MSI Radeon HD 7790 OC Edition: Mid-Range Graphics

Name: MSI Radeon HD 7790 OC Edition: Mid-Range Graphics Card
Brand: MSI

by Joshua Gulick — Friday, May 10, 2013, 01:55 PM EDT

Test System and Unigine Heaven v4.0

Page 2: 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.

HotHardware's Test System

Intel Core i7 Powered

Hardware Used:
Intel Core i7-3960X
(3.3GHz, Six-Core)
Asus P9X79 Deluxe
(Intel X79 Express)

Asus Radeon HD 7790 Direct CU II
Sapphire Radeon HD 7790 OC
MSI Radeon HD 7790 OC
Radeon HD 7770
Radeon HD 7850
GeForce GTX 660
GeForce GTX 650 Ti
GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST

16GB GSKILL DDR3-1866
Western Digital Raptor 150GB
Integrated Audio
Integrated Network

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 Heaven v4.0 Benchmark

Pseudo-DirectX 11 Gaming

Unigine Heaven v4.0

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 MSI Radeon HD 7790 kicked off our benchmarks with some solid scores in Unigine Heaven. In fact, it provided frame rates that were even with (or close to) the pricier ASUS and Sapphire 7790s. But it fell a little further behind when it came to the overall Heaven score. And because the MSI card didn't top any of its fellow 7790s, it also couldn't match the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST.