AMD has finally released the Radeon HD 7990, which was expected to release on August of 2012 to counter the GeForce GTX 690.
However, what was seen instead were dual Radeon HD 7970 Editions, put together by various manufacturers such as PowerColor and Club3D...
The Radeon HD 7990, released with a $999 USD price, packs 4096 Shader Processing Units (2048 per GPU), 256 TMUs (128 per GPU) and 64 ROPs (32 per GPU), on a 768-bit (368-bit per GPU) memory interface with GDDR5 memory. The central unit runs at 950MHz (1000 in Turbo Mode) and the memory clock operates at 1500MHz. It consumes up to 375W.
I expected that Radeon HD 7990 would offer similar performance to GeForce GTX 690 and thus gamers would choose depending on which games they played, since some cards are optimised for different games.
It seems the Radeon HD 7990 performs only very slightly better on AMD optimized games and much worse on NVIDIA optimized games, compared to the GeForce GTX 690, and worse than the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition on a couple of games, such as Hitman Absolution.
Poor driver support? Poor Scaling? We don't know, but it's very disappointing. Why would someone pay $999 USD for a card that performs worse than the GeForce GTX 690 overall, and worse than a single Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition at times?
Adding to that, the Radeon HD 7990 also consumes considerably more energy than GeForce GTX 690, which definitely adds extra dollars to your electricity bills each month.
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