The AMD Radeon HD 7990 is the world's fastest graphics card

Here at AMD we are obsessed with gaming performance and graphics cards. For the lot of us, it's more than 'a job'... It's deeply personal. That is to say: when we shut off the lights and go home, we're hardware enthusiasts, gamers and content creators in our own right. It's that kind of consuming passion that makes us so excited to bring word of our latest product: the AMD Radeon™ HD 7990 graphics processor. And at the expense of spoiling it, I'm proud to say that it's the fastest graphics card in the world.1
Building the world's fastest graphics card requires a mountain of state-of-the-art hardware, which the AMD Radeon™ HD 7990 GPU offers in spades:
Two specially-screened AMD Radeon™ HD 7900 Series GPUs, with a clockspeed of up to 1GHz.6GB of GDDR5 on a 384-bit bus, running at 6.0Gbps for 576GB/s of memory bandwidth.A PCI Express® 3.0 PLX bridge to connect the dual ASICs in an internal AMD CrossFire™ technology configuration.2 This interconnect provides 48 lanes (96GB/s) of bandwidth.Native support for up to five simultaneous displays integrated via AMD Eyefinity technology. Further support for up to six total displays is possible using DisplayPort 1.2 MST-enabled hubs or monitors.3A shockingly quiet triple-fan cooler, which is not only quieter than the Titan or the GTX 690, but quieter than your average library.4 At 100% GPU load.FUN FACT: The graphics chips on the HD 7990 GPU contain a combined 8.2 billion 28nm transistors. If you were to redraw the schematics by hand with a fine-tipped pencil, you would need a piece of paper larger than 172 American football fields! If you look at the data that Valve Corporation assembles for their Steam® Hardware Survey, you can see that a small percentage of their 50,000,000+ users demand the best gaming experience by using 2560x1600 and 2560x1440 displays. These truly passionate gamers are on the bleeding edge, and it's for them that we've lovingly crafted the performance I'm about to demonstrate.

CLICK TO EXPAND: This image of BioShock? Infinite was captured at a resolution of 3840x2160 on the AMD Radeon? HD 7990 GPU. Surely most have heard about "4K" or "UltraHD" TVs and monitors. These displays have a gigantic resolution of 3840x2160, which is twice as many pixels as a 2560x1600, and a whopping four times the resolution of a normal 1080p display! That's a lot of pixels to move, but the AMD Radeon™ HD 7990 graphics processor enables completely playable performance and high image quality.

We know that UltraHD monitors are still quite expensive, which makes multi-monitor an attractive solution for big resolution! Thanks to AMD Eyefinity technology, we can bring that capability out in force on the AMD Radeon™ HD 7990 card with native support for up to five simultaneous displays. These five displays would offer a larger resolution than a single UltraHD panel at a significantly lower cost.

Today, however, we'll be looking at the more common 3x1080p configuration many users select for AMD Eyefinity technology. The resolution of this configuration falls between 2560x1600 and 3840x2160 with respect to the number of pixels, so it's only predictable that the AMD Radeon™ HD 7990 GPU absolutely screams when pitted against such a display setup.

We know that acoustic performance is just as important as game performance to our most demanding enthusiasts, which is why we've engineered the AMD Radeon™ HD 7990 GPU with a shockingly quiet triple-fan design. Mounted atop a big ol' heatpipe array of eight heatpipes, we can happily say that the world's fastest graphics card is also quieter than a library!1,4

Measured with a sound meter from a distance of 50cm in a room with a noise floor of 29.1 dBa, the AMD Radeon™ HD 7990 GPU posted sound pressure of 37.8 dBa to beat out a library, GTX 690 and Titan at 100% GPU load. Quite simply, this is one of our quietest enthusiast products ever.

Since January, we've been running the astonishingly successful Never Settle Reloaded promotion, which has given gamers around the world scores of free games for purchasing select AMD Radeon™ GPUs at participating retailers. More recently, we expanded that program to include Far Cry® 3 Blood Dragon, which we're giving away for free to thousands of gamers! Clearly it's a mission of ours to be constantly doing awesome things with awesome games, and the AMD Radeon™ HD 7990 GPU is no different.

Coinciding with retail availability over the next two weeks, customers will be treated to EIGHT FREE GAMES for purchasing the world's fastest graphics card!1 Those games include:
We've worked with our GPU manufacturing partners to ensure that a postcard to redeem these games will be right in the box for every AMD Radeon™ HD 7990 GPU sold in a country eligible for the Never Settle Reloaded promotion. For more details, I invite you to take a look at the Never Settle Reloaded webpage!
The AMD Radeon™ HD 7990 GPU will be on shelf within two weeks from the date of this post. Today, however, reviewers around the world are publishing their independent analyses of this fantastic piece of engineering, so keep an eye on our Twitter and Facebook properties for the latest scoop!  Thanks for reading. See you next time!  [accordion] [accordion_pane title="> Click here for Fine Print" current="no"]Robert Hallock is a Product Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD's positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.
1 In tests by AMD as of 28 February, 2013, the AMD Radeon™ HD 7990 showed higher average performance than the NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 690 in the 3DMark® Fire Strike Extreme (FS6407 vs. FS5316) and Crysis 3 (1080p & 1600p at all quality presets). System configuration: Intel® Core™ i7-3960X (3.30 GHz), MSI X79A-GD65, 16GB DDR3-1600 and Windows 8 x64. AMD Radeon™ HD 7990 evaluated with AMD Catalyst™ 13.2 Beta 6. NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 690 evaluated with NVIDIA® ForceWare™ 310.90 WHQL. GRDT-32 2 AMD CrossFire™ technology requires an AMD CrossFire Ready motherboard, an AMD CrossFire™ Bridge Interconnect (for each additional graphics card) and may require a specialized power supply. 3 AMD Eyefinity technology supports up to six DisplayPort™ monitors on an enabled graphics card. Supported display quantity, type and resolution vary by model and board design; confirm specifications with manufacturer before purchase. To enable more than two displays, or multiple displays from a single output, additional hardware such as DisplayPort-ready monitors or DisplayPort 1.2 MST-enabled hubs may be required. Maximum two active adapters supported. See www.amd.com/eyefinityfaq for full details. 4 Acoustics testing performed by AMD from a distance of 50cm, in accordance with ISO 7779:2010 methodology, with an open-air system and an acoustically-controlled environment with a noise floor of 29.1 dBA. AMD Radeon™ HD 7990 acoustic results of 37.8 dBa bests the GeForce Titan and GTX 690 with values of 41.2 and 47.5 dBa, respectively. All graphics cards tested at 100% graphics load with FurMark. Perceived loudness of a library rated at 40 dBA by the Purdue School of Chemistry: http://www.chem.purdue.edu/chemsafety/Training/PPETrain/dblevels.htm GRDT-33 SYSTEM CONFIGURATION(S):Intel Core i7-3960X (3.3GHz) MSI X79A-GD65 16GB DDR3-1600 9-9-9-24 Microsoft® Windows® 7 x64  [/accordion_pane] [/accordion] View the original article here