AMD unleashes Radeon HD 7990: A dual-GPU graphics card beast

April 24, 2013

One thousand dollars. That’s how much AMD anticipates it will cost you to acquire a video card packing two of its most powerful GPUs on a single dual-slot PCB. AMD has provided us with reference design hardware, with retail cards expected to follow by the end of the month. So consider this a hands-on preview of the Radeon HD 7990. We’ll follow up with an official review as soon as we get a card that people can actually buy. The Radeon HD 7990 has a massive heatsink that runs the entire length of the card. Three amazingly quiet fans keep everything cool. The Radeon HD 7990 is essentially two Radeon HD 7970 cards melded into one. You might call it CrossFire on a card. Each 28nm GPU packs 4.3 billion transistors (8.6 billion in total) and a total of 4096 stream processors to deliver compute performance of a staggering 8.2 teraflops: That’s 8.2 trillion floating-point operations per second. And each processor has a 384-bit interface to 3GB of GDDR5 memory (that’s 6GB in total), so games with large memory footprints perform extremely well on this card. See that edge connector near the card's mounting bracket? That will enable you to build a quad-GPU monster system by running two of these cards in CrossFire mode. The card is capable of supporting up to five displays simultaneously, even if they don't support DisplayPort multi-streaming, thanks to the presence of four Mini DisplayPort connections and one DVI port. AMD’s Eyefinity technology can support up to six DisplayPort monitors (provided at least one supports multi-streaming), although it's unlikely that you could run six high-resolution displays at once. That's because the DisplayPort standard is capable of delivering maximum bandwidth of 21.6 Gbps. Four 1920-by-1200 displays with color depth of 30 bits per pixel and a refresh rate of 60 frames per second would consume most of that bandwidth. And as I discussed in my earlier DisplayPort multi-streaming primer, playing games with more than three monitors isn’t the best experience because it leaves a bezel in the middle of your view. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2036249/amd-unleashes-radeon-hd-7990-a-dual-gpu-graphics-card-beast.html#tk.rss_all