AMD Radeon HD7990 reviews go live

AMD’s Radeon HD7990 has been in the works for over a year and today (24 April 2013) the company has lifted the embargo on reviews worldwide.

Reviews so far have been favourable for many titles, although it is noted that this is a paper launch. Very few vendors will be selling the card this week and it’s only expected to land on European shores in the next three weeks. Its price is set at $1000 or R9192 as of today’s exchange rate.

Hexus gave it their performance award and were quite pleased with the card’s potential. Techpowerup! gave it a score of 8.3, noting that it’s elegant cooler design was better than third-party efforts from the likes of HIS and PowerColor.

While AMD has allowed it’s partners to make their own version of the HD7990 over the last few months, with cards like the PowerColor Devil 13 and HIS’ HD7970x2, there hasn’t been a reference design from the company, even though many fans expected one after the release of the HD7970 in December 2011. The HD7990, codenamed “Malta”, sandwiches two Radeon HD7970 cores onto a single circuit board and internally wired up in Crossfire mode.

It already works with the standard AMD Catalyst driver suite, although AMD is promising a new Catalyst version to ship when the card is available in the retail channel, which promises to make big changes to the way Crossfire runs in games. Currently it’s labeled as “Catalyst Prototype” by many reviewers.

The HD7990’s power consumption is also very close to Nvidia’s GTX690, although AMD’s HD7000 graphics cores are designed to be more powerful, not more efficient as is the case with Nvidia’s graphics cards.

The HD7990 also will be bundled with the full complement of games from the Never Settle bundle, which includes BioShock Infinite, Tomb Raider, Crysis 3, Far Cry 3, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, Hitman: Absolution, Sleeping Dogs, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution.