Tuesday, April 9th 2013
Radeon HD 7990 CrossFireX Smiles for the Camera
An anonymous tipster left an interesting picture on our doorsteps. It shows a pair of Radeon HD 7990 "Malta" reference-design graphics cards chugging along inside an enthusiast PC. AMD surprised us late last month, when it showed off a reference-design Radeon HD 7990 dual-GPU graphics card, at the Game Developers' Conference (GDC) event. The cards in this new picture appear to be identical to the one AMD showed. The "Radeon" embossing appears pretty clear on both cards, so one can't mistake them for FirePro S10000.
Bearing a new internal codename "Malta," compared to last year's various dual-HD 7970 contraptions that were codenamed "New Zealand," the new Radeon HD 7990 is being designed to be far more energy efficient, and quiet. While the various "New Zealand" cards often featured three 8-pin PCIe power connectors and triple-slot cooling solutions, "Malta" makes do with just two 8-pin power connectors, and a dual-slot cooler. We've been talking to a lot of reliable sources in the industry, and nobody has any clue about a tentative launch date.
Bearing a new internal codename "Malta," compared to last year's various dual-HD 7970 contraptions that were codenamed "New Zealand," the new Radeon HD 7990 is being designed to be far more energy efficient, and quiet. While the various "New Zealand" cards often featured three 8-pin PCIe power connectors and triple-slot cooling solutions, "Malta" makes do with just two 8-pin power connectors, and a dual-slot cooler. We've been talking to a lot of reliable sources in the industry, and nobody has any clue about a tentative launch date.
75 Comments on Radeon HD 7990 CrossFireX Smiles for the Camera
If they get quadfire to work here, it will be an absolute miracle.
@1080p FT 75% decrease / V 25% increase
*Only resolution where SLI scaling comes close as you put it.
@1440p FT 50% decrease / V 50% increase
*In some games FT is spiking to single card levels.
@5760x1080 FT 25% decrease / V 75% increase
*In some of the games FT spikes higher then a single card. Kind of defeats the purpose of buying a second card all together now
Seamse to me its an arguement of who has the better paper weight.
I know when I reviewed the HIS 7970 X Turbo, I saw some solid scaling (35-99%).
CFx Scaling /= Frametime or Latency!
EDIT: Look at the 7790 scaling. With crap titles is scaled 66%, take those non scaling titles out and its 88%.
7790 results: www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7790_CrossFire/21.html
Here is the 650 Ti Boost- Looks worse to me: www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_650_Ti_Boost_SLI/21.html
And PLX is better then regular crossfire or regular SLI bridge, less latency better sync. 690GTX proved it compared to 590GTX.
Edit: if AMD apparently uses PLX since 3870 x2 then they need a lot more work to do.
Bridge = that ribbon that goes between TWO cards.
...the 590 is also on ONE PCB so no 'bridge' was used there.
While neither solution (CFX/SLI) is anywhere close to ideal, SLI has better consistency at the present time, and while it isn't much of a hardship to disable a card if there isn't a reasonable multi-GPU profile available, that really is less of an option with a duallie card like the 7990....and not something that shows up readily in an aggregated chart:
That said, you can still disable CFx on dual GPU cards... at least you can on the 690 and I have to assume so with 7990 as well.
That being said, SLI works better as control panel implementation.
I dont call an apple an orange (why? Because its an apple is not an orange!)...just like a CF/SLI bridge is not a PLX chip. :slap: :D
Anyhooo...
Whose resposibility is it to make these setups work? Game devs, Microsoft or the amd/nvidia? And why does it work sometimes and other times it juat does not?
First of all: whether you like it or not, AMD's driverteam has been really busy the past half year, and arguably making bigger strides than any other time in the past couple of years
Second: after scott watson from techreport started using frametimes in his reviews, revealing AMD's weakness on that front, AMD has shown it can, and atleast in the near future will improve their drivers a lot when it comes to stuttery behaviour, arguably one of the worst things for crossfire.
Third: recently AMD told the world that it was busy building and improving its drivers in way that is specifically beneficial for crossfire, with a rumored release date somewhere in june.
Fourth: AMD's recent push in the gaming market, by providing all console hardware, supporting game developers, and generally pushing out a strong message about their gaming dedication. This imo says that they regard having a strong card as important.
Fifth: not the strongest argument, but i dont see amd waiting more than a year before they lauch a card like this, only to see it getting burned down by reviewers because of crappy scaling/performance.
Now, none of these reasons give any guarantee that crossfire will get better ever, but i suppose a lot of signs are there that say it will get better, which is of course a win for everybody!
If only tridef supported crossfire, I'd prolly get myself another 7950 this summer!
Example: Crysis 3 on 1 card is low fps, while 2 cards is much much better, extremely playable and enjoyable. There are occasionally dips or a little stutter, it's true. But I can't enjoy the game with single card and I can with crossfire.
So on topic, I'm excited for the 7990, and depending on price, I would be interested in one. Any word on whether it can be crossfired with a 7970?
The real reason I posted that video was to get the discussing going, honestly. AMD said they'd release a driver in March to partially deal with this(this isn't a new thing, by any means), and didn't. Now we know why.
As to the info and testing into the issue, no one needs to do anything about it but Ryan Shrout over @ PCPerspective. As long as he stays up to date on how things progress, there's no need for anyone else to, unless to verify that he isn't pro-Nvidia-biased.
That said, since AMD IS releasing this card, I am sure that when they do, most of the issues for Crossfire and DX10/11 will be fixed/mitigated. The picture proves AMD is getting this hardware into the hands of developers so that they can help optimize performance for titles individually.
My comment was more directed to comments like a second card in crossfire is a "paperweight" and the like, which I have seen posted before.
Head over his thread on [H] or OCN, he's running quad Titan and he has a youtube channel too with some surround videos.
CallsignVega's channel - YouTube
I've had a lot of quad setups from ATI and they were never playable.
4870x2 CFX / 5970 CFX and 6990 CFX, at a certain point you just stop waiting for those drivers and you jump to the other side.
Because for me, it is literally as bad as that. I literally explored every possible avenue for why CrossfireX was behaving poorly, visually, to me, when benches said otherwise, and even FPS. Drives, PSUs, boards, memory, CPUs, SDDs/HDDs, blah blah blah, ad naseum. I'm left-handed. To some, that's explain why I'm more sensitive to this issue than most. I also tend to run high-end configs, multi-monitor and such, that few users do.
For me, that second, third and fourth card I have, they are basically useless. I expect, that when this card launches, that will change. Actually, I expect the first WHQL after the card lunches to fix it for all cards, honestly.