Introducing “the World’s Fastest Graphics card”, AMD’s flagship HD 6990
Conclusion
Price to Performance
The HD 6990 leads the Radeons convincingly in most of the benchmarks and it is a solid improvement over the HD 5870 CrossFire and by extension much faster than the old flagship, the HD 5970. We note the GTX 580 SLI completely stand out as a wild card to put up against HD 69×0-X3 TriFire; they are priced about $1000 for each configuration. Leaving it off of our chart would have made a completely different impression of the new Antilles Radeon and may give a hint of what may be coming from Nvidia in their own dual-GPU video card expected soon as the GTX 590. The HD 6990 does succeed as an ultimate-quality successor to the HD 5970 although they are somewhat eclipsed by the GTX 580’s strong SLI performance.
Let’s take a look at current (suggested) etail pricing:
- HD 6990 – $699
- GTX 580 – $499
- HD 6970 – $359
- GTX 570 – $349
- HD 6950 – $299
- HD 6870 – $239
Of course you have to consider the street pricing of the HD 6970 is at about or below $325 – so for about $650 you can surpass the HD 6990’s performance if you have a CrossFire capable motherboard. The HD 6990 does not stand out as a particularly good price to performance value; flagship dual-GPU cards rarely do
It is important to note that initially the HD 6970 and the HD 6950 were equipped with 2GB of vRAM although AMD’s partners brought out 1GB versions that are priced about $20 less than the 2GB versions. If you do not play games at or above 1920×1200, it might be a good cost-cutting measure. The HD 6990 or HD 6970 CrossFire should only be considered for the highest resolutions and they would be great for Eyefinity.
Did AMD succeed with HD 6990?
It appears that AMD succeeded in doing what they set out to do. They succeeded in blowing away the GTX 580’s performance; something the aging HD 5970 was unable to do. However, it also appears that AMD was somewhat surprised by the GTX 580 and GTX 570 which completely addressed Fermi GF100’s former flaws which forced them to position its dual-GPU card against the GTX 580 and to go to extremes to crush it.
What is going to make this especially interesting is that Nvidia may well release their own dual-GPU video card based on a GF110 variant that may be even faster although this is pure speculation now. One thing for sure – exciting times in the Graphics Wars are still ahead!
It is pretty clear from our 29 games and three synthetic tests that the HD 6990 is a quality upgrades over the old HD 5970 video card. The new HD 6990 – in this snapshot in time – has the clear distinction of being the fastest video card in the world and it crushes the GTX 580 performance-wise. At a suggested retail price of $699, it sets the HD 6990 just above the average price of HD 6970 CrossFire or GTX 570 SLI. Also the Radeon drivers are brand new and we can expect to see performance improvements in CrossFire scaling over the coming months.
If you are looking for the very fastest single video card that can support multiple displays simultaneously, or the new 5×1 Eyefinity, then the new HD 6990 is a great choice and an excellent upgrade over the HD 5970. And if you need even more power, you can also use CrossFire-X to pair your video card with another HD 6990 for Quad-fire – or as we have done with a HD 6970, for TriFire – to give a substantial frame rate boost to your gaming experience in most cases. And 4GB of vRAM may well be necessary for the high resolutions that running multi-panel displays require.
We also expect that some of HD 6990’s success will depend on market pricing and also what Nvidia does with their GeForce pricing as the two companies respond to each other. Basically, if you want the fastest single video card that is an improvement in every way over the HD 5970, the new HD 6990 does it for you, albeit with a price premium.
Conclusion
This has been quite an enjoyable – if physically exhausting – four days, hands on experience for us in comparing our brand-new, under-NDA, HD 6990 versus our other video cards and we look forward to evaluating further new products from AMD and Nvidia.
We used all “fresh” testing with the very latest drivers for all of these video card. We wish that we had more than the 4 days that we were allowed to benchmark our HD 6990 so as to give you our first impressions. Fortunately, we have been gaming for months with our other test cards so that we can provide you with a reliable comparison. It was certainly worth it and we feel priviliged to bring you our very first benchmarks and performance testing of AMD’s new Antillies HD 6990, “the world’s fastest graphics card”.
We like the new HD 6990. It has much to offer to the serious gamer and especially to someone who wants to use Eyefinity 5×1. It is an amazing piece of technology. In the meantime, feel free to comment below, ask questions or have a detailed discussion in our ABT forum. If you have any requests on what you would like for us to focus on for further testing or for any other information, please join our ABT forum.
The HD 6990
Pros and Cons:
Pros:
- The HD 6990 is much faster than its predecessor, HD 5970 and is it much faster than the GTX 580 and HD 6970
- There is further room for overclocking and good scalability.
- New architecture brings support for GPU computing and a level of performance way beyond the last generation.
- DX11 and greatly improved support for tessellation, 4 GB vRAM and high resolution 5×1 Eyefinity brings even more realism to gaming
- AMD’s improved vapor chamber cooler is great for achieving and managing your further overclock.
- PowerTune manages the power consumption intelligently.
- CrossFire-X technology allows you to harness two or more GPUs for faster gaming at higher detail levels and resolutions. You can easily do Quad- or Tri-Fire configurations.
- Enhanced AA and more control over settings
- Back-up dual BIOS switch offers safety features for enthusiasts; overdrive kicks in with higher voltage and a higher core clock.
Cons:
- It is expensive at $700 – more than two CrossFired HD 6970s or SLI’d GTX 570s which are both quieter and faster; the market will decide the pricing and Nvidia’s own dual-GPU GTX 590 is on the way.
- It runs very hot and it is quite noisy at load in games. It is loud and adding a second video card for CrossFire-X is nearly intolerable.
- (updated 3/9/11) There is no warranty if you use the unlocked factory-overclocked “ASUM” switch. Make sure to check the A-i-B partner’s individual warranty.
Although heat and noise are real issues, we love the raw power and the ability to add a HD 6970 for TriFire-X3, or another HD 6990 for Quad-Fire, which further improves performance. It deserves an ABT Editor’s Choice award on its pure performance alone and just for living up to AMD’s claim of “the fastest graphics card in the world.”
We do not know what the future will bring, but this new HD 6990 brings prestige to the Radeon family as their flagship video card. Look for them immediately at an etailer. This editor believes that AMD brings a very full-featured DX11 GPU lineup to the market that will find good acceptance among customers and their fans alike. The new Cayman architecture including Antilles is a solid improvement over Cypress and it translates to higher performance in gaming.
We have also seen AMDs drivers improve historically and their multi-GPU CrossFire-X scaling for newer games is very impressive. We also like the direction they are heading in with their application profiles and more control over settings. We are looking forward to experimenting with the new AA, also.
If you currently game on an older generation video card, you will do yourself a big favor by upgrading. The move to a HD 69×0 will give you better visuals on the DX11 pathway and you are no doubt thinking of CrossFire-X if you want to get even higher performance or want to use Eyefinity’s multi-panel display (which we are going to explore in a future article versus 3-panel Surround).
The competition is hot as the prices on even the new video cards have softened and Nvidia offers their own set of features including PhysX, CUDA and 3D Vision. And Nvidia is also bringing out their own highest-performing dual-GPU video card out shortly. Stay tuned, there is a lot coming from us at ABT. Stay tuned for a USB sound card review this week and another new video card next week!
Mark Poppin
ABT Senior Editor
Please join us in our Forums
Become a Fan on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
For the latest updates from ABT, please join our RSS News Feed
Join our Distributed Computing teams
- Folding@Home – Team AlienBabelTech – 164304
- SETI@Home – Team AlienBabelTech – 138705
- World Community Grid – Team AlienBabelTech
This is soooo intense, the scaling is near perfect and the price is somewhat reasonable. I’m still not sure about overclocking that thing, it’s already damn powerful 😛
I wonder how Nvidia will respond with their 590.
Good Job Poppin! *claps*
This is the holy grail of hd 6990 reviews!!!! All hail the king!!!!
Dang…that’s one IMBAH review right there.
Thanks for the epic review 😀 .
Thank-you all!
Let me make a big clarification. At the AMD presentation we were told that simply flipping the switch doesn’t violate the warranty.
That is technically correct. However *operating* the card in the 2nd OD position voids your warranty and makes what they told us at the meeting double-speak. If I had known this, I would have only tested it in the stock (warrantied) position.
WARNING: If you break the yellow sticker that covers the switch, you are NOT warrantied. However, each AMD Graphic Partner may have a different policy and I’d highly recommend that you get it in writing from them before you touch the switch if you are considering buying a HD 6990 (and care about overclocking and retaining your warranty).
I will update my article to make this very clear and to add another negative to the conclusion. All of my future testing will be done with this card in the non-overclocked (under warranty) position.
Hey apoppin, will there be a 11.4 driver review? I noticed that all other Radeon cards were tested with 11.2s and according to AMD there have been some improvements for the HD 6000 series with the new drivers.
Of course. As soon as WHQL 11.4 is released. 11.4 is a beta driver.
However, we did use 11.4 beta for the HD 6990 as it is the only release driver. And for comparison’s sake, we used our HD 6970 with 11.4 beta also – and also because we used it together with HD 6990 for TriFire-X3.
If you’d like to see the performance increase for HD 6970 with the new beta drivers, check out our 11.2 vs 11.1a Performance Analysis – we used the same settings as for the HD 6990 launch article:
http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?p=24120
You can see significant increases for HD 6970 with the new beta driver over the latest WHQL driver, 11.2. Probably there are also increases with the 6800 series.
We tested the rest of the AMD Graphics cards – except as noted above for HD 6990 and HD 6970 – with the latest WHQL driver as we usually do.
Thanks! Looking forward to it!
My spouse and i have been so thankful that Emmanuel managed to complete his studies through the entire precious recommendations he grabbed using your web page. It’s not at all simplistic to simply always be giving out tips which people today have been making money from. And now we fully understand we have the writer to appreciate for that. Those explanations you’ve made, the easy website navigation, the friendships you can make it easier to instill – it’s all impressive, and it’s really helping our son in addition to us consider that that situation is excellent, and that’s extraordinarily mandatory. Thank you for all the pieces!