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

OpenGL: Synthetic Gaming Performance

Unigine Heaven 4.0

Unigine Heaven 4.0 is one of those tests that helps us evaluate the performance of cutting-edge graphics features in a real game engine when we’re benchmarking under DirectX 11. What happens when we run it under OpenGL instead, though? Here are the metric’s key features:

  • Comprehensive use of hardware tessellation, with adjustable settings
  • Dynamic sky with volumetric clouds and tweakable day/night cycle
  • Real-time global illumination and screen-space ambient occlusion
  • Cinematic and interactive fly/walk-through camera modes

Although the Radeon HD 7990 leads the pack, it’s also obvious that SLI offers better scaling in this OpenGL benchmark than CrossFire.

Unigine Sanctuary (OpenGL)

The second benchmark from Unigine emphasizes a different set of features, and Nvidia’s cards do unexpectedly well. The Radeon board seem to struggle with Sanctuary’s particle system—something we’ve also observed in other benchmarks. Throw lots of particles at the AMD cards and they slow down noticeably.

  • Five dynamic lights
  • HDR rendering
  • Parallax occlusion mapping
  • Ambient occlusion mapping
  • Translucence
  • Volumetric light and fog
  • Particle systems
  • Post-processing

Unigine Tropics

The Radeon HD 7990 pulls ahead of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 690, reversing the trend we see from single-GPU cards based on the same GPUs. Here’s a summary of this test’s key aspects:

  • Dynamic sky with light scattering
  • Live water with a surf zone and caustics
  • Special materials for vegetation
  • HDR rendering
  • Parallel split shadow map
  • Depth of field
  • Real-time ambient occlusion
  • Up to 2M polygons per frame
  • Simulation of changing light conditions

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.
  • 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