AMD Radeon HD7990 SA price point revealed

An AMD South Africa spokesperson has confirmed to MyGaming that AMD’s flagship dual-GPU graphics card, the Radeon HD7990 is coming to South Africa.

The HD7990 is currently pegged at a recommended retail price of R11,000 when it reaches our shores, although the exchange rate with the US Dollar may change this figure significantly. Currently the Rand is trading at R8.98 to the Dollar (30 April 2013) and AMD’s $1,000 RRP for overseas markets translates to R8,982.50.

AMD SA did not indicate when the card will hit our shores. The HD7990 is currently on order for fans and enthusiasts in America, Canada, the UK, Europe, and Asia, and will be available in the retail channel in those regions by 7 May, according to reviewers who asked the company for more information. The RRP (recommended retail price) for those regions is set at $1,000, competing directly with the dual-GPU Nvidia Geforce GTX690 and the Nvidia Titan.

The Nvidia GTX690 can be found in South Africa for anywhere between R11,500 and R14,500.

AMD Radeon HD7990 Malta

The Radeon HD7990 launched on April 24th and reviews were positive, although recommendations were reserved because AMD’s prototype driver that fixes Crossfire stuttering issues has not been released yet.

The HD7990 is based on two Tahiti XT chips – the same found in the Radeon HD7970. Both are clocked at 950MHz boosting to 1GHz, with 6GB of GDDR5 memory at 1.5GHz (6GHz effective), divided into 3GB per chip. The Radeon HD7990 can enable more memory-intensive graphics details because each chip has an extra 1GB of RAM, whereas the GTX690 only has 2GB allocated per chip.

Two AMD Radeon HD7990 cards were needed for DICE’s Battlefield 4 demo.

Fans may want to wait for AMD to release their prototype frame pacing driver before picking up the card, though. The special driver, released to reviewers a week before the NDA (non-disclosure agreement) lifted, significantly improves frame rates, reduces stutter and makes better use of the card’s abilities in Crossfire mode.

Instead of sending each frame to the monitor once it’s ready, this driver acts a lot like V-sync, waiting for your monitor to refresh itself so that the frame rate matches your monitor’s refresh rate, reducing stutter and eliminating tearing in fast-paced first-person shooters. Nvidia has been using the same technology to sort out it’s own issues with SLI for its GPUs based on the Kepler architecture.

The HD7990 comes with a massive “Never Settle” games bundle, giving buyers free copies of BioShock Infinite, Tomb Raider, Crysis 3, Far Cry 3, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, Hitman: Absolution, Sleeping Dogs, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Two of them were needed for DICE’s 17-minute Battlefield 4 gameplay demo, which the company later confirmed was running at 4K resolution (3840 x 2160 pixels) and downscaled to 1080p for viewing on Youtube.

The card will be available from various third-party brands with the reference cooler and design.