We've seen plenty of the Radeon HD 7990 in action with Battlefield 4, but it's taken AMD a little while to furnish us with full specs and pricing. Now that all the info is here, in the run-up to commercial availability in two week's time, it's finally possible to judge the pros and cons of what is arguably a very niche product. Read on past the break and we'll do just that.
The positives are weighty: over 8 TFLOPS of raw compute power, which is more than double that of the Radeon HD 7970 and four times that of the PlayStation 4's GPU. This grunt comes from a New York-sized population of 8.6 billion transistors -- 1.5 billion more than in NVIDIA's Titan -- which can handle pretty much any current game at 4K resolution and max detail settings, including Tomb Raider (with flowing locks enabled) and Crysis 3. Both these games happen to be bundled with card, along with Bioshock Infinite and five other big titles.
Note, however, that you'll need a pricey CPU to be certain of getting the frame rates shown in the slide deck, which are based on an Intel Core i7-3960X. It's also curious that no frame rate is provided for Crysis 3 at 4K and max settings -- only Crysis 2 is shown in the chart below, with a frame rate nudging 40 fps, so we'll definitely be checking out some independent benchmarks.
There's 6GB of RAM, PCI Express 3.0 support for ridiculous inter-GPU memory bandwidth in case you were ever in a position to CrossFire this thing, plus a "massive" cooling system that is claimed to be 3dB quieter than NVIDIA's Titan and 10dB quieter than the GTX 690.
And the negatives? Well, those deserve to be addressed in bullet points, even though there's only one of them for now:
- $999
To be fair, this price point is totally in line with the competition and our expectations. But as to whether the transaction is as straightforward as it sounds, and how sensible it is relative to paying the same amount for a Titan, we'll wait to do our regular review roundup rather than risk any expensive errors of judgement.
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