Rather than take up the equivalent of four slots in your PC, the HD 6990 sticks to the usual two. 0 - Gigabyte 4GB Edition 0 - Asus Edition AMD Radeon HD 6990. The HD 6990 for the most part proved to be just as fast as 2 x HD 6970s, but there are other benefits that go beyond simple performance.
But where high-end gaming is concerned, this card offers an impressive bang for the buck. At $700, the Radeon HD 6990 is far from cheap, and in fact it’s the most expensive GPU to be released since NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800 Ultra. AMD delivers a card that’s about 80% faster than NVIDIA’s GTX 580, but carries a mere 40% price premium. Our results prove an obvious point: AMD’s Radeon HD 6990 is the fastest graphics card on the planet. Here, the closest figure to +40% was with Dirt 2, which still managed to far surpass it by reaching +48.65%. Just Cause 2 has seen a staggering +136% increase in performance, and Metro 2033 came awful close to +100%, settling in at +96.57%. I think I’m beginning to understand where AMD has come from with its final presentation slide for its HD 6990.
The tables below break down our results for both our 1080p and 2560×1600 resolutions. Compared to NVIDIA’s card, AMD’s carries a 40% price premium, so I thought it’d be interesting to break our results down and see if we see that premium translated into performance gain at an equal level. It’s an unfair competition, but the best comparison card to the HD 6990 is NVIDIA’s GTX 580. Though the HD 6990 is designed for overclocking, we were unable to devote time to it, but may in the future. While the deltas were minimal overall, I can’t help but wonder about that decision, or if there was some technical limitation.
Regardless of the reasons behind this, our CrossFireX solution proved faster than the HD 6990 in most cases as a result. One thing I do find odd about the HD 6990, though, is that it doesn’t share the same 1350MHz memory clock speed of the HD 6970. Regardless, NVIDIA’s solution costs $300 more, so while a bit faster, it carries an even higher price premium than the HD 6990. NVIDIA would beat out the HD 6990 if SLI’d GeForce GTX 580s are introduced, but unfortunately, we’ve been behind on testing that configuration for a while, but will be tackling it for an upcoming article. After all, the HD 6990 is in essence dual HD 6970s, which already beats out any other single-card offering out there. Powered by AMD Radeon HD 6990 GPU Integrated with the first 4GB GDDR5 memory and 256-bit memory interface Features Dual-link DVI-I / Mini Displayport4. That’s not to say that this result wasn’t expected. As discovered throughout all of our testing, the HD 6990 has become the fastest graphics card available, and by quite a wide margin. Now, let’s take a look at the graphics card itself, VTX HD 6990.Too often, I hit a writer’s block when trying to conjure some thoughts for a ‘Final Thoughts’ page, but with a product such as AMD’s Radeon HD 6990, a section like this almost writes itself. GPU-Z screenshot showing activated OC profile, increasing the core clock to 880 MHz.
AMD advises to read the manual at before attempting to access this feature. In contrast to the HD 6970/ 6950 where the second BIOS acts as a backup, on the HD 6990, the second BIOS stores an Overclocking profile which, when activated, will increase the graphics card’s core frequency by 50 MHz. The OC Profile BIOS on the HD 6990 is sealed by default. Purpose-built to dominate your gaming competition in the most advanced DirectX 11 titles, the AMD Radeon HD 6990 is quite simply the fastest graphics processor in the world. You can select which one to activate via a small switch located on top of the card, near the Crossfire connector. Immerse yourself with AMD Eyefinity technology and expand your games across up to six simultaneous displays. Like the previous HD 69xx models, the HD 6990 also comes equipped with two switchable BIOS chips.
As such, it is also equipped with the same set of features, including:Įnhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing (EQAA) The above picture shows the difference between EQAA and MSAA methods.ĪMD PowerTune Technology HD 6990’s AMD PowerTune feature can be accessed through the ATI Overdrive tool.įor more elaborated information on these two features, refer to our previous Radeon HD 6950 article.ĭual BIOS BIOS switch on the HD 6900 Series The HD 6990 is basically two Cayman boards combined together for almost double the processing power.