available with the latest drivers, so the entire article IMO is moot without it.
Personally, if you're concerned about FCAT I think you'll want to wait about three months before buying any dual-GPU AMD setup. Maybe they'll surprise me and fix their drivers before then, but I'm betting on partial and flaky fixes for a little while longer.
seeing how the 7990 is a dual-gpu card, and the Titan is a single GPU, I would hope the 7990 would beat it. You'd have been a lot wiser to compare it to Nvidia's dual GPU card, the 690 (which is already faster than the Titan to begin with).
The fact remains, the titan is like 15 to 20% slower than the 690 or 7990, and its single GPU. That's pretty damn impressive that the single-gpu titan can compete with the dual-gpu cards. Toss in another titan for SLI, and it slaughters both of those cards, lolololol. And not by a small amount, but by leaps and bounds.
Also, check the 7990 benchmarks, look at the microstutter and framerate averages. They are god awfully terrible as well as power consumption. What good is a card when it's rollercoastering framerates like mad? I know Nvidia's SLI has some issues as well, but they've really fined tuned it, but AMD's crossfire and multigpu cards are just horrendous, and shouldn't even be considered.
"The fact remains, the titan is like 15 to 20% slower than the 690 or 7990, and its single GPU. That's pretty damn impressive that the single-gpu titan can compete with the dual-gpu cards. Toss in another titan for SLI, and it slaughters both of those cards, lolololol. And not by a small amount, but by leaps and bounds."
Yeah, and you would be "leaps and bounds" $2000 lighter in the bank account too (or in credit card debt like the way many home PC builders pay for the components in their rigs). You can bet $2k in price would not equal double performance what $1k could buy.
Most people can't afford to pay $2k in cash (or would not choose to do so if they could do so, as is the case of me). Plunking down that kind of money for GPU performance for gaming and not thinking twice about it (or missing it) is the exception, not the rule. That's all I'm saying. More power to you, so to speak, for bragging rights.
Without FCAT numbers this review is a complete waste of time. 3 Weeks ago Ryan wrote that FCAT numbers for crossfire will be available "next monday", and nothing has happened since. EVERY other major hardware review website has FCAT results.
Long time AnandTech fan here, but this review really drops the ball.
Like many other commenters said, if you don't have the FCAT analysis or similar, you're not ready to publish a review. As other sites are showing the 7990's frate rate is in some cases largely fictitious and has gamer-perceptible stutter. Apparently the prototype drivers will fix or improve the issue, but the release date is only "second half 2013" ie potentially months away.
Also, did your sample not have the high pitch whine caused by vibrations of the capcitors / PCB that other reviews are reporting? Can't cover what didn't happen but this appears to be a material issue with this card.
In short had I bought this case based solely on this review, I would have ended up sorely dissappointed. I trust AnandTech more than that and don't want to see this trust erode.
You have to hand it to AMD. Looking at the benchmark games, six out of ten are already Gaming Evolved titles that were included in a bundle by AMD. Of the four that are not, Battlefield 3 will almost certainly be updated to BF4 this year when the Gaming Evolved version shows up.
Control the way the benchmark games are developed, control the benchmarks, and look better by comparison. It's smart and I bet it costs a lot less money than actually releasing new cards every year.
Here's a thought Ryan; You didn't have enough time to get the FCAT results together, and you are releasing a review of a product that at best is 2 weeks away (can you say SUPER SOFT LAUNCH). So how's about you HOLD THE REVIEW until release or at least until you have a proper review ready.
The last couple years has seen Anandtech flip/flop constantly on this point. And while I don't feel Anandtech is biased towards one or the other be it AMD/Intel or AMD/NVIDIA, it just looks bad when one time you hold a review and other times incomplete articles get thrown out to beat the NDA....
i currently own the powercolor 7990 and i have to say the driver releases have changed the performance exponentially. the card was downright disappointing playing crysis 3 using driver 13.2 but after 13.5 there is a much smoother gaming experience. i really dont think that it matters if AMD has better architecture if they cant release good drivers. *i guess it should be said that this is my first AMD card in my 7-8 years of gaming. i used to be a nvidia fanboy XD
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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.HisDivineOrder - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
They bring a fantastic cooler that prioritizes silence and convenience to have SLI in a system that doesn't have two PCIe slots available for them. Plus, you always had the option of quad-SLI that's a little harder to do with four 680's.That said, I think anyone buying a 690 over a Titan now is pretty stupid. It's not about the speed difference. It's that if you're in the market for a $1k GPU, go for the one that won't be running out of memory with next year's PS4/next Xbox ports.
extremesheep - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Table typo...should the first be "7990"?extremesheep - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Err...should page 1, table 1, column 1 be "7990" instead of "7970"?Ryan Smith - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
You may be seeing an old, cached copy. That was fixed about 25 minutes ago.code65536 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Any chance we could get Tomb Raider in future benchmark tests?Ryan Smith - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
In the desktop tests? No. We keep the tests capped at 10 so that it's a manageable load when we need to redo everything, such as with the 7990 launch. At this point the desktop benchmark suite is set for at least the immediate future.VulgarDisplay - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
4th paragraph: Incorrectly stated that Tahiti has 48 rops.Flamencor - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
What a mediocre review! In your conclusions, you mention nothing about how AMD absolutely spanked NVIDIA in compute performance and synthetics! It is 75 watts more power hungry, and in exchange you get substantially more memory and a total win on compute and synthetics! I know synthetics aren't actual gaming numbers, but they're indicative of how the card will stand up to future games. The fact that the card has far better synthetics says a lot about it's longevity. The card looks like a great card (although quite late)! I'm no fanboy, but why can't people just write a legitimately upbeat and positive review about an amazing part?Warren21 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Ryan typically has a slight undertone of NVIDIA bias; it can be found in most of his articles. That being said, the GTX 600 series are some amazing cards. I'd love to have a GK104-based card to replace my aged 6870 1GB.CiccioB - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
This kind of compute benchmarks based on OpenCL are quite useless. No professional applications use OpenCL and nvidia doesn't really put all its efforts in optimizing their OpenCL drivers.You may be surprise to know that REAL applications that really need GPU assisted computation use CUDA. And thus you have the option to use nvidia GPU computation or nothing else.
That's for how good is OpenCL. It may be open, it may be something AMD needs to show good (useless) graphs, but in real word none is going to use it for serious stuff.
3D renderers are a meaningful example: apart the useless SmallLuxMark benchmark, professional engines use CUDA. AMD is not there with whatever "devasting" computational solution you may believe they have. That's why nvidia holds more than 80% of the professional market and it's the only one having GPUs solutions for HPC while AMD just struggles to sell consumer products.
By the way, goo review, though a double Titan solution may have been added to make it more interesting (especially for power consumption) :)
A5 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
People use OpenCL all the time. You have no idea what you're talking about.bigboxes - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Then you might as well had a double 7990 in your fantasy world.Freakie - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
It's already long been discussed, Nvidia's drop in Compute performance. Nvidia decided to focus their consumer cards on what they are meant for, gaming, and not overly engineer their GPU's to be heavy hitters for compute performance. There a number of instances where the GTX 580 is better at compute than the 680 is. As Ryan mentioned, the price AMD pays for those gains is in much higher power consumption which of course makes it harder for budget minded buyers to get into AMD. Having to spend an extra $30 on your PSU makes a big difference in a $600 build when you're trying to stretch every dollar and Nvidia has shifted to focus quite heavily in the budget build areas and this is one of the ways they are doing it.And no, the synthetics say absolutely nothing about the longevity of a card. Longevity of a card is always the support that the GPU developer (AMD/Nvidia) and game developers give it. Software makes or breaks a GPU's ability to be useful, which is why we have a plethora of Driver updates and game patches and why things are programmed using unified tools and languages and why new GPU's keep certain features of their architecture throughout many generations. There is reason why Nvidia 7xxx and 6xxx series GPU's have suddenly become insufficient when they, at least the 79xx, lasted a VERY long time. Hardware shifted too far away fundamentally from those older cards and so software (games) made for newer cards simply did not have the hardware architecture of older cards in mind and now the utterly fail in some games. If you want longevity in your GPU, then just buy the latest architecture from whichever company you prefer, make sure it's not a rebranded version of a previous series, and you'll get the maximum lifespan out of it.
lmcd - Friday, April 26, 2013 - link
It's pretty irrelevant for this card given that the 7990 posted one significant win over the 7970...xTRICKYxx - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Love the review. With having to compete with the GTX 690 and Titan, this is the correct response AMD provided. I think it should be priced at $849 or something around there to sway buyers.On paper the 7990 is faster than all of Nvidia's products overall, but its high power consumption may be a turn off for some.
On another note, 320.00 is an awesome driver release.
abhishek6893 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
AMD 7990 is much faster than NVIDIA's TITAN.CiccioB - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Yessss.... It also uses twice the power though...Beavermatic - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
LOL.... considering the 7990 is a dual-gpu card, I would hope its faster than a Titan, given titan is a single-gpu powerhouse. But only marginally, which shows how powerful the Titan really is.shing3232 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
where could i get AMD CCC 13.5?Sancus - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
It would be nice if you guys got one of the PNK321 3840x2160 monitors and tested it with this card(and some other setups like CF 7970s, maybe Titans using borderless windowed...). Right now AMD has the only solution for fullscreen 4k gaming at 60hz because this monitor shows up as two displays when you run it at 60hz and thus without 2x1 Eyefinity you can't get a single display surface. Nvidia's only comparable solution is Mosaic but it's only for Quadro cards.Anyway, it would be nice to find out whether 3840x2160 gaming is viable with the 7990.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
One of our goals this year is to get a 4K monitor. But if so it will be a bit more mundane; something cheaper and more accessible, and something that can do 4K off of 1 DP 1.2 connection and present itself as one monitor.mayankleoboy1 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
How do you use SSAA in Crysis:Warhead ?Ryan Smith - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
You can force it through the drivers on both AMD and NVIDIA cards.Veteranv2 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
One giant massive pro for the 7990 is compute performance. Nvidia clearly misses the ball there.StealthGhost - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Massive...for the 5% of people who buy cards like this and don't gameVeteranv2 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Not all graphic cards are bought for gaming....And certainly in the future, compute for GPU will be more and more important.
Have you looked at the graphs? AMD has a GIANT leap over Nvidia.
Ktracho - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
I think the compute benchmarking may be flawed. How many people who buy the Titan for compute will use OpenCL? I suspect almost all would be using CUDA. Since CUDA isn't available on AMD cards, I think a better benchmark would be HPL, which is a common benchmark in the HPC world. This would allow each manufacturer to show how much sustained performance a given card is capable of achieving, without being limited by the constraint of having to use OpenCL or DirectCompute, or whatever. Without such benchmark results, all that can be concluded without reservation is that if you must use OpenCL, then you really should limit yourself to AMD (at least for now).BrightCandle - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Lets be clear, you went live without FCAT results, which are singularly the most important aspect of reviewing this card as every other site has shown. Instead you chose to go with single FPS numbers, again.Pages upon pages of useless numbers, because the card doesn't actually display those frames. Using an older driver would have been better than using a prototype driver users aren't expecting to use for at least another month.
MartinT - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
I agree, the data set in this review is of very limited import, especially for a CF-on-a-stick solution.You probably should have devoted more time to getting frame times into your workflow, and less time benchmarking so many games using less than relevant methodology.
Looking forward to your write up of the frame time data, but this article is a serious waste of time on your part, I'm afraid.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Obviously we planned to have full FCAT data for this, but fate wasn't so agreeable. In any case FCAT is meant to augment our FPS data, not replace it. So we needed to have the FPS numbers before we could dig into FCAT for the full breakdown.And as a point of clarification, we aren't using the prototype driver for these results. We're using Catalyst 13.5b2, which should see a public release in the very near future. The prototype driver is another driver entirely, which we aren't using for these tests.
TheJian - Saturday, April 27, 2013 - link
I said a week or two ago you'd find an excuse to leave out fcat...LOL. You did. Even come up with a problem nobody else has, and show a large boost to AMD that places like tomshardware don't show while showing NV cards slower than their benchmarks in the exact same games and resolutions.Just like the percent gains in the driver post a few days ago (as I posted all of your %'s were lower than NV's own page which I linked to), you have NV scoring lower than other reviews.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6913/nvidia-r319-ser...
Read the last comment people...They seem to lie a lot here and it's not surprising AMD chose to talk ONLY to this site recently and avoided access even to these guys to the driver team working on the "ISSUES" AMD has.
Heck toms last page title is this:
"Can The World’s Best Bundle Save Radeon HD 7990?"
ROFL...That pretty much sums up what they found...AMD sucks currently when FCAT is thrown in the picture.
But even leaving that out they put 5 gamers in a pepsi/coke style blind play test. ALL 5 CHOSE NV 690 gtx as the better card. They even note both Titan and 690GTX gave a better gaming experience.
It's funny you didn't mention what tom's found with noise:
"It’s only unfortunate that power-related vibrations generate more volume than the coolers themselves."
hmmm....
I guess you guys will keep claiming something about fcat problems until AMD solves their issues just as I've said before. This site is really losing credibility.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7990...
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Ra...
"Perhaps they are using multiple displays for Eyefinity/Surround setups - in that case, the HD 7990 has different but equally traumatic problems. In our testing, nearly every other frame generated by all of our games tested are dropped and never shown to the gamer, resulting in frame rates at about half of what they should be and half of what is being reported by some other testing methods. That's just not acceptable. We are working on another story that directly compares the issues of Eyefinity and Surround that we hope to have up by next week along with some videos to demonstrate those complicated issues. "
Other people draw the exact OPPOSITE conclusions from this site's conclusions...LOL. “traumatic problems” in multi-monitor setups is a pretty harsh thing to say correct?
But then you come up with this zinger:
"As we’ve seen in the past AMD does a bit better than NVIDIA at multi-monitor resolutions, so while the 7990 trails the GTX 690 at 2560, it immediately jumps ahead at 5760."
From your shogun page...How much does AMD pay you guys to say complete opposites of other review sites using FCAT results? Are they completely funding your site at this point or what?
"It’s not a problem at this moment, but 2GB at multi-monitor resolutions in particular is going to be a wall very soon, and 2560 may not be too far behind. 2GB per GPU was reasonable in 2012, but now it’s a year later and things change. So for as little as we can predict something to be future-proof, AMD certainly seems to have an edge."
Yeah, get back to me when you're not making up stuff that isn't happening. As toms 5 gamers showed, NV was better all around and all 5 chose NV without knowing which was which. That kind of data matched their FCAT results exactly, even with the beta2 latest driver and the Prototype driver that won't be out until who knows when. After Q2 isn't specific...that could mean 2014. While the prototype driver helped at toms they still had issues and the gamers still chose NV even after testing again with prototype.
“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.”
Also, you tested all the way to 5760...Memory isn't a problem and won't be for a long time (don’t forget the titan has 6GB!). They don't program games for cards that barely exist. I'm guessing this is a limited run just like asus' card only had 1000, unlike NV's first titan run which was 100,000 and is sold out still today after more runs...LOL.
Without the games as incentive toms gives this on the conclusion page:
“And so we’re faced with a card that represents a huge improvement over its predecessor, but still comes up shy of its competition, and is priced like an equal.”
The games get old or I already have them. But I have to live with the card itself (especially at these prices) for probably 4-5 years or maybe more.
“For buyers that have faith in multi-GPU scaling and AMD’s ability to deliver timely profile updates the 7990 can and will handily surpass Titan by about 20%”
Umm…Have you read Hardocp’s driver review of AMD’s situation for the last year? They were 6 months late on some game optimizations and it took them a year to get drivers even near right and Enduro still sucks according to notebookcheck’s 7970 rehash review.
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/03/04/2012_amd...
They paint a pretty POOR driver picture for a year for AMD. While you’re there read their review of the 7990 which also points to multimonitor problems:
“We have sent our experiences to AMD, and hopefully there will be a fix in the future and then we can bring you TressFX performance under Eyefinity and CrossFire.”
LOL. But you think it’s all good with multi-monitor’s and think the memory future proofs it eh ryan? Everyone else thinks it sucks and has issues. Comically they found a slide showing AMD claiming to be able to do 3840x2160 in tombraider. They couldn’t get it to run there at all:
“AMD is claiming playable performance in Tomb Raider with TressFX enabled at a resolution of 3840x2160. We wanted to test this ourselves, and found where Tomb Raider stores its graphics settings in the registry. We attempted to force 3840x2160, unfortunately the game would not start at this resolution.” Followed by this little gem, “Therefore, we find it highly unlikely that AMD's claim is valid.” Well ok then. They made the same claim for crisis 3…Which again Hardocp attempted to prove (right or wrong):
“Above is our run-through at "max settings" at 3840x2160. You can clearly see that performance is very poor on the AMD Radeon HD 7990. The minimum framerate is 10 FPS, and the average is 19.4 FPS, well under 30 FPS. This level of performance is not playable in Crysis 3.”…Well ok then…Another lie shot down eh? “This claim is clearly invalid.”
Yeah, we hear you loud and clear. Two AMD claims, two AMD lies. It didn’t even work with 1.3mil pixels less res of 5760x1200 for them. They got below 30fps.
Farcry note: “GeForce GTX 680 SLI has the lowest framerates, but the smoothest overall experience thanks to SLI's non-stutter gameplay compared to CrossFire in this particular title.”
Yeah, that’s kind of what tomshardware and their 5 game players said. No stutter=BETTER gameplay.
And when they found your memory claim kicking in:
“Hitman is sensitive to VRAM capacity. In this case, the AMD Radeon HD 7990 and Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition CrossFire have the advantage thanks to the larger 3GB of VRAM per GPU. GeForce GTX 680 SLI only has 2GB per GPU.”
“The drops in performance make gameplay not possible because it hitches and lags behind as you are playing.”
So when your situation actually happens, it isn’t playable already anyway…LOL Not the minimums on all cards were under 3fps…LOL. That’s not a type man, it’s they all scored 1, 2 & 3 fps…ROFL. But you keep trying to help AMD any way you can ryan…They need it…LOL.
Their conclusion page:
“Hopefully after reading this evaluation you've come to the same question we have, "Where's the missing performance?"….So the card sucks then there too? They even manually turned up powertune 20% and got the same results. And again another site saying it: “Quite simply, AMD CrossFire is the stutterer in the room.” Yeah we know the 5 gamers said the same at toms. His 680 GTX experience however is described as this on the same page:
“I was in awe. It felt smooth, really smooth, it felt like it was running at a faster framerate than it really was.”…Yeah kind of why the 5 gamers at toms picked it too. He calls the 7990 a “BAD VALUE”.
Again, 80 pages of complaints at notebookcheck’s forums don’t lie either. People need to take all the AMD driver complaints into major consideration. Who here thinks AMD’s drivers are great and on time? We’ll be waiting months for them to fix a problem they’ve had for a year+ and enduro has had issues for as long also (notebookcheck’s first review was awful and the second fixed some but not everything, they still say it has a ways to go compared to NV). Just google 7970m & notebookcheck you’ll get there people. It’s laughable hardocp crashed trying to prove AMD’s driver claims.
PCPER’s review conclusion page says the same about drivers:
“With its performance completely dependent on CrossFire technology, the HD 7990 as a $1000 graphics card has a very hard time justifying its price. With our early testing of the Catalyst prototype driver showing positive results though, there is yet hope for CrossFire to be fixed in this generation, at least for single monitor users! But until that driver is perfected, is bug free and is presented to buyers as a made-for-primetime solution, I just cannot recommend an investment this large on the Radeon HD 7990.”
LOL…HOPE…At least for SINGLE monitor users. Ryan Shrout says TITAN for multi-monitor and 690GTX for single monitor. It seems everyone says quite the opposite of you Ryan Smith. I could keep going but hopefully people get the point. NOBODY sees it like anandtech.
Check out Techpowerup’s review also people…Shows a TON of games these guys leave out. Skyrim, Assassins Creed 3, F1 2012, Borderlands 2, StarCraft2 Heart of the Swarm, Diablo3, COD Black ops2, and World of Warcraft (awful scores for radeons on WOW). The 690GTX basically wins everything at nearly ever res. Guess that’s why NONE of these are tested at anandtech even though they are all HUGE sellers compared to crap like Warhead, Dirt Showdown. Nobody PLAYS Warhead based on server checks, and which nobody bought in the case of showdown. Makes you wonder why these two games get tested here don’t it people? Why leave out multi-million units popular sellers like these that they leave out? It’s because you’d get a very clear picture of why NV owns 65% of the gaming market. Overall in their 20 or so games Titan was 4% faster and GTX 690 was 14% faster.
The negatives they state?:
• High price
• Annoying coil noise
• Requires CrossFire game support to reach proper performance
• Many games do not scale properly in CrossFire
• Very high multi-monitor and Blu-ray power consumption
• Slim performance gains from overclocking
• Long card
Again with the COIL NOISE and of course they note all the games with crossfire issues in their review.:
“Out of eighteen titles, five did not scale, or worse, showed negative scaling. These are not small titles, but big AAA games: Assassin's Creed 3, Batman: Arkham City, F1 2012, StarCraft II, Skyrim, and World of Warcraft. What really surprises me is that this long list is the same as the one we had with our reviews of HD 7990 "New Zealand" implementations by board partners, like the ASUS ROG ARES II and PowerColor Devil 13. So either AMD does not care or can't fix CrossFire support with these games millions of people play.”
Jeez…5 out of 18 games running like CRAP and they’re all AAA titles. Is this why they are all OUT of Anandtech’s gaming suite ryan? Again I ask, how much is AMD paying you guys or do you just really love them that much?
“What is a major issue, though, is the extremely annoying coil whine the card emits as soon as it runs a 3D application.”
He notes the 690 GTX and Titan have no such issues. Also notes it OVERPOWERS the fans just as Toms said. Forget to mention this did you ryan?
“In order to overcome the frametime issues some of our colleagues reported, AMD is working on a new driver to improve things, and has provided us with it, but it's only for Windows 8 and sacrifices some performance for more constant frame delivery.”
So win7 users won’t even be expecting this HOPE driver then? OF course it slows things down also. I hope you’ll be benchmarking it rather than just telling us how AMD smoothed out play…But I doubt it. You’ll forget to mention what they already found…IT’S SLOWER WITH THE HOPE DRIVER. Nuff said I guess...Read other reviews people and judge Ryan Smith yourself.
blackoctagon - Thursday, May 2, 2013 - link
Um...you seem to have missed the fact that Ryan didn't exactly give the 7990 a glowing review mate.TheJian - Friday, May 3, 2013 - link
“For buyers that have faith in multi-GPU scaling and AMD’s ability to deliver timely profile updates the 7990 can and will handily surpass Titan by about 20%”That doesn't sound like he'd go against it as all the others I've shown flatly did. Raise your hand if you have faith in ANY amd drivers, or them being on time. Read the stuff I linked to, every site made driver comments. Look at Ryan Shrout's comment on them ignoring millions of users and still having crap drivers. Heck he basically is recommending it for "future proof" memory crap. HOGWASH. Titan has 6GB and as hardocp showed to tap out memory you end up at 3fps or less. What good is future proof crap if you can't play when at 30fps when the future kicks in?...LOL
Also, he said FCAT article coming last week. AS I said they won't write one until AMD fixes their issue. Where is this magical article? Every other big site has dealt with FCAT but this one. Strange yes?
MartinT - Saturday, May 4, 2013 - link
Ryan, this review's been out in it's misleading form for 10 days, when do you anticipate FCAT results to be published?Finraziel - Friday, July 19, 2013 - link
Well, it's been about 3 months now, so unless I'm totally missing it... I'm guessing the answer is never? Pretty crappy, guys.StealthGhost - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
It's damn late to the party to still lose to the 690 in games. I have nothing against AMD, I just wish they'd step it up, or maybe price this thing to compete.CiccioB - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
If they won't sell price will drop soon enough, If they sell there's not reason to lower it.This is possible an attempt to get a bit more money on their quite underpriced flagship GPU. nvidia sells a smaller GPUs for a higher price, meaning that AMD is not getting all the potential they could with such a solution.
However I do not know how many of these cards they can sell. AMD is famous for the no-quality of their crossfire (stuttering) and for its support (there are still many games where their crossfire do not scale at all), so spending such an amount of money for something that won't deliver a good enough experience is quite useless.
It is much better a solution made up of 2 discrete cards, so you can easily get rid of them once you (soon) become disappointed with AMD crossfire support.
Finally - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Now we can compare which company comes aorund with the LESS BUGGY dual GPU $999 "hopefully it will show twice the performance - unfortunately it rarely does" mess of a product...It's the perfect card for the 1%, because they don't have to worry about price, power draw, noise or pretty much everything else (they sure as hell don't soil their hands with manual labor, but have them assembled for a few grand extra).
My suggestion is to make both of them into "limited editions" by replacing every plastic part possible with solid gold...
Torrijos - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
So no FCAT yet for some test?!This is ridiculous! Why propagate possibly false information about a 1k$ card instead of waiting for the proper data?
PCPer has FCAT data and it's damning for AMD's tech and marketing.
A5 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
You could've taken like 5 minutes to read the article to see why there aren't any FCAT results and saved yourself some embarrassment. They're coming soon.Torrijos - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
I guess you didn't understand me!My point is, no matter the excuse, if FCAT results weren't available to provide the potential consumers with the proper information on what he would be purchasing, the article shouldn't have been published.
They say the results are coming in a week...
Good! Let's wait a week.
Instead we get superlatives and plots about how great the card is doing, except that some other site (PCPer) had the time to present FCAT result and as of right now you would be trowing money out the window.
Good news though that same site tests the experimental drivers and show that AMD might be on a path to a solution, BUT no release date for that driver, so NO IDEA WHEN this 1k$ card would FINALLY be useful!
There is no excuse, if you have an ounce of scientific integrity, to present a paper/article without the proper data. That is embarrassing!
rocky12345 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
What I find funny is that a year ago you would have taken these numbers & most likely ran to the store with cash in hand to be the first in line to buy one of these cards. But because someone somewhere was bored & decided that straight Frame rate numbers was so 90's & decided to make some crap software that breaks things down to each & every frame you now can not decide if a card is good or not withoout these fcat numbers. If any given card produces smooth frame rate in a game at the monitors res & refresh then it is a good card. But if all your looking at is unlocking the refresh & spending all of your time bench testing then enjoy your beloved fcat. myself I tend to enjoy actually playing the games I will let others spend their time worrying about the fcat numbers if that is all that is important to them.Like I said if a given card can hold its frames at my monitors refresh then that is all thats important.
rocky12345 - Thursday, April 25, 2013 - link
I may have been a bit harsh in my last post. I went to that site read the review on the 7990 & then read the fallow up review about the prototype 2 drivers http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Frame-... and AMD is indeed on the right path on sorting this out.I myself have never noticed these issues in my games because I am normally to involved in the action or story to notice the tiny glitches or runt frames as everyone is pointing out.
Klimax - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
I'd like to ask what mode was Titan in for compute tests? Was it Single or double precision. (Can't test it yet unfortunately as I do have Titan myself)Ryan Smith - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
SP mode for everything except FAH's double precision tests.yannigr - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
No comment about the game bundle in the conclusion? 8(not one or two) NEW and FREE and TOP(most of them) games don't count when deciding about a $999 card? I don't think that everyone is downloading games from torrents.A5 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
There's a comment earlier. It's not really worth mentioning in the conclusion.R0H1T - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
I'd think that over the lifetime of this card one would/could easily recuperate his/her expenditure with bitcoins & as such given the possible improvements in performance especially with future driver updates this dual GPU card is a much better deal over the titan or GTX 690, again over a long(er) period of time not counting the short term drawbacks !A5 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Don't peg your cost/benefit analysis to Bitcoins. That's dumb.R0H1T - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Umm did you miss the part where the game bundle is worth ~350 $ in itself ? The bitcoin mining is an added advantage & unless you think its asinine for one to go down that route, FYI the bundled games are also resold, it's disingenuous for anyone to suggest that mining bitcoin isn't worth it !Nfarce - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Uhm, that Bundle is only "worth $350" to those who would USE it, as in those who haven't already purchased the games, let alone those who wouldn't play them (I never was a Tomb Raider or Bioshock fan, and I already have Crysis 3 and FC3). Think a little bigger next time.Nfarce - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Oh, and those are downloads only, which are NOT resalable...unless you like passing along your personal information to the buyer.R0H1T - Thursday, April 25, 2013 - link
The point still stands regardless of the game bundle, its like saying the free accessories you get with your phone/tablet are useless because you have a better pair of headphones at home ! The same goes for bitcoin mining, like discount coupons you don't necessarily have to use them but they certainly aren't worthless for people who actually do care about every penny they spend !nathanddrews - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
GPU Bench 2013 - broken linksEvery selection I make under DX11 brings me to the following page:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/2
Speaking as one of those wackos that still plays games on a CRT, I have to admit that the entire state of GPUs is pretty bad. You've got to spend a mortgage payment just to get over 120fps @ 1080p maxed out on recent titles. Software seems to have evolved tremendously, offering cinematic levels of detail, but GPUs have not kept pace. The move to 60Hz LCD has sadly let GPU manufacturers off the hook. If we're looking at mainstream 60-120fps 4K displays this year and 120fps 8K displays following close behind, then AMD and Nvidia have their work cut out for them. They need to push a LOT more pixels MUCH faster than they are now. I can tell you right now, I'm not going to be impressed by 4K @ 30Hz.
iMacmatician - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
I noticed that too. Hopefully they fix it.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
The web devs fixed it this morning.nathanddrews - Thursday, April 25, 2013 - link
Fantastic, thanks!Wreckage - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Late, not faster than the 690 and it uses a lot more power. Throw in the stuttering issues and this may be the biggest hardware disappointment of the year.eanazag - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
NVidia needs to up the power and VRAM on the 690 part. I am sure that the additional VRAM accounts for some of the additional 75W AMD is working with. Maybe 10W; 20W at most. NVidia needs to flex that 690 since they have the TDP room and spank AMD. I saw a lot of game favoring in the review. Luckily for Nvidia that compute isn't a big deal for today. AMD smokes it in compute.iMacmatician - Friday, April 26, 2013 - link
In a few months (given the 770 and 760 Ti rumors), they might be able to do a refresh with revised GK104s and give 8 GB of RAM and clock bumps over the 690 in the same TDP.colonelclaw - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
The card I don't understand the price/performance/name of is the Titan. Looking at these charts shouldn't Nvidia have called it the GTX780? Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but it doesn't look like much more than the standard generational change we normally get once a year from Nvidia/AMD, and follows on from 2012's 6xx series. Charging a grand for it seems a little offensive, in my opinion.prime2515103 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
"The GTX 690 is a 300W card and the 7990 is a 375W card. The GTX 690 consumes around 75W less power and puts off 75W less heat, full stop."If the 690 was consuming 75W less power and dissipating 75W less heat, it would be drawing 150W less in total. How did you calculate this?
tk11 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Consumed power = dissipated heat. He's just pointing out that the increased power draw also equates to an increase of 75W of heat output.sulu1977 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
3 fans? Oh please, you can do better than that. For that price I want at least 9 whizzing fans because I simply love my quiet workroom to sound like a busy airport.tk11 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
More fans != more noise because more fans running at lower speeds make less noise than fewer fans running at higher speeds.chadwilson - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
I know the whole mindset of put it out on release, but I really don't see a reason to read this article without FCAT information. Anyone who would be considering a purchase will be waiting until this data comes available with the latest drivers, so the entire article IMO is moot without it.JarredWalton - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Personally, if you're concerned about FCAT I think you'll want to wait about three months before buying any dual-GPU AMD setup. Maybe they'll surprise me and fix their drivers before then, but I'm betting on partial and flaky fixes for a little while longer.Beavermatic - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
looks like Nvidia already responded with a Titan Ultra model today...http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Nvidia-Teases-GTX...
seeing how the 7990 is a dual-gpu card, and the Titan is a single GPU, I would hope the 7990 would beat it. You'd have been a lot wiser to compare it to Nvidia's dual GPU card, the 690 (which is already faster than the Titan to begin with).
The fact remains, the titan is like 15 to 20% slower than the 690 or 7990, and its single GPU. That's pretty damn impressive that the single-gpu titan can compete with the dual-gpu cards. Toss in another titan for SLI, and it slaughters both of those cards, lolololol. And not by a small amount, but by leaps and bounds.
Also, check the 7990 benchmarks, look at the microstutter and framerate averages. They are god awfully terrible as well as power consumption. What good is a card when it's rollercoastering framerates like mad? I know Nvidia's SLI has some issues as well, but they've really fined tuned it, but AMD's crossfire and multigpu cards are just horrendous, and shouldn't even be considered.
Nfarce - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
"The fact remains, the titan is like 15 to 20% slower than the 690 or 7990, and its single GPU. That's pretty damn impressive that the single-gpu titan can compete with the dual-gpu cards. Toss in another titan for SLI, and it slaughters both of those cards, lolololol. And not by a small amount, but by leaps and bounds."Yeah, and you would be "leaps and bounds" $2000 lighter in the bank account too (or in credit card debt like the way many home PC builders pay for the components in their rigs). You can bet $2k in price would not equal double performance what $1k could buy.
Beavermatic - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
I've got (2) Titan's in SLI and I didn't use a credit card, just sayn'Nfarce - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Most people can't afford to pay $2k in cash (or would not choose to do so if they could do so, as is the case of me). Plunking down that kind of money for GPU performance for gaming and not thinking twice about it (or missing it) is the exception, not the rule. That's all I'm saying. More power to you, so to speak, for bragging rights.Shark321 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Without FCAT numbers this review is a complete waste of time. 3 Weeks ago Ryan wrote that FCAT numbers for crossfire will be available "next monday", and nothing has happened since. EVERY other major hardware review website has FCAT results.brucek2 - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Long time AnandTech fan here, but this review really drops the ball.Like many other commenters said, if you don't have the FCAT analysis or similar, you're not ready to publish a review. As other sites are showing the 7990's frate rate is in some cases largely fictitious and has gamer-perceptible stutter. Apparently the prototype drivers will fix or improve the issue, but the release date is only "second half 2013" ie potentially months away.
Also, did your sample not have the high pitch whine caused by vibrations of the capcitors / PCB that other reviews are reporting? Can't cover what didn't happen but this appears to be a material issue with this card.
In short had I bought this case based solely on this review, I would have ended up sorely dissappointed. I trust AnandTech more than that and don't want to see this trust erode.
HisDivineOrder - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
You have to hand it to AMD. Looking at the benchmark games, six out of ten are already Gaming Evolved titles that were included in a bundle by AMD. Of the four that are not, Battlefield 3 will almost certainly be updated to BF4 this year when the Gaming Evolved version shows up.Control the way the benchmark games are developed, control the benchmarks, and look better by comparison. It's smart and I bet it costs a lot less money than actually releasing new cards every year.
7Enigma - Friday, April 26, 2013 - link
Here's a thought Ryan; You didn't have enough time to get the FCAT results together, and you are releasing a review of a product that at best is 2 weeks away (can you say SUPER SOFT LAUNCH). So how's about you HOLD THE REVIEW until release or at least until you have a proper review ready.The last couple years has seen Anandtech flip/flop constantly on this point. And while I don't feel Anandtech is biased towards one or the other be it AMD/Intel or AMD/NVIDIA, it just looks bad when one time you hold a review and other times incomplete articles get thrown out to beat the NDA....
Chaser - Friday, April 26, 2013 - link
When I decide I need three 30 inch monitors I'll consider a $1000.00 video card. Meh.Mr. Mephisto - Monday, April 29, 2013 - link
i currently own the powercolor 7990 and i have to say the driver releases have changed the performance exponentially. the card was downright disappointing playing crysis 3 using driver 13.2 but after 13.5 there is a much smoother gaming experience. i really dont think that it matters if AMD has better architecture if they cant release good drivers.*i guess it should be said that this is my first AMD card in my 7-8 years of gaming. i used to be a nvidia fanboy XD
Parablooper - Monday, April 29, 2013 - link
There's no way I can afford it, but that doesn't stop me from getting really fucking pumped.Biln3 - Tuesday, April 30, 2013 - link
looks like we need to buy 2 6970s instead of a 6990Shark321 - Friday, May 3, 2013 - link
There is a rumour floating around in forums that Anandtech did not post any FCAT results (like promised 4 weeks ago), because of a deal with AMD.AbdullA - Thursday, May 16, 2013 - link
of course Nvidia :)