AMD Radeon HD 7790: Affordable DX11 Gaming
Test System and Unigine Heaven v4.0
How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the graphics cards in this article on an Asus P9X79 Deluxe motherboard powered by a Core i7-3960X six-core processor and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR3-1866 RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the system UEFI and set all values to their "high performance" default settings and disable any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The memory's X.M.P. profile was enabled to ensure better-than-stock performance and the hard drive was then formatted and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the installation was complete, we fully updated the OS and installed the latest DirectX redist along with all of the drivers, games, and benchmark tools necessary to complete our tests.
|
|
|
|
Hardware Used: |
Relevant Software: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 DirectX April 2011 Redist AMD Catalyst v13.3 Beta 3 NVIDIA GeForce Drivers v314.21 Benchmarks Used: Unigine Heaven v4 3DMark "Fire Strike" Batman: Arkham City Hitman: Absolution Alien vs. Predator Metro 2033 Sleeping Dogs Crysis 3 |
|
|
|
|
|
Unigine's Heaven Benchmark v4.0 is built around the Unigine game engine. Unigine is a cross-platform, real-time 3D engine, with support for DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11 and OpenGL. The Heaven benchmark--when run in DX11 mode--also makes comprehensive use of tessellation technology and advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion). It also features volumetric cumulonimbus clouds generated by a physically accurate algorithm and a dynamic sky with light scattering. |
Please note that we've underclocked one of the factory-overclocked cards to reference levels to show a more complete picture of performance. The Radeon HD 7790 represented in the graphs on this page, and the others moving forward, is clocked at 1GHz (GPU) / 6Gbps (Memory).
According the Unigine Heaven test, the new Radeon HD 7790 cards perform just as you would expect--they outpace the Radeon HD 7770 but trail the Radeon HD 7850. Compared to NVIDIA's offerings, the Radeon HD 7790 cards finish in front of the GeForce GTX 650 Ti but don't come close to the GeForce GTX 660 here.
