AMD claims the board has “96 GB/s” of “inter-GPU bandwidth,” but do the math with me. The twin GPUs are joined by a bridge chip from PLX with 48 lanes of PCIe bandwidth, 16 lanes to each GPU and 16 to the PCIe slot. The true memory capacity is half that, with 3GB allocated to each GPU, but the memory interface is effectively 768 bits wide, with all the bandwidth that entails. With dual Tahiti GPUs, it has a total of 4096 shader ALUs providing 8.2 teraflops of compute power.
Pretty much anything else you can say about the 7990 requires big numbers. They claim air turbulence, not fan noise, creates noise in most coolers this cooling setup reduces turbulence by pushing air down directly through the heatsink fins. AMD has put some work into searching out a quieter cooling solution. Heck, the 7990 seems like a faint whisper next to the reference 7970’s cooler. This card is much, much quieter than its predecessor, the Radeon HD 6990, which set some records on the Damage Labs decibel meter. The biggest revelation about this reference design comes courtesy of those three fans spread atop a massive, board-long array of heatpipes and fins. Also, the level of refinement evident in this card and cooler goes well beyond what we’d expect out of a science project from a board maker. AMD tells us this card will be widely available through all of its partners, a true mass-market product. The fact Malta exists as a reference design from AMD matters, though.
#Amd radeon hd 7990 code
This thing even has its own code name, “Malta.” AMD tells us New Zealand is an umbrella code name that refers to all dual-Tahiti products from itself and its partners, including those in the FirePro lineup, while Malta refers specifically to this reference design, proving once and for all that codenames are almost infinitely malleable. Now here we are, well over a year since the Radeon HD 7970 was introduced, looking at an official Radeon HD 7990 reference card. Then came GDC last month, when we got our first peek at the 7990. At that time, the company told us it had more 7000-series products on the way.
#Amd radeon hd 7990 series
We figured that was it for the 7990, but then the news broke that AMD would be extending the tenure of the Radeon HD 7000 series until the end of 2013. We tried to get our hands on one of the water-cooled Asus ARES II cards for review but were told the cards were completely sold out practically as soon as the product was introduced. That product didn’t arrive as anticipated, and we nearly gave up hope that it ever would.Įventually, several board makers, including Asus and PowerColor, slapped two Tahiti chips onto a single card, but those products didn’t ship until late last year, in extremely limited volumes. You see, back when AMD unveiled the Radeon HD 7970 at the end of 2011, the firm let slip a code name, New Zealand, for an upcoming dual-GPU graphics card and said it was “coming soon.” Since we in the media are given to fits of speculation, we pretty much expected to see a dual-Tahiti graphics card from AMD at some point in early 2012.
The Radeon HD 7990’s introduction is more interesting than usual because it’s either really late, already over, or nearly didn’t happen. Let’s have a closer look at the 7990’s formidable hardware, and then we’ll dive into the performance results. Although we have loads of data collected by multiple tools, our goal is to take a very practical approach that should yield some definitive answers to the questions at hand. I think that makes our task interesting, at least. Reviewing this thing should be, you know, fun.īut we have some difficult questions to ask about the 7990’s true performance along the way. Point is, the 7990’s hardware is world-class, second-to-none stuff, capable of crunching more flops, bits, and texels than anything else you can plug into a PCIe slot. That’s like… twin Clydesdales pulling your wagon, a pair of Ferrari V12s driving all four wheels, like various other poor analogies involving large-scale parallelism and testosterone. The formula is straightforward enough: two Tahiti GPUs, like those driving the Radeon HD 7970, working together in CrossFire on one graphics card.
Just as we published that article, we learned of AMD’s plans to introduce a killer new multi-GPU graphics product: the Radeon HD 7990.īy most measures, the introduction of a card like the Radeon HD 7990 should be simple, because it is unreservedly the most powerful graphics card the world has ever seen. As I said in that article, our next task is to address the issue of multi-GPU microstuttering in more depth. We recently started using some new GPU testing tools from Nvidia that measure precisely when frames are being delivered to the display, and in the process, we found that Radeon-based multi-GPU solutions have some troubling problems.