AMD's Entry Level Radeon HD 7790 Revealed

By Tarun Iyer
published

AMD provides details on the Bonnaire XT based HD 7790.

As was rumoured last month, AMD will be releasing the entry-level Radeon HD 7790 graphics card to bridge the gap between the HD 7770 and HD 7850. The HD 7790 will feature 786 shader processors instead of the previously indicated 896, a clock rate of 1075 MHz and 2 GB of GDDR5 memory over a 128-bit interface and support DirectX 11.1 and OpenGL 4.3. According to a now redacted result posted on CL benchmark's website, the HD 7790 can be expected to provide 10 percent lower performance than a HD 7850.

Interestingly, the HD 7790 is actually based on the 28 nm Bonnaire XT chip and uses the GCN 2.0 architecture that will also be used in the upcoming Radeon HD 8000 series. For an explanation of AMD's somewhat confusing naming conventions, refer to both our coverage of the HD 8000 series delay and the overview of AMD's plans for 2013.

The Radeon HD 7790 has a recommended price of £118 and will be available in April 2013.

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Tarun Iyer
61 Comments Comment from the forums
  • madjimms
    22nm? saweet! Is lower power consumption something we can assume?
    Reply
  • Unolocogringo
    I would assume poor yeilds again.
    First time ever to release the low level cards first.
    Reply
  • de5_Roy
    shame on you amd for confusing customers with your sku-ing. if it's a 22nm gcn 2.0 card, it belongs to a seperate series.
    no, rebadging it when new lineup comes out doesn't make it any better. :(
    Reply
  • madjimms
    madjimms22nm? saweet! Is lower power consumption something we can assume?Looking at the Wiki page comparing AMD graphics cards I see that even the 8XXX series is only 28nm.

    What gives?
    Reply
  • bigshootr8
    It will be interesting to see how it places itself pricing wise. Even with the article suggesting 118 you can get at the lowest I'm seeing now 125 for 7850 in £.
    Reply
  • blazorthon
    That memory would have to be clocked pretty high to keep performance only 10% lower than the 7850. It's probably running at 1.5GHz, if not higher.
    Reply
  • blazorthon
    Rick_CriswellI would assume poor yeilds again.First time ever to release the low level cards first.
    That's possible, but even if true, I highly doubt that poor yields are the only reason for not releasing high end cards yet. AMD has little reason to release high-end cards in a time where they'd be difficult to really stress and most gamers who'd consider buying them would probably wait until there's more reason to upgrade. It'd take more sense to release them later when they'll be in greater demand and that gives AMD more time for improvement too.

    It most certainly wouldn't be the first time that AMD introduced lower end cards first.
    Reply
  • rgd1101
    Rick_CriswellI would assume poor yeilds again.First time ever to release the low level cards first.They been doing that for a while, new architecture on lower end first before higher end.
    Reply
  • -Fran-
    It's the 4770 all over again! That's actually a good thing!

    Cheers!
    Reply
  • Jarred Ibarra
    If it is 22nm, then this card will play the same role as the Radeon 4770- a run on a new process to learn from and work out the kinks for the later 8000 series cards.
    Reply