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

Results: 3DMark

Whenever I jump into my car, I like to let my oil temperature get to 80 degrees before I start flogging the engine. Consider 3DMark today’s warm-up, leading into some very spirited driving. AMD claims supremacy in this synthetic metric, as we’d expect it to given outright impressive performance specifications.

The real question is whether a lead in Futuremark’s title bears out in the rest of benchmark suite once we start factoring out dropped and runt frames, which don’t positively affect gaming, but still would have been counted toward the average frame rate in Fraps.

Talk about precision. The Fire Strike score gives us the exact hierarchy we would have predicted based on each solution’s specs. Indeed, the Radeon HD 7990 claims its first-place finish.

But we know this means little outside of bragging rights. Let’s load up a 256 GB SSD full of eight top gaming titles and start recording 430 MB/s of raw video at 2560x1440 to analyze using the FCAT tool suite.

And by the way, a number of readers have asked for access to the FCAT extractor tool and Perl scripts, eager to dig in and confirm that they’re above-board. If you’d like to get your hands on the tool, just let me know.

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