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

Benchmark Results: Real-World Games

Based on your feedback, we're benchmarking these high-end cards using extreme quality settings and resolutions, including the multi-monitor setups they're designed to drive. This does limit the number of games we're able to test, since not all titles support Nvidia Surround and AMD Eyefinity.

What we notice is that the beta Catalyst 12.11 driver does, in fact, deliver a massive performance boost in a majority of the games we're testing. Nvidia only manages to maintain an advantage in long-time strongholds like Battlefield 3 and Batman: Arkham City, even though AMD jumps from 25 to 30 percent in Battlefield 3, practically making it a draw.

The gains in CrossFire configurations are a bit more moderate. We still don’t know how AMD is improving performance this much. Hopefully it isn't doing anything to graphics quality, as we've seen in the past (Do AMD's Radeon HD 7000s Trade Image Quality For Performance?). We aren't able to discern any difference at first glance, but we plan to take a closer look in an upcoming story. Unfortunately, overzealous German customs officials already did their part to make this story late by Googling for the price of a graphics card not yet on the market.

Metro 2033

Crysis 2: DirectX 11

Batman: Arkham City

Alien vs. Predator

Battlefield 3

The massive performance difference between the Nvidia and AMD cards is gone in Battlefield 3, so long as you're talking about boards based on AMD's Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture.

Whatever advantage Nvidia maintains has more to do with the game sequence we tested than generally-better performance. AMD manages to draw even or pull ahead in less-taxing workloads.

Nvidia’s SLI technology remains more effective in this game than AMD’s CrossFire. So, we're calling it a draw. To the delight of gamers, the days when you had to pick one vendor over the other for a good experience in Battlefield 3 are over.

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  • 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