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Posted 04/24/2013 at 12:05am | by Josh Noremhttp://www.maximumpc...7990_first_look
Nvidia’s GTX 690 finally has some serious competition
Today the embargo is lifting on the AMD Radeon HD 7990 that was teased back at GDC, so here’s the TLDR version; yes it’s just as fast and a tiny bit quieter than the Nvidia GTX 690, and it includes a mega bad *** eight-AAA-game bundle and costs the same price as its nemesis, making it quite a tempting package for those with the budget for it. Whether or not that will be enough to convince anyone to actually buy it remains to be seen of course, but at least AMD can no longer be knocked for conceding the $1,000 GPU market to Nvidia. It also signifies somewhat of a resurgence for AMD, who first came off the bench late last year and early this year with its totally righteous Never Settle game bundles, then attacked the midrange recently with the surprisingly powerful and quiet Radeon HD 7790 card, and is now going for the jugular with the dual-slot and triple-fan HD 7990. Whether AMD wins or loses that battle is slightly less important than the overall significance of this introduction, as in our minds its designed to not only beat Nvidia’s offering, but also to send a very clear signal to hardcore PC enthusiasts everywhere — AMD is still in the game, and doesn’t intend to give an inch of ground to Nvidia any time soon.
Benchmarks
When it comes to performance, the card performs just as well as you would imagine, if you were imagining that AMD would only bring this to market when it was sure it could beat Nvidia’s card. To do otherwise would be a fool’s errand, so naturally the HD 7990 is faster than the GTX 690 in most tests that we ran, but not in all of them (see benchmark chart below). Overall performance with both the GTX 690 is very close though, enough to effectively call it a draw. It's not as fast as the overclocked and water-cooled Asus Ares II, however, but nobody can buy those cards so the point is somewhat moot. When compared to a CrossFireX setup, the results are in favor of the HD 7990, but the CrossFireX results were achieved last month with an older driver, so it's quite possible that two cards would be a tiny bit faster than the HD 7990 if using updated drivers. Even more surprising is the card's lack of noise and heat, as the other dual Tahiti boards we've seen so far have either been water-cooled (Ares II) or so loud and hot as to require earplugs and heat shields (Devil 13), but not the HD 7990. It got up to about 85C in gaming and was a tiny bit audible, but not "loud" at all, which is an amazing development for AMD. We'd say all in all it's probably just a bit quieter than the GTX 690, and gets about as hot.
Benchmarks
"On the one hand, we’re pretty pumped to see the HD 7990 finally arrive, as it’s more than a year late to market, and its absence made a lot of people question AMD’s commitment to the uber high-end PC gaming market. Since AMD has sort of abandoned the high-end CPU market, having them leave the same GPU market would mean nothing but bad things for a lot of consumers, so we're stoked to see them join the fight. The card itself presents a very strong option for buyers looking to drop a large bill on a GPU given the fact that it includes over $500 of Kick *** games. If the bundle wasn't included, we'd say you could flip a coin over whether or not to get this card or the GTX 690, but the gaming bundle clearly gives AMD a significant advantage against its competitors."
Now that the HD 7990 has launched, we have to wonder whether or not Nvidia will counter AMD's launch with the rumored GTX Titan Ultra, but it sure seems likely the way the two have been going at it lately. This effectively means the GPU cold war that has existed throughout 2012 is now largely over, with the two companies fired up and ready to wage war this summer. All we can say to that is "bring it on!"
Read on...whole article http://www.maximumpc...7990_first_look
