Radeon HD 7990 And GeForce GTX 690: Bring Out The Big Guns

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EVGA recently lent our German lab one of the GeForce GTX 690s we've had in the U.S. for months. The purpose? To pit against HIS' upcoming 7970 X2 and PowerColor's Devil13 HD7990, both dual-Tahiti boards vying to become the world's fastest graphics card.

Benchmark Results: Synthetics

3DMark 11

When you see some of these cards show up twice, remember that we're testing the AMD board with two driver versions. The Catalyst 12.11 beta package propels performance forward quite a bit (in some cases well beyond Nvidia's results). We didn’t think that new drivers would make this much of a difference (again), but AMD manages to give its cards a very welcome boost. We're looking into what the company did to achieve its speed-up.

Unigine Heaven 2.5

Clearly, AMD put a lot of effort into optimizing the Catalyst 12.11 driver for synthetic benchmark performance. But do actual games benefit just as much from the company's tuning?

We didn’t bother with Catalyst 12.9 in Unigine, but we did include a triple-monitor setup.

Unigine Sanctuary

We’re only using the Catalyst 12.11 beta build in this benchmark as well. The average frame rate increase moving from Catalyst 12.9 to 12.11 is only about five percent, anyway.

Igor Wallossek
143 Comments Comment from the forums
  • mayankleoboy1
    IMHO, the GTX690 looks best. There is something really alluring about shiny white metallic shine and the fine metal mesh. Along with the fluorescent green branding.
    Maybe i am too much of a retro SF buff :)
    Reply
  • Ironslice
    What's the most impressive is that the GTX 690 was made by nVidia themselves and not an OEM. Very nice and balanced card.
    Reply
  • tacoslave
    i wept
    Reply
  • hellfire24
    your test system is sexy!!!!!!!
    Reply
  • willyroc
    You can't really go wrong either way with these generally insane(so to speak) cards.
    Reply
  • amuffin
    Is it just me or do the 7970X2 and 7990 coolers look so fast and fugly? :heink:
    Reply
  • thanks for the in depth analysis with adaptive V-sync and radeon pro helping with micro stutter.

    not to take away anything for the hard work performed; i would have liked have seen nvidia's latest beta driver, 310.33, included also to see if nvidia is doing anything to improve the performance of their card instead of just adding 3d vision, AO, and sli profiles.
    Reply
  • esrever
    can we get some quadfire benchmarks too? :D
    Reply
  • RazorBurn
    AMD's Dual GPU at 500+ Watts of electricity is out for me.. Too Much Power and Noise..
    Reply
  • mohit9206
    2 670's in sli is better than spending on a 690 and 2 7950's in Xfire is better than spending on a 7990. this way you save nearly $300 both ways
    Reply