AMD Radeon HD 7990 6GB Malta Video Card Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

The AMD Radeon HD 7990 6GB ‘Malta’ video card was found to be a beast in every right. The Mediterranean island of Malta is the largest of the three major islands that constitute the Maltese archipelago. Here we have the AMD 7990 being the largest and fastest of the three cards that make up the AMD Radeon HD 7900 series, so the internal codename makes sense. This card also caps of the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series and it was able to showcase the power of the Tahiti XT2 GPU cores and AMD’s 28nm GCN technology.

When it comes to performance you really need a 30-inch display running 2560×1600 or a multi-panel AMD Eyefinity setup to get the most out of the Radeon HD 7990. We don’t have a 4K display available to test on, but AMD says that the Radeon HD 7990 video card is ready for Ultra HD 4K gaming and provided us with the performance slide above. It shows that the Radeon HD 7990 does a tad better than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX690 in 11 game titles. Our performance testing showed that the AMD Radeon HD 7990 be the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 more times than not at 2560×1600. The performance of the AMD Radeon HD 7990 was solid, but we were expecting a bit more from this card for the price. Sure, it beats the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 more times than not, but NVIDIA released that card back on May 2nd, 2012. It took AMD basically a year to release a dual-GPU card that could take the performance crown. While we are on the topics of dates did you know that this is AMD’s first new dual-GPU card since the AMD Radeon HD 6990 was launched in March 2011? This card has been in the making for a long time and we were told that it was coming over a year ago.

As with all high-end graphics cards they AMD Radeon HD 7990 costs an arm and a leg. This card will set you back $999, but it comes with eight game titles as part of the bundle that have a full retail value of over $325. This certainly helps offset the price of this card and makes it a compelling reason to purchase this card over the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 that it was able to outperform more times than not. We should also mention that we completed our testing with CATALYST 13.5 Beta 2 drivers, but AMD also send over some preview drivers that really help frame latencies and frame pacing performance. A number of sites are showing weakness when it comes to frame latencies and micro stutters on AMD cards, but AMD has taken action and has some software fixes in the works. Legit Reviews hasn’t gotten into frame capturing for our video card reviews just yet because we wanted to see how things play out. AMD appears to have a software fix for now and it is safe to assume that future GPU’s that aren’t taped out will have some new technologies to avoid the stutters. NVIDIA is clearly ahead of the game when it comes to that aspect, but we expect AMD to have a solution and that all could pass. Is it worth a $5,000-$10,000 investment to capture frames and report on something that has a fix in the works? We’ll let you tell us!

Legit Bottom Line: The AMD Radeon HD 7990 6GB video card is a monster and takes the dual-GPU performance crown away from NVIDIA and the GeForce GTX 690, but after waiting all this time is it enough?