28 replies to this topic

[Bad Karma 308]

AMD working on Malta dual-chip card?

Written by Fuad Abazovic
http://www.fudzilla....-dual-chip-card


1GHz+ version of HD 7990


It looks like AMD is not done with HD 7000 series Radeons.

"We have heard from multiple sources now that AMD is working on a card codenamed Malta. The Malta is a dual-chip card and we are not sure if it is based on Tahiti like HD 7990 cards."

"This card should come in the next few months but some of our sources do indicate that the card will launch soon."

"These GPUs will likely beat the 1050MHz that Asus delivers with its dual-chip water cooled ASUS ARES2-6GD5, 2x Radeon HD 7970 card"

"The launch of the card is expected in the first half of 2013, but we don’t have a better date than that."

Whole Article :
http://www.fudzilla....-dual-chip-card

Edited by Bad Karma 308, 11 March 2013 - 12:01 PM.

[Egomane]

A little bit misleading title, don't you think?
AMD hasn't confirmed anything yet.

But if it is true, this card could give the GTX690s a run for their money.

[Bad Karma 308]

Yep , sorry on the title, good catch, almost got myself in trouble. I was pulling from a soon to be released article when I changed tracks and decided to use what was already available. Missed reverting the title.

But I agree, the 7990 should re-energize the competition at the high end. However, a ittle birdy told me that there may already be an answer to the 7990 already waiting in the wings.........

Edited by Bad Karma 308, 11 March 2013 - 12:07 PM.

[Egomane]

You mean the rumored twin titan?

[Catamount]

Considering the colossal disappointment Titan has proved to be, I hope not. The original was like 30% more powerful than a 7970GE for almost 300% of the price. A dual Titan would be... wasteful.

Still, who knows what Nvidia has up its sleeve right now.

[Bad Karma 308]

Colossal disappointment has only been in the price/performance. It is still the fastest single GPU card out there. Some are still willing to pay for top dog no matter the cost. Besides, a 690 /7990 still is handicapped if the game (like MWo) doesn't support SLI. In such cases you get a single GPU card that also takes a hit from the SLI/XF overhead circuitry.

When I bought Titans direct from my Nvidia reps they are far closer in price to the 680s then the 690s. Now I don't know if that is because I'm purchasing in bulk, Government pricing, or special pricing for getting them so much access and feedback from our labs. Probably a combination of those But knowing what I pay and what I see them at for retail, makes me think that this initial high price may be temporary or a result of retailers positioning the product.

The other side of the coin is that the GK104 is literally half of a GK110. I suspect, that with what I've seen from the Gk110 Quatros, that the Titan may very well have some sort of governor in place, with Nvidia slowly upping performance with succesive driver releases.



We'll see.

Edited by Bad Karma 308, 11 March 2013 - 12:49 PM.

[Catamount]

There really isn't anything that matters other than price/performance. Even if you cared about nothing but performance, and don't mind paying a billion times more for something 2% faster, you could just buy a 7970GE and a good liquid cooler, OC it to outperform the Titan, and probably pay less. Or you could buy 3 7970s and end up with something that has no MS, and in 99% of game titles, would hand the Titan its own ***.

Unless you only wanted to play games with no multi-GPU support, it's a pointless card.

Now, if Nvidia is governing the card, that's a different story, but why would they intentionally take all the steam out of their own publicity stunt? Do you know how many people I hear talking about Titan nowadays? Basically zero. No one cares, because it's crappy value and an unimpressive performance leap.

Edited by Catamount, 11 March 2013 - 01:12 PM.

[Chiyeko Kuramochi]

The only uses I see for a titan are some one who desperately wants fast and single GPU only, or some one who was to much money and wants to triple sli the things.

So for most of us folk it is just useless and if it was priced cheaper aka closer to a 680 than Nvidea would be shooting themselves in foot seeing the 680 keeps selling well.

Anyhow curious to see what this AMD card could do, but I bet it will be in the 1k range again.

[Bad Karma 308]

A 7970GE is already an overclocked version of the 7970, so there isn't a whole lot of head room left to play in.

Other than price, it is sitting in a traditional performance position. The king GPUs has always been beaten by the 2 top of the line, but smaller, GPUs from the previous generation. A 30% gain over the 680 is actually well ahead of what you usually see from a new chipset over the previous one.

But you are right, the price makes it an odd duck. If it was sitting around the $600 point (just above the 680) then it would make far more sense. Or even better if it had pushed the entire 600 series down in price and it took the top slot it would rank far better. Other than what I mentioned above, the only other reason I can think off for it being a $1K chip is that they are trying to recoup some of the $7K-$9K that a full up GK110 costs.

I just got though testing 3 way SLI with Titans. Their performance scales very well. However I found them far more useful independently running 3x 30 inch monitors at 2560 x 1600 each.

Should the twin Titan appear then I will have no second thoughts about getting rid of my 2x 690 setup in favor of 2x twin Titans for my workstation .

Chiyeko Kuramochi, on 11 March 2013 - 01:25 PM, said:

The only uses I see for a titan are some one who desperately wants fast and single GPU only.....

Chiyeko, It isn't talked about much but both SLi and Crossfire do have a major Achilles heel. They use a portion of one of the GPUs to act as a command circuit to control the other. The circuit basically takes the image and assigns one GPU to work 1/2 of that image. Be it top-bottom/left-right/interlaced.. or other combination of the screen. Also, lot of game engines just aren't well coded to act well with twin GPUs, so your not utilizing either one to their fullest. The other side of it is that the command circuit often stumbles, which then causes the SLI to revert to Single GPu and then wait X amount of cycles to re-sync the link interface. This can happen at the milli-second level so it isn't always noticeable to the user. Remember that a frame rate is averaging X amount of frames per each second, to a computer 1 second is like an eternity, and a lot can happen in a 1 second time period.

But, some of the hardware engineers I've talked with have thrown out numbers in the range of 50% of the time that both Crossfire and SLI aren't actually engaged during processing.

Edited by Bad Karma 308, 11 March 2013 - 02:14 PM.

[Catamount]

Oh, believe me, a 7970GE has a lot of headroom. I mean, any 7970 does, really. Without voltage modifications, getting to 1150/1600 isn't that uncommon, and with enough voltage, a good Sapphire card can get up to 1300/1800. That's a 30% overclock, core, on air, over 7970GE clocks (41% over stock 7970 clocks). I can only imagine what I could do on water

Edited by Catamount, 11 March 2013 - 02:52 PM.

[Chiyeko Kuramochi]

7970 does have room I mean I can run the chip of a non ghz stable at 1.2 and people have been able to get it to 1.3.

Not sure, though I believe the ghz edition are in the end just the same chip, but just picked from the lot?

As for crossfire/SLI I know about the issues, but still I don't see that warranting the price of the titan. Nvidea would have done better putting it at 650-700USD for the reference model that would put it just above the top line of the 680. However even than it would harm the 680 quite a bit. In the end to me the titan was made in fear of a next amd move which didn't come ending Nvidea with a card that was not really needed in the normal line up, but had ample of power so they decided to upmarket it and make it look very special.

[Bad Karma 308]

Cat,
Oh' I'm believer in the 7970GEs, AMD put out some very nice silicon with those chips. In fact a have a small stack of them sitting right here next to the desk. Other than a few tests, I've just had no use for them, which is a shame, a few more months and I'll be obligated to throw most of them into our disintegrator.

Chiyeko,
The GE version 's only difference is that it has already been overclocked. GE just means that the clock has exceeded the Gigahertz threshold. So it is merely a tweak to the clock and Ram. So yeah, you should be able to take a regular 7970 and clock it just as high as a GHZ edition. Some of the manufacturers do use better voltage caps to help ensure better stability and reliability.

I was just commenting that the GE is already eating into the overclocking headroom that the 7970 is capable of obtaining. The GE just offers to run that much consistently harder without threatening the cards vitals or warranty.

On a side note: the overclocked Titans have already started to pop up. http://www.newegg.co...N82E16814130898

Edited by Bad Karma 308, 11 March 2013 - 03:10 PM.

[Catamount]

It does seem to me that the act of picking parts that will go to 1GHZ core, minimum, is basically creating a higher bin of chip though. You're setting a slightly higher minimum bar for your core clocks, so it seems to me that, on average, you should OC further.

Although you're right that the differences aren't going to be that meaningful. I'm an OC enthusiast and I didn't bother with a 7970GE, because sapphire's normal Dual-X OC model gets the same stock clocks, a good cooler and the same additional power phase (lets you ramp RAM clocks to absurd levels), and is cheaper than even a basic GE. For OCers, I agree that the normal 7970 is probably ultimately the way to go unless you feel like paying top dollar for somewhere between zero and almost zero OC headroom.

Edited by Catamount, 11 March 2013 - 03:51 PM.

[Chiyeko Kuramochi]

True, but lets not forget a majority of people will not even think about OC their GPU, I mean when I brought my current card it was in my mind like an option to get more life out of it, but yeah as things went on and I learned more and more I started to OC more. To me it is just a fun thing to do, the benchmarks rarely ever leave my PC and it is just getting that bit extra.

That bit extra I really need though planetside 2 is a heavy burden! (MWO which I actually forgot about sorry all, but right now it just crashes, so waiting for the patch)

[Bad Karma 308]

Cat,

This popped up on Maximum PC today: http://www.maximumpc..._gtx_690_review

It doesn't pit the Xfired 7970GEs on the charts, but instead uses the regular 7970 in crossfire.

That and EVGA now puts out a superclocked version of the 690 as well.

Still it's a good read.

Edited by Bad Karma 308, 18 March 2013 - 06:02 PM.

[Catamount]

Unforunately, Maximum PC is the epitome of an outlier in their results anyways, because of their extremely off the wall game selection (in fairness, Far Cry 2 was used a lot for a long time, despite the fact that it should never be included in reviews due to it's extremely odd performance characteristics)

On the subject of interesting reads though, the 7990 is definitely not the card indicated by average FPS measurements, according to Tom's

http://www.tomshardw...-x2,3329-8.html

Despite them still labelling it the fastest GPU in their testing, fps-wise, that page still clearly shows that it suffers microstuttering badly.

[Bad Karma 308]

Yeah, I've gone through the Tom's articles a few times and have taken up your Micro-Stutter question. We recently had to swap out some of the systems on the Titan at Oak Ridge so I should be meeting with a few of Nvidia's engineers here in the near future. If I can corner some of the engineers off of the main discussion, I'll see if I can ask that question for you. I can't promise that I'll understand it any better though....

Edited by Bad Karma 308, 18 March 2013 - 06:36 PM.

[Catamount]

Hah! Fair enough

Watch them not have any clue either. I'm hoping that eventually they'll be able to fix it on dual GPU setups, because then it'll be a really great technology.

[Chiyeko Kuramochi]

Well I guess I am going to find out soon how this micro stuttering would affect me, my RMA cards was concidered damaged and a replacement is on its way so I be crossfiring two 7970 (gotta use afterburner I guess and get the clocks sorted out was thinking 1.1 clock and 1.5 on vram on both)

Just hope my corsair 850AX can hold up to these power hungry cards

[Catamount]

Well if you're just running a single monitor, I imagine the effect would be negligible, given the framerates you'll be putting out in most games, especially at 1100/1500 (which most 7970s will do without a problem at stock voltage). Eyefinity might be a different story.

Still, it's looking more and more like 3 7870s might really be the way to go for a setup in that price range

And yeah, I think an 850W PSU can handle a couple of 200W-250W cards, unless you plan much higher OCing and/or have a ridiculous CPU overclock. Even in that situation, I'd be shocked if your system passed 600W in any gaming situation.

Edited by Catamount, 19 March 2013 - 07:25 AM.