Shootout: AMD HD 7990 vs NVIDIA GTX 690 Performance Results

Updated: May 7, 2013

Everyone loves a battle royal, but they love it a little more when its something they are really into, you know like video cards? For me that is an arena I am always glad to be a spectator at as I am into games and their natural counterpart the video card that powers them. Today’s battle is the brand new AMD HD 7990 Versus the NVIDIA GeForce GTX690. Both of these cards are based on a Dual-GPU architecture on a single silicon solution, which means you get either SLI or CrossfireX performance right out of the box on one card, and also equates to a high sales price as well due to the fact that both of these cards are the top of the heap performers in either companies lineup and priced to match.

Most people cannot not even afford the $1000.00 or more price tags of these cards, but and believe me, there are some who would rather eat cereal for every meal for as month in order to get their hands on this type of card. With that said the amount of buyers for these cards might make for a small group, but the amount of people who just want the information is mind-boggling. We set out to put these cards through a rigorous amount of testing in an effort to see how far the cards could be pushed as well as how well they perform in real world gaming. Let’s take a look at these cards in a spec for spec comparison before getting into the actual gameplay to see how the cards compare on paper.

GPU Codename

HD 7990 – Malta (28 nm process)

GTX 690 – GK104 (28 nm process)

Core Clock:

HD 7990 – 1000 MHz

GTX 690 – 915 MHz (But it boosts to 1020 MHz)

Memory Clock:

HD 7990 – 1500 MHz

GTX 690 – 1502 MHz

Shaders:

HD 7990 – 4096 Stream Processors

GTX 690 – 3072 CUDA Cores

Memory Interface:

HD 7990 – 384-bit x2

GTX 690 – 256-bit x 2

Memory Size

HD 7990 – 3GB GDDR5 x2

GTX 690 – 2GB GDDR5 x2

Memory Bandwidth

HD 7990 – 288 GB/s x2

GTX 690 – 192.3GB/s x 2

TDP:

HD 7990 – 375W

GTX 690 – 300W

For our test setup we used an ASUS Maximus V Extreme motherboard, and i7 3770K, 16GB of Corsair Dominator 2133MHz memory, a Patriot 120GB SATA3 SSD as the boot drive and a 1 TB Western Digital Black Hard drive as the media drive. WE run all the tests a minimum of three runs and then balance out the scores for better accuracy. We also try and maintain a balance between real world and synthetic testing in our test regiment as to get a feel how the cards perform all around. Both cards can be overclocked, but for me out of the box performance is the standard, and true overclocking usually requires liquid cooling to be the most efficient so both cards were tested with their primary settings at default and custom tuned in the game or test application being run.

In the battle between the AMD Radeon HD 7990 and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 we tried pushing the cards to their peak performance ends. We tested in both standard 1920X1080 and also at 2560X1440, which is a resolution that is slowly gaining ground as monitor prices go down and sizes keep getting bigger. I am sure in the near future we will see 2560X1440 become the next standard as we saw 1920X1080 take over from the previous 1600X900 standard. Neither card ran so noisy as to make it an aural nightmare at stock settings, but if you turn the fans to 100% both cards sound like mini windmills. You will get better overclocking performance with the fans turned up, albeit with the sacrifice of quiet running cards, which I why I reinstate that any overclocker who is really serious is not going to use an air cooled fan. Thus I will leave overclocking to another article in the future with proper liquid cooling on the cards.

At the end of the test day we can plainly see that AMD 7990 Beats the GTX 690 in pretty much every category and destroys it in OpenCL performance across the board. There were some glory marks although for the GeForce GTX 690 as the GTX 690 performed better on the Unigine Heaven Benchmark (Heavy DX11) as well as Batman Arkham City, it competed head to head in Crysis 3, which BTW features advanced PhysX if that something that matters to you. The GeForce GTC 690 did have a lower TDP, but it did run slighter hotter under our stress tests in the lab. Some games have advanced PhysX that only an NVIDIA card can render, but AMD cards can run PhysX although off the CPU not the GPU hence NVIDIA’s advanced options. AMD has played a crazy card at the end of this cycle of events and now NVIDIA will just go back to their labs throw some cash at R&D and come out with something of their own. For this moment in time, yes folks AMD is the king of the ring and this battle goes in their favor. We appreciate you taking the time to read this performance battle article and would love to hear your thoughts and idea’s in the comment section below. Thanks for reading Tech Of Tomorrow we look forward to your comments below, Peace.