AMD Radeon HD 7990 Review: The Quiet Beast
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.
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Hardware Used: |
Relevant Software: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 DirectX April 2011 Redist AMD Catalyst v13.2B6 / 13.5B2 NVIDIA GeForce Drivers v314.09 Benchmarks Used: Unigine Heaven v4 3DMark "Fire Strike" Batman: Arkham City Hitman: Absolution Alien vs. Predator Metro 2033 Sleeping Dogs Crysis 3 FRAPS + FCAT |
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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. |
The new Radeon HD 7990 performed just as expected in the Unigine Heaven Benchmark. With a pair of Tahiti GPUs and 6GB of frame buffer memory on board (3GB per GPU), the HD 7990 is essentially a Radeon HD 7970 CrossFire configuration with slightly lower GPU clocks. As such, the card performs right in line with the dual-card Radeon HD 7970 configuration, which slightly trailed the GeForce GTX 690.
