Double the GPUs, double the performance, at almost double the price.

AMD’s dual GPU cards have come a long way in the past several years. The original Radeon HD 3870 was noisy, ran hot and didn’t always perform up to snuff. Since then, AMD’s Catalyst Driver suite has substantially improved the performance and breadth of CrossFire-supported games.

On the hardware side, AMD is pulling out all the stops with its Radeon HD 6990 card. The company understands that a dual GPU card is most appealing to a small band of enthusiasts who really want the card to push the edge of the envelope, both in terms of engineering and features.

Despite being fully twelve inches long—like its predecessor, the Radeon HD 5970—the HD 6990 looks a little less imposing than the 5970. Maybe it’s the center-mounted fan, which visually breaks up the huge mass of the cooling shroud.

The Radeon HD 6990 combines twin Cayman GPUs, 4GB of GDDR5 and a new cooling system.

Still, it’s a big, heavy card that will only fit in larger PC cases, so make sure your case has the room for it.

The HD 6990 is essentially two Radeon HD 6970 cards built onto one card. While the base core clock speed is down a bit, at 830MHz, the full 6970 has been replicated, complete with 3,072 total shader ALUs, 192 texture units and 4GB of GDDR5 running at 1,250MHz.

A pair of HD 6970 GPUs and all that GDDR5, even with the core clocks cranked back to 830MHz, consumes serious power; the HD 6990 ships with two 8-pin PCI Express power connectors. Also built into the card is a tiny physical dip switch that allows you to overclock and overvolt the core clock with a single flick, to 880MHz. Flicking that switch turns the 6990 into full, screaming dual HD 6970s, but at a hefty power cost. At full throttle, the overclocked HD 5990 used 528W—more power than we’ve ever seen from a single graphics card. The card itself, when overclocked, consumes up to 450W, which requires serious voltage regulation. AMD touts its use of Volterra digital programmable regulators and cherry-picked GPUs which would run at high voltages and clock speeds without melting.

The dual Volterra digital regulators are the rectangular chips at the top. The two GPUs are symmetrically laid out.

Cooling dual Cayman GPUs and 4GB of video RAM takes a serious cooling system. AMD re-engineered the cooling system, incorporating a full-board heat dissipation system with dual vapor chambers.

The heat sink fins each cover a separate vapor chamber located above each GPU. The copper head sink is thermally linked via phase change thermal interface materials.

The central fan pulls heat from the rearmost GPU, pushing that air over the front GPU. Since all the video connectors are mounted on one side of the double-wide PCI bracket, the other bracket side becomes a full-height exhaust vent.

The HD 6990 ships with five video connectors built in, one dual-link DVI connector and four mini-DisplayPort 1.2 attach points. Retail boxes will ship with three additional adapters, one miniDP to single link DVI passive, one miniDP to single link DVI active and a miniDP to HDMI passive.

Four mini-DP 1.2 ports plus a dual link DVI connector enable full Eyefinity support.

So the Radeon HD 6990 seems well engineered. How does it actually perform? We cranked up the standard testbed, loaded up the benchmarks and took it for a spin. We compared the HD 6990 (with the OC switch in both settings) to an overclocked eVGA GTX 580 SC, and the previous generation Radeon HD 5970.

Any lingering doubts as to who is the new performance champ are now gone.  In games that are seem mostly bandwidth or texture bound, we see little difference between the OC setting and the standard setting. It’s worth noting that we did see games crash on a couple of occasions when the card’s switch was set in the OC setting, while the 6990 was completely stable at the standard setting.

So for the moment, AMD gets to hoist the PC graphics performance crown onto its brow. But fame and GPU fortune can be fleeting, and already rumblings of a dual GPU Nvidia-based card have hit the Internet rumor mills.

Will you want one? At $699, the price is pretty steep, especially if you consider that a single Radeon HD 6970 costs about $360. Also, it’s a big card, so make sure you case has room for a foot-long card. And you’ll need a robust power supply to deliver all that juice.

Nevertheless, the temptation is there – that’s a lot of raw GPU power on a single card. The price of GPU glory is never a small one.
 

$699 (est) http://www.amd.com     

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Wait a minute, didn’t AMD take the ATI brand behind the shed and give it the Old Yeller treatment? Sort of. Barring a special edition throwback or a mulligan of sorts, you won’t ever see a new graphics card in the home desktop market carrying an ATI label, but AMD is still using it for some of its professional cards, including the ATI FirePro V5800 DVI, one of two new graphics cards geared for the workplace (the other being the AMD FirePro 2270).

“Because of their superior power consumption and multi-dispaly capabilities, solutions based on the AMD FirePro 2270 and ATI FirePro V4800 DVI deliver strong value for financial, medical, and corporate workstation environments,” said Janet Matsuda, general manager, AMD Professional Graphics. “With the AMD FirePro family, we continue to demonstrate our focus on enhancing productivity through an enhanced visual experience.”

The AMD FirePro 2270 ( $150) is AMD’s only low-profile, passively cooled, dual-display, triple set support solution graphics card, while the ATI FirePro V5800 DVI ($470) boasts added muscle to drive two high-resolution dual-link DVI displays. Both cards are available now.

Image Credit: AMD

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The fellas over at TechPowerUp have posted a guide detailing how to mod a Radeon HD 6950 (Cayman Pro) videocard into a Radeon HD 6970 (Cayman XT), both of which are based on the same GPU design. The main difference comes down to the number of shaders — 1408 on the 6950 and 1535 on the 6970.

According to TechPowerUp, the 6950′s missing shaders are the result of a deactivation scheme in the card’s BIOS. That’s good news for modders, as unlike hardware locks, software locks are usually easy to reverse.

Bear in mind that you’re on your own should something go wrong, but according to the guide, activating those dormant shaders involves nothing more than flashing the BIOS. Once you’re finished with that, you can goose the clockspeeds to match that of a 6970 videocard.

TechPowerUp tested its method on 14 cards from 7 different vendors and in each case determined that the mod “unlocks and works fine” without any errors.

Image Credit: AMD

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Our sincere apologies if we just spoiled the ending to Old Yeller, but c’mon, you had since 1956 to read the children’s novel and nearly as long to watch the original flick. So, are we good? Alright then, moving on.

AMD, the world’s second largest chip maker, is taking the ATI brand out behind the shed, and that shotgun isn’t just for show. By the end of the year, ATI will be nothing more than a footnote, save for whatever older generation products are still in the wild.

Apparently this wasn’t an easy decision for AMD, which sent out surveys to several thousand “discrete graphics aware” respondents in the U.S., U.K., Germany, China, Japan, Brazil, and Russia. What they found was that the “AMD brand [is] stronger than ATI vs. graphics competitors,” while the “Radeon and Fire Pro brand awareness” ranks as “very high.” The conclusion?

“Results indicated ‘permission’ to consolidate under the AMD brand,” the survey says.

AMD purchased ATI back in 2006 for $5.4 billion, a price tag that had many analysts scratching their heads at the time, particularly as AMD continued to post losses quarter after quarter. Now four years later, the acquisition is looking like one of the smartest moves AMD ever made.

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If you’re the type who likes to update your drivers on the day of release and you own an ATI videocard, get to clicking. AMD has just dropped its ATI Catalyst 10.8 software suite into the wild, which brings a handful of new features and improvements to the table.

The latest driver release boasts full support for OpenGL ES 2.0 and enables 3D accelerated graphics with a Web browser that supports the 2.0 spec. Performance supposedly has been “greatly improved” for gamers equipped with an ATI Eyefinity setup on a quad ATI CrossFireX configuration, and anti-aliasing through the Catalyst Control Center (CCC) is now available for StarCraft II.

A number of performance improvements and resolved issues come with the 10.8 package, some of which include:

• Up to 2-6 percent improved performance in Far Cry 2 on Radeon HD 5800 series single and CrossFire configurations
• Up to 3-5 percent improved performance in Left 4 Dead 2 on Radeon HD 5800 series and CrossFire Radeon HD 5700 series configurations
• Up to 5-10 percent improved performance in Stormrise on Radeon HD 5600 and 5500 series cards
• HDMI default refresh rate now appears properly as 60Hz under HDTV in Catalyst Control Center (all Windows OSes)
• Desktop line corruption no longer observed after powering off the DP display and then turning it on while viewing Blu-ray content (Windows 7)
• Catalyst Control Center no longer fails and displays error message while transcoding specific video files on 64-bit OSes (Windows Vista)
• Hardware acceleration is now enabled in PowerDVD (Windows XP)

For a full list of changes, view the release notes here (PDF).

Driver Download

Image Credit: ATI

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For the most part, AMD’s 5xxx series of GPUs have stood up well against the competition,and that includes Nvidia’s Fermi architecture. If the Sunnyvale graphics chip maker wanted to, it could probably sit on the sidelines for the rest of the year and still remain competitive.

That isn’t in AMD’s cards, so to speak. Citing “sources from graphics card players,” Digitimes says you can expect AMD to start shipping videocards built around its next-gen GPU — codenamed Southern Islands — in November, with an official announcement preceding the launch a month ahead of time. This new GPU will come manufactured on a 28nm process. The original plan was to make these upcoming chips using a 32nm manufacturing process (and called Northern Islands by AMD), but Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) ended up skipping its 32nm R&D and jumped straight to 28nm.

Around the same time, and perhaps even earlier, AMD is said to be cutting prices for its ATI Radeon HD 5000-series graphics cards, both in preparation for the upcoming 6xxx series, and to fend off Fermi from chewing into its market share.

Imge Credit: pcpop.com

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The film Predators opened in theaters over the weekend, and as was the case with several other flicks proceed by Robert Rodriquez — Shorts, Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams, Spy Kids 3D: Game Over, Planet Terror, Sin City — it was AMD hardware that brought the special effects to life.

In this case, Troublemaker Studios tapped into AMD’s six-core Opteron processors and ATI FirePro graphics cards, and specifically the V8800 iteration. Representing the flagship GPU in the FirePro Vxxx line, the V8800 comes with 1600 stream processors, a 256-bit memory interface, 2GB of GDDR5, and all the modern standards you would expect, such as DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.2, and Shader Model 5.0.

Six digital artists comprised the core Predators production team. According to Charlie Boswell, AMD’s Direct of Digital Media and Entertainment, the AMD-powered workstations allowed the Predators team to render scenes in real-time at resolutions of up to 4,096 x 2,160.

Image Credit: Rico torres / 20th Century Fox / MCT

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