AMD HD7990 Malta Review

1. Introduction2. AMD HD7990 Malta3. AMD HD7990 Malta (Super High Res Gallery)4. Testing Methodology5. Unigine Heaven Benchmark6. Unigine Valley Benchmark7. 3DMark Vantage8. 3DMark 119. 3DMark10. Total War: Shogun 2 (built in benchmark)11. Total War: Shogun 2 (2560x1600)12. Sleeping Dogs (2560x1600)13. Dirt Showdown (2560x1600)14. Dirt Showdown (2560x1600 high IQ)15. Max Payne 3 (2560x1600)16. Tomb Raider (2560x1600)17. Crysis 3 (5760x1080)18. BioShock Infinite (5760x1080)19. Thermal Dynamics20. Acoustic Performance21. Power Consumption22. Closing Thoughts23. View All Pages

The battle for the title of ‘world's fastest graphics card' has been hotly contested for as long as I can remember. This week AMD are releasing their official HD7990 ‘Malta' graphics card – a dual GPU solution comprising 8.6 billion transistors, 4096 stream processors … capable of 8.2 TFLOPS of compute power.

Today we test the HD7990 against the two fastest graphics cards from Nvidia, the GTX690 and the GTX Titan.

AMD are making no hardware compromises with this HD7990 Malta graphics card, it ships with 6GB of GDDR5 memory and can support 5 monitors simultaneously. It has 48 lanes to give 96GB/s of intergpu bandwidth.

This is a card designed from the ground up to cope with the very highest image quality settings and resolutions and today we will test a variety of Direct X 11 games at 2560×1600 and 5760×1080 resolutions.

Regular readers may remember our multiple reviews of the VTX3D HD7990 back at the end of 2012, but this is a completely new, official design by AMD. The clock speeds are significantly higher as well.

Before we go any further, I need to comment on AMD's reference coolers.

I have lost count of how many times I have asked AMD to shift their reliance on a small, single fan to cool their high end reference graphics solutions. Partners such as Sapphire generally fix these cooler concerns shortly after launch, but it always frustrates me. Why go to all the effort of launching an ultra fast, ultra expensive graphics card then outfit it with a shoddy, noisy cooler?

Thankfully AMD have apparently listened to critical feedback and the new HD7990 Malta is equipped with three, large axial fans, spanning the full width of the PCB. When we take the card apart later in the review we will see if AMD have incorporated a high grade heatsink implementation to partner with the quality fans.

Above, a reference graph lifted from one of the AMD slides. We can see that the new HD7990 is basically two HD7970 GHZ Edition cards crammed into a single card. It is built around the 28nm manufacturing process with 8.6 billion transistors on the card. It is clocked at 1GHZ and has 4,096 stream processors. There are 256 Texture units and 64 ROP's with a dual 384 bit memory interface. The memory is clocked at 1,500mhz (6.0Gbps effective).


AMD don't ship their reference designs in any retail packaging. By the time it is released to the public, partners such as Sapphire will have their own bundle deals, including video and power adapters, extras, and undoubtedly codes for the latest AAA games in the box.

Before publication AMD told us that partners will be bundling BioShock Infinite, Tomb Raider, Crysis 3, Far Cry 3, Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon, Hitman Absolution, Sleeping Dogs and Deus Ex Human Revolution with the card. If you don't already have any of those games, the AMD bundle is worth quite a lot of cash.

First impressions of this dual slot card are certainly positive, although it is gargantuan. You can see above just how long the card is – in the middle of the picture is the GTX690 and on the right, the GTX Titan. I measured it at 308mm long, which must be a new record.

Our sample did receive some damage in transit, so I had to spend a couple of hours straightening the backplate with specialised pliers and also repairing a fan header which was destroyed on what was clearly a hefty impact.

As we mentioned earlier in the review, the HD7990 Malta is formed around a black plastic shell with three large red RADEON branded fans taking up the full length of the PCB. The rear of the card has a backplate in place for protection and to help cool the memory.

The HD7990 Malta takes power from two 8 pin power connectors, as we would expect.

The card is Crossfire capable if you have enough money to pay for two of the cards. We didn't have a great experience in the past testing Quad Crossfire, but we might get around to it again in the coming months. There is also a dual BIOS switch close to the Crossfire connector.

The HD7990 has a single dual link DVI output, and 4 additional mini Displayport connectors. It can support all five output connectors simultaneously, if you want to power five monitors.

The rear backplate is used to cool some of the GDDR5 memory, additionally it offers protection against damage. The backplate has little thermal pads in place to transfer heat from the memory chips on the PCB.

Above, the main cooler, after disconnection from the PCB. There are two copper cores in place to cool each GPU core, placed on either side of the PCB. If you want to see close up pictures of the PCB, then make sure to visit the high resolution gallery on the next page.

As the images above show, the AMD HD7990 Malta cooler is designed in ‘two halves', with a dedicated heatsink for each core. Each heatsink has four thick copper heatpipes which run into the aluminum fins to dissapate the heat. The three fans are placed above the heatsinks and ensure adequate cool air circulates.

Two of the fans are doubled up into a single fan header, and the other fan is connected to a header on the other side of the PCB. Our fan cables received some damage, but we were able to repair them.

A GPUz screenshot of the hardware. We discussed this in detail on the last page.

On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later.








For this review today we are using the latest beta versions of Catalyst drivers from AMD and Forceware drivers from NVIDIA. (Force 314.22 and Catalyst 13.5).

We built a very high end liquid cooled Core i7 3960x system and overclocked it to 4.4ghz. We paired it up with 16GB of 2,400mhz memory and an ASUS Rampage IV Extreme motherboard.

We wanted to use the best graphics cards on the market today, so opted for the Gigabyte GTX690 and Gigabyte GTX Titan. We had confirmation the night before publication that the HD7990 Malta will cost around £860, so the pricing is equivalent to both of these cards.

Test System
Processor: Core i7 3960 X Extreme Edition @ 4.4ghz

Graphics Card: AMD HD7990 Malta (Catalyst 13.5)
Cooler: Antec 920 H20
Memory: 16GB G.Skill 2,400mhz @ 10-11-10-30
Motherboard: Asus Rampage IV Extreme
Power Supply: Seasonic 1KW Platinum
Optical Drive: Asus BluRay Drive
Chassis: Lian Li PC-A77FR Aluminium Red Full Tower Case
Boot Drive: Patriot WildFire 120GB
Secondary Drive: 1TB Samsung
Monitors: Dell U3011 and Dell U2410 x 3.

Comparison cards:

Gigabyte GTX 690 (ForceWare 314.22)
Gigabyte GTX Titan (ForceWare 314.22)

Software:
Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Unigine Valley Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
3DMark
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark

Games:
Tomb Raider
BioShock Infinite
Crysis 3
Sleeping Dogs
Total War: Shogun 2
Dirt Showdown
Max Payne 3

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp.

It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk. Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

We test with the settings above – at both 1920×1080 and 2560×1600.



At 1920×1080, the GTX690 actually comes out on top in this particular benchmark, although when we switch to a 2560×1600 resolution, the AMD HD7990 Malta claims top position.

Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark. The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user.

We used the settings above at both 1920×1080 and 2560×1600.



The GTX690 wins both these tests and clearly AMD have a little more driver optimisation to sort out before they take top position in this benchmark.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.



The AMD HD7990 Malta graphics card claims top spot in this benchmark, by more than 2,500 points.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance.

Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

The GTX Titan scores 13,766 points which is excellent. The two dual GPU cards however are in a different scoring zone, with the AMD Malta HD7990 scoring 15,839 points and the GTX690 claiming top spot with 16,121 points.

3DMark is an essential tool used by millions of gamers, hundreds of hardware review sites and many of the world’s leading manufacturers to measure PC gaming performance.

Futuremark say “Use it to test your PC’s limits and measure the impact of overclocking and tweaking your system. Search our massive results database and see how your PC compares or just admire the graphics and wonder why all PC games don’t look this good.

To get more out of your PC, put 3DMark in your PC.”



In the latest 3DMark, the AMD HD7990 Malta claims top spot by a comfortable margin, scoring 11,579 points compared against 9,920 points from the GTX690. The GTX Titan scores 8,967 points.

Shogun 2 is set in 16th-century feudal Japan, in the aftermath of the Ōnin War. The country is fractured into rival clans led by local warlords, each fighting for control. The player takes on the role of one of these warlords, with the goal of dominating other factions and claiming his rule over Japan.

The standard edition of the game will feature a total of eight factions (plus a ninth faction for the tutorial), each with a unique starting position and different political and military strengths.

We run the DX11 Graphics High 1080p benchmark, available for this game in STEAM. You can therefore directly compare against your own system. Frame rates are rounded up or down to the nearest digit.

On the next page we test the three cards with real in game performance at 2560×1600.


The AMD HD7990 Malta manages to outperform the GTX690 in the built in benchmark, by 3 frames per second. The GTX Titan is in last place, averaging almost 106 frames per second.

Shogun 2 is set in 16th-century feudal Japan, in the aftermath of the Ōnin War. The country is fractured into rival clans led by local warlords, each fighting for control. The player takes on the role of one of these warlords, with the goal of dominating other factions and claiming his rule over Japan.

We measured performance over several of the more intensive levels with hundreds of units on screen. Our results would be firmly a ‘worst case scenario'.

The AMD HD7990 Malta claims top spot, averaging 68 frames per second. The GTX690 is only 4 frames behind.

Sleeping Dogs started development as an original title, but was announced in 2009 as True Crime: Hong Kong, the third installment and a reboot of the True Crime series. As a result of the game’s high development budget and delays, it was canceled by Activision Blizzard in 2011. Six months later, it was announced that Square Enix had picked up the publishing rights to the game, but the game was renamed Sleeping Dogs in 2012 since Square Enix did not purchase the True Crime name rights.

We are using the highest possible settings at 2560×1600, including the high resolution texture pack.

This is one of the most demanding engines on the market at these settings, and we can see that both the GTX690 and AMD HD7990 Malta deliver smooth frame rates. While the AMD HD7990 is higher on average, it actually posted a single frame worse in the minimum result. The GTX Titan struggles at these settings, although it is remarkable to think it is just a single GPU, unlike the other cards.

Dirt Showdown is the latest title in the franchise from Codemasters, based around the famous Colin McRae racing game series, although it no longer uses his name, since he passed away in 2007.

For the first test we configured standard ULTRA settings at 2560×1600 with 8 times MSAA.

The AMD HD7990 totally dominates this particular test, averaging over 100 frames per second.

We decided to crank the image quality within Dirt ShowDown, as all cards produced such smooth frame rates on the last page. The results between AMD and NVIDIA cards on this page are not directly comparable as both companies use different algorithms for these settings. It is interesting however to measure frame rate performance when increasing the anti aliasing settings.

We enabled the 8f16x EQAA setting for the AMD HD7990 Malta and the 16 X QCSAA for the GTX 690 and Titan.

With these image quality settings Dirt Showdown looks absolutely beautiful and runs great on all the solutions.

Max Payne 3 is a third-person shooter in which the player assumes the role of its titular character, Max Payne. Max Payne 3 features a similar over-the-shoulder camera as its predecessors, with the addition of a cover mechanic, while also retaining much of the same run-and-gun style of gameplay. Max Payne 3 also marks the return of bullet-time in action sequences, for which the franchise is notable.In bullet-time it is possible to see every bullet strike an enemy in detail.

New to the series is a “Last Stand” mechanic, which gives the player a grace period after losing all health during which time the player may kill the enemy that wounded them in order to continue playing, however this mechanic is only usable if the player has one or more bottles of painkillers in their possession.

We used the settings shown above.

Max Payne 3 was one of my favourite games released in recent times and it runs well on all the hardware tested today. The AMD HD7990 Malta takes top position in the chart, just ahead of the GTX690.
After a delayed release from late 2012 to March 2013, the game received much anticipation and hype. Tomb Raider received much acclaim from critics, who praised the graphics, the gameplay and Camilla Luddington's performance as Lara with many critics agreeing that the game is a solid and much needed reboot of the franchise. Much criticism went to the addition of the multiplayer which many felt was unnecessary. Tomb Raider went on to sell one million copies in forty-eight hours of its release, and has sold 3.4 million copies worldwide so far.

We used the Ultimate quality setting at 2560×1600 with the settings detailed above.

Another fantastic game released earlier this year. It runs very well on all the hardware, but the AMD HD7990 Malta takes the top performance position.
In Crysis 3 players take on the role of Prophet as he returns to New York in 2047, 24 years after the events of Crysis 2. He discovers the city has been encased in a giant Nanodome created by the corrupt CELL corporation. The New York City Liberty Dome is a veritable urban rainforest teeming with overgrown trees, dense swamplands and raging rivers. Within the Liberty Dome, seven distinct and treacherous environments become known as the Seven Wonders. Prophet is said to be on a “revenge mission” after uncovering the truth behind CELL's motives for building the quarantined Nanodomes.

We use the ‘very high' preset at a resolution of 5760×1080, no MSAA is enabled.

Both solutions are playable at these settings although the AMD HD7990 Malta has a little more headroom available and delivers a slightly smoother overall in game experience.

BioShock Infinite is the third installment in the BioShock series, and though it is not part of the storyline of previous BioShock games, it does feature similar gameplay concepts and themes. The game's concept and setting were developed by Irrational's creative lead, Ken Levine, who took inspiration from both historical events at the turn of the 20th century, as well as more recent ones at the time such as the “Occupy” protests.

Another enjoyable title that was released this year. The engine runs exceptionally well on both HD7990 Malta and GTX690 across three screens, although as previous titles have shown, the HD7990 Malta has the performance edge at super high resolutions.

The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 24c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes.Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic.


The substantial three fan cooler on the AMD HD7990 Malta is exceptionally good, outperforming both coolers on GTX690 and GTXTitan by around 6-8c under load.

We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests.

We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation. Ambient noise in the room measures close to the limits of our sound meter at 28dBa.

Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

The move to a three fan, dual heatsink cooler has paid dividends for AMD. This is an exceptionally quiet cooler, silent when idle and barely audible when gaming. To be fair, I think the Titan cooler is exceptionally good too, but it is a little louder under load.
Our  Keithley Integra unit suffered a failure several weeks ago and is still in for repair, so today we have to measure power consumption at the socket via a calibrated meter – system wide.



The AMD HD7990 Malta system takes around 578 watts under load, compared to 535 watts when we replace with the GTX690. The GTX Titan demands the lowest power with the system taking 495 watts under load.
There is no margin for debate, AMD have achieved their goal of creating the world's fastest graphics card. The HD7990 Malta architecture is clearly designed to power the latest Direct X 11 engines at insanely high resolutions. Across three screens it was the clear performance leader, with the GTX690 a little distance behind.

My biggest issue with high end AMD reference cards in the past has always been the loud, ill performing cooling systems they have incorporated. In this regard Nvidia have had the edge in recent years. I don't think even the most devout AMD followers would argue this point.

That has changed today, as AMD have redressed this problem by incorporating a paired copper heatsink, triple axial fan cooling system. This time we can focus on the cooler for all the right reasons – that being class leading thermal performance, paired up with low noise levels.

With a price point around £850, there is no doubt that the AMD HD7990 Malta is superior to the GTX690. It emits less noise under load, has a superior cooling system and is markedly faster with the latest Direct X 11 titles at high resolutions. If you are using a 1080p screen then we recommend you save some money and buy a lesser solution. This card really only makes sense with a 30 inch screen, or three 24 inch or 30 inch screens running Eyefinity.

Comparing against the GTX Titan is less clear cut. While the AMD HD7990 Malta is clearly a higher performance gaming solution, it is formed around two HD7970 cores. This means it consumes a lot more power at the socket and will rely on AMD Catalyst driver profiles to operate at full efficiency.

The GTX Titan is still the fastest single GPU graphics card, and there is a possibility that the AMD HD7990 Malta could be running at half performance if AMD don't support a newly released game properly at launch. With a dual GPU card it is critical you update drivers immediately, including the latest up to the minute beta versions.

In the ‘ultra high end', the audience are less focused on getting the best deal possible. People who are interested in buying a GTX690 or HD7990 have a much higher level of disposal income, so a little extra either way isn't so critical. If Nvidia can charge £850 for the GTX690 then AMD are fully justified in charging the same for the HD7990 Malta. Where does the GTX Titan fit into this? There is no doubting it is an incredible graphics card, made even more remarkable by the fact that it is a single GPU design, but how can they justify £850 for it? I think it should be priced closer to £700 inc vat, but it seems to be selling exceptionally well so nVidia are unlikely to drop the price anytime soon.

Our testing today has highlighted the HD7990 Malta is the new performance leader. If you are contemplating one, just be sure to pair it up with a quality, capable power supply. It demands more power at the socket than the GTX690 and may bring lesser supplies to their knees.

Pros:

• The world's fastest graphics card.
• class leading cooling system.
• exceptionally quiet under load.
• same price as GTX690.
• fantastic thermal performance.

Cons:

• high power drain.
• you will still need deep pockets for pride of ownership.

Kitguru says: AMD have created the world's fastest graphics card and the price seems good compared against  the GTX690 and GTX Titan. 

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