HD 6990 Preview/Review

[RaZz!]

[...]

Yeah I know 2560*xxxx isnt a huge market yet but 1920x1080 @ 120hz might be soon.

i'm waiting for that "soon" for 2 years already and absolutely nothing has changed

mh, oh well, i need to correct me! smth changed in these 2 years: the industry went from 16:10 (samsung 2233rz, first 120hz panel) to 16:9. so things got even worse in those 2 years. there's not a single industry that frustrates me as much as the tft/lcd industry.
the only things the manufacturers "improve" is to increase brightnesses of 1918561956:1 to 139856238560123865:1. seriously, what are they doing in this industry?

[Alex-Ro]

Finally we found someone with lower ability in excel than youngpro regarding these graphs =))

[Roadhog]

1920x1080 @ 120hz requires dual-link. 2560x1600 @ 60hz requires dual-link. Even 2560x1440, 2560x1080..

Dont care if it costs a bit more, should be a dual-link adapter.

Yeah I know 2560*xxxx isnt a huge market yet but 1920x1080 @ 120hz might be soon.

They are free... I didn't get any kind of adapters with my 6970s.

[SpuTnicK]

TDP 450W! So, how fast should the little fan rotate to blow away that heat, 10K RMP?
Any one wanna a jet plane in his house...

[zerazax]

450W wow - if the GTX 590 doesn't have ratings for > 300W it won't stand a chance

Looks like a new era for enthusiast GPUs

[antiacid]

so basically if I want to replace my 5970->6990 I also need to swap in a new PSU?

If I go quad-fire, I also need to invest in solar panels and wind turbines, right?

[Pantsu]

Slap two of these things inside with watercooling and you're good to go.

It's going to be hard for Nvidia to beat this considering CrossFire scaling is better atm and Fermi doesn't have as good perf/watt, so it would need to be a 500W card for them.

A true enthusiast card by the looks of it, offers some serious tweaking ability.

[Lanek]

so basically if I want to replace my 5970->6990 I also need to swap in a new PSU?

If I go quad-fire, I also need to invest in solar panels and wind turbines, right?

I don't think, until you had choose a psu who was just enough for make run the 5970 stable .. and don't have 50-75W free to use on your PSU.

[JkS]

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned, but the article says launch date March 8th (fud mentioned it).

Anyway, previously I got the impression the launch was a month away, only time will tell.

[informal]

Another lame ass benchmark chart where the competitor card has a 1.0% ratio... lame. Though I want to see how it performs against the GTX 590.

Actually the competitor's card is at 100% or 1.0x.This is just how it is supposed to be.Any other level for NV card would be inaccurate.

[saaya]

lol, overclocked dualgpu card vs nvidias stock single gpu card... yeah thats a good comparison... NOT
6990 isnt out yet, neither is the 590...
so what, nvidia will reply to this slide by comparing an overclocked 590 to a stock 6970 tomorrow?

sigh.... hope they stop the marketing bs and release the cards already...
its really about time, especially for the 6990...

[saaya]

i'm waiting for that "soon" for 2 years already and absolutely nothing has changed

mh, oh well, i need to correct me! smth changed in these 2 years: the industry went from 16:10 (samsung 2233rz, first 120hz panel) to 16:9. so things got even worse in those 2 years. there's not a single industry that frustrates me as much as the tft/lcd industry.
the only things the manufacturers "improve" is to increase brightnesses of 1918561956:1 to 139856238560123865:1. seriously, what are they doing in this industry?

totally agree...
they did drive costs down a lot, but i think they focus too much on making cheap panels... its really time to improve quality and features, prices for TN panels are cheap enough already...

[informal]

lol, overclocked dualgpu card vs nvidias stock single gpu card... yeah thats a good comparison... NOT
6990 isnt out yet, neither is the 590...
so what, nvidia will reply to this slide by comparing an overclocked 590 to a stock 6970 tomorrow?

sigh.... hope they stop the marketing bs and release the cards already...
its really about time, especially for the 6990...

First of all the OC speed is 6% higher than default one,no brainer to deduce how much faster 6990 vanilla is. Second,in the NDA document(so not the official one from AMD yet) the compared card from NV is its best currently,from uarchitecture perspective(sure OC can give you ~5% more).Don't blame AMD for NV's lack of better product. If there was a dual gpu monster made of 2 Fermis AMD would have to include it in the chart. This way they made best Vs best comparison and it's perfectly valid.
And if you expect that NV can put two full fledged Fermi GPUs from GTX580 on one board with the same spec per GPU then I think you are overly optimistic.

[STEvil]

totally agree...
they did drive costs down a lot, but i think they focus too much on making cheap panels... its really time to improve quality and features, prices for TN panels are cheap enough already...

costs dropped because they were caught price fixing. Sure took a while for the prices to drop though after that.

1920x1080 isnt new, true 120hz is fairly new and is only barely starting to get into the market with any kind of force.

Whats annoying is that features being marketed are so colluded in marketing speak. Anyone without an idea of the difference between interpolated or true 120hz, let alone having to face 100hz/200hz/240hz/360hz/600hz/subfield numbers has almost no chance of buying something worth their money, let alone the crap numbers being tossed out these days for contrast ratio and response times or ever latency times which are not mentioned at all...

[Olivon]

First of all the OC speed is 6% higher than default one,no brainer to deduce how much faster 6990 vanilla is. Second,in the NDA document(so not the official one from AMD yet) the compared card from NV is its best currently,from uarchitecture perspective(sure OC can give you ~5% more).Don't blame AMD for NV's lack of better product. If there was a dual gpu monster made of 2 Fermis AMD would have to include it in the chart. This way they made best Vs best comparison and it's perfectly valid.
And if you expect that NV can put two full fledged Fermi GPUs from GTX580 on one board with the same spec per GPU then I think you are overly optimistic.

AMD did the same recently and you weren't shocked

[informal]

Well NV did kinda surprise-launch GTX580,while 6970 was targeted at 480 level .Delta between the 580GTX and 6970 is ~12% in 25x16 resolution. They(AMD) should have included 580 numbers in the chart too,if they had them at the time of making that presentation. They made a mistake if they sat on the numbers and purposely not include them in the chart.
But the thing is 5970 was still faster card than GTX580 .It was faster than 6970 too. Uber high end was hence covered with this older product,while 6970 did slide in below it,to high performance segment.

[tajoh111]

AMD did the same recently and you weren't shocked

Not only that, the gtx 580 was released significantly before the 6970 so they had time for testing.

AMD marketing department has become shadier than NV as of late.

[AbortRetryFail?]

So much for PCIE certification... I was hoping default powertune would have been 300watt, not 375. This is insane No doubt about it, this is going to be one loud hot arsed card. That said for Nvidia to be competitive they will have to offer something similar ( >300watt ) We need 28nm yesterday.

As far as price I don't see this being less than 700 now that the cat is out of the bag.

My understanding of the spec certification:

300w -- external power
75w -- the slot itself


Reality, as always, may well be beyond my knowledge and comprehension

[Pantsu]

Marketing slides have always been like this, it shouldn't come as a surprise. Wait for reviews if you want unbiased information. It makes no sense to use faster and more expensive competitor's card as comparison in a marketing slide.

The GTX 580 is the fastest card Nvidia has atm, so it should suffice. It would not be any more fair to use a SLI setup as comparison.

[zalbard]

Damn, why does it have nice overdrive limits and 6970 are @#$%ed without unofficial overclocking?
3 free adapters = awesome.
Overclock switch is a nice idea. You can get 2x 6970 (the same VRAM amount, shader count, clocks!) in a form of 6990. Power consumption figures are nasty, though. Mostly from the heat perspective.
Awesome card, 'nuff said. As long as the stock cooler can do its job...
WTH is "Phase change TIM?"

[Gilgamesh]

With 830/1250 - 1536SP for each gpus on HD6990, GTX590 need al least 700/1400/1000 - 512SP to just PAIR performance: little over at 1920 AA, little under at 2560 AA.
This time is very hard for Nvidia

Just for reference this review:
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/g...ating_mit_aaaf

and this:
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/813-...ossfire-x.html

[Dresdenboy]

The scale on that graph is absurd...

Marketing standards 1x1: emphasize on the difference.

[Boissez]

With 830/1250 - 1536SP for each gpus on HD6990, GTX590 need al least 700/1400/1000 - 512SP to just PAIR performance: little over at 1920 AA, little under at 2560 AA.
This time is very hard for Nvidia

Just for reference this review:
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/g...ating_mit_aaaf

and this:
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/813-...ossfire-x.html

Yeah - I'm thinking the same. Nvidia may be able to match this - but it won't be able to beat it. (unless the 590 turns out to be a 500W monster)

[ahu]

With 830/1250 - 1536SP for each gpus on HD6990, GTX590 need al least 700/1400/1000 - 512SP to just PAIR performance: little over at 1920 AA, little under at 2560 AA.
This time is very hard for Nvidia

Just for reference this review:
http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/g...ating_mit_aaaf

and this:
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/813-...ossfire-x.html

You're forgetting one thing. If I read correctly from the article, typical game workload is 350W. Powertune limit being so close at 375W, the card is bound to be throttling a lot on shader heavy loads. If I remember correctly, even HD6970 was throttling on 3D Mark Perlin noise test with a TDP limit of 250 W (vs 190 typical).

[EvilOne]

From what i have seen the current AMD cards are slightly more efficent power/performance, and scale slightly better with CF then SLI. Nvidia have most powerfull single chips and some nice add-ons like cuda.

IF AMD's dual cards are this power hungry i dont know how anyone can expect the Nvidia ones to give more performance with less power. I would expect AMD to have the edge in this battle because this is what there smaller chips where designed to do. Nvidia will still have the fastest single GPU card, which is what alot of people care about.