AMD Radeon HD 7990: Eight Games And A Beastly Card For $1,000

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We've been waiting for this since 2011. AMD is ready to unveil its Radeon HD 7990, featuring a pair of Tahiti graphics processors. Can the dual-slot board capture our hearts with great compute and 3D performance, or does Nvidia walk away with this round?

Results: Tomb Raider

AMD’s Radeon HD 7990 pushes the highest practical frame rate, losing some of the card’s rendering effort to runts and drops. It does significantly better than two Radeon HD 7970s in CrossFire, though, which get hammered by the number of runts that only show up on-screen for a couple of milliseconds. Prototype software helps the 7990 a little. But because Tomb Raider is the fourth title with latency-specific optimizations already rolled in to Catalyst 13.3, it’s possible that a lot of the gains are already baked-in.

The thin, dotted lines again reflect hardware frame rates, while solid lines are indicative of what you actually see once runts and dropped frames get disregarded.

Although it incurs the highest 95th percentile latency, AMD Radeon HD 7990 with Catalyst 13.5 Beta 2 yields better average frame time variance than the other two Radeon-based data points.

Unfortunately, while those numbers seem fairly low, volunteers we brought in to test routinely fingered the Radeon HD 7990 as less consistent than GeForce GTX 690 after swapping between platforms armed with both cards.

Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini is an Editor Emeritus at Tom's Hardware US. He edits hardware reviews and covers high-profile CPU and GPU launches.
131 Comments Comment from the forums
  • blackmagnum
    If I had 1,000 dollars... I would buy a Titan. Its power efficiency, drivers and uber-chip goodness is unmatched.
    Reply
  • whyso
    Power usage?

    Thats some nice gains from the prototype driver.
    Reply
  • ilysaml
    Nice article!! Unbeatable performance out of the box.
    Reply
  • 17seconds
    Sort of seems like a mess to me. The game bundle is nice.
    Reply
  • timw03878
    Here's an idea. Take away the 8 games at 40 bucks a piece and deduct that from the insane 1000 price tag.
    Reply
  • donquad2001
    this test was 99% useless to the average gamer,Test the card at 1900x1080 like most of us use to get a real ideal of what its like,only your unigine benchmarks helped the average gamer,who cares what any card can do at a resolution we cant use anyway?
    Reply
  • cangelini
    whysoPower usage?Thats some nice gains from the prototype driver.Power is the one thing I didn't have time for. We already know the 7990 is a 375 W card, while GTX 690 is a 300 W card, though. We also know AMD has Zero Core, which is going to shave off power at idle with one GPU shut off. I'm not expecting any surprises on power that those specs and technologies don't already insinuate.
    Reply
  • ASHISH65
    nice article! here comes the Competitor of gtx 690!
    Reply
  • cangelini
    donquad2001this test was 99% useless to the average gamer,Test the card at 1900x1080 like most of us use to get a real ideal of what its like,only your unigine benchmarks helped the average gamer,who cares what any card can do at a resolution we cant use anyway?If you're looking to game at 1920x1080, I can save you a ton of money by recommending something less than half as expensive. This card is for folks playing at 2560 *at least.* Next time, I'm looking to get FCAT running on a 7680x1440 array ;)
    Reply
  • hero1
    Nice article. I was hopping that they would have addressed the whining but they haven't and that's a shame. Performance wise it can be matched by GTX 680 SLI and GTX 690 without the huge time variance and runt frames. Let's hope they fix their whining issue and FPS without forcing users to turn on V-sync. For now I know where my money is going consider that I have dealt with AMD before:XFX and Sapphire and didn't like the results (whining, artifacts, XF stops working etc). Sorry but I gave the red team a try and I will stick with Nvidia until AMD can prove that they have fixed their issues.
    Reply