News ATI Radeon HD 6990 delayed

They give me a ridiculous amount of performance, don't get me wrong. I'm just hoping that the new Northern Islands 40nm architecture will more efficiently utilize all four GPU cores, as this seems to be an ongoing issue for many 4-way CrossFire users. While the performance potential in terms of Hemlock's architecture design is more than sufficient at the hardware level, I'll be the first person to point the finger at AMD's Catalyst driver team for insufficiently supporting advanced multi-GPU configurations, or even realizing that there are enthusiast users who own such configurations. Only since Catalyst 10.8 have the drivers actually made any good use of my Quad-CrossFireX configuration on Windows 7. I'm not even kidding - for the entire first half of 2010, I felt like I had 8.6 billion useless 40nm transistors just sitting in my system, all thanks to some clowns who don't know how to code drivers correctly.

 

Happy to wait it out and see what 6990 offers, it also coincides with Valve's new offerings and a few new games like Guild Wars 2, so I might have to put off the new rig until then.

 

I think it's a bit of a bummer. In order to stop the rot I offloaded my 5870's just before the 6 series hype kicked in. I was waiting for the 6990 to come along and now don't think I'm arsed waiting another 2-4 months so that leaves me with a choice between the 6970 and 580. The 580 did it's proper dx11 improvements (tesselation etc) last year in the form on the 480 and suffered poor yields and delays. Cayman is playing catch up on this side of the high end performance and is suffering poor yields... So what to go for.. Well to me the 580 is looking like this years winner. It's ironed out it's issues last year and will have relatively mature drivers thanks to it being an evolution. Reviews have it performing aroound the same level as a 5970 but without the driver issues of dual chip. The 6970 will probably come in around the same performance as the 580 with huge gains in tesselation over the 5870. So it's down to the frills... Physx cuda nvidia 3d are all appealing. Unless the 6970 is an ass whopper ati have dropped the ball which is pretty **** for a company resting on it's laurels for 12 months!

 

Two 5970's? You have to be losing performance in there somewhere man. One is overkill for just about anything. And they don't scale well. I wish I had more money than sense. Must be nice.

 

How do you figure? Are MCM multi-core processors cheating for using multiple dies? Better hope you never had a Core 2 Quad! What about the GTX480 v. 5870, how do you rationalize the massively larger die on the 480? Is that not cheating by simply throwing more transistors at it until you get better performance?

It's one thing to be proud of the GTX580 taking the fastest single-GPU crown, but to call other cards cheating simply because they have a different design? If putting two dies on one PCB lets them turn out high performance at a reasonable prices/heat/power draw then more power to them.

 

reading through all your thoughts i think the bigest question is if the 6990 will come out is there a proccesor that will let you use all its performance or will it show us minimum framerates that is similar to other cards in the top end i would like to see them improve over the pre-high end cards and i don't want to see bottleneck's with other hardware. I say let them sort out the yields or whatever problem and bring it out when its ready for us to use it and i can't wait to see it in action

 

Come on Sloth, you know what he means.

 

until we have real multi-GPU, it will always be very driver dependent.

real multi-GPU is where GPU are designed from the ground up to be used in multiples. such as having a side-port on the 4870x2, and the Hydra chip. i can never trust software to do the right thing at the right time, while i am sure a dedicated work scheduling chip on a dual-GPU card can do a good job.

multi-core CPU have scheduler to handle workload distribution. GPU have scheduler (there's a name for it during Fermi's launch) inside its core. when the right time comes that company realise they can't throw in more cores onto same chip, they will start have dedicated scheduler for work destruction.

before then, any multi-GPU set isn't done correctly.

 

I wonder if I can buy 2 at a time?

The only thing to replace my 4870x2

S*D

 

Pure speculation - as you have said yourself, numerous times before.

Strange how you have double standards when it comes to AMD products compared to Nvidia....

 

I really don't, unless he means to setup arbitrary rules and restrictions to make one side look better, but I honestly doubt that's his goal.

I'll jump straight to the end here and say: if it performs better than its alternatives, isn't that correct?

I would have guessed you considered multi-GPU cheating because it was like comparing SLI/CF results to a single card. Your explanation clears that up. I definately agree on software problems with dual-GPU solutions, it kept me from buying a dual 5770 setup which was popular when I was looking to buy. Glad to see you don't have a problem with the concept of dual/multi-GPU cards, though. Just as we saw with processors, you can only push a single unit so far before it reaches a performance plateau. GPUs are obviously a bit of a different beast, such as Fermi with its 16 "cores", but the heart of the matter remains: technology can always advance and when new solutions come along they just might be worth investing in. Perhaps if dual-GPU solutions become more popular they will be developed with their own schedulers, just as part of technology advancing.

 

Unless you have an Eyefinity set-up this slight delay of the HD 6990 is not gonna bankrupt AMD besides the HD 5970 is still faster than the GTX 580 as is the HD 6870 in CF and a GTX 460 1gb Sli set-up.

AMD may have to delay the HD6970 6950 because of low production which seems to be a common theme to everyone needing silicon except Intel (and Strippers). The HD6990 uses two HD 6950 chips so there you go but seriously there is like only one game out right now that demands this much graphical horsepower.

Why do some people have an issue with dual GPUs? Especially when you can get better performance cheaper with two mid range GPU's versus one expensive high end GPU. HD 5850 CF has the same or better performance than a HD 5970 and is cheaper. GTX 460 sli beats a GTX 480 every time. To each his own I guess.

When was Nvidia so gung ho about the "Fastest Single GPU Crown" I don't remember this ideology when the GTX 295 with it's dual GPUs was out and nothing could touch it. If one card cost $500 then compare it to the next $500 solution be it single, double, triple, whatever. $500 dollar performance is $500 dollar performance no matter the configuration it comes in.

 

Unless you're running games at high res, in which case they are ALL demanding.

 

The figures I saw showed the 5970 to be slower than the 580 in most games tested, especially at higher res.

 

Link me to that TSMC announcement. Oh, you mean Fudzilla's rumour based on a blogger's gossip based on an anonymous source rumoured to be from TSMC. I'll start panicking about a delay if December arrives and it doesn't arrive in numbers.

 

This just makes you sound ignorant. Maybe 3 years ago the scaling was poor, but now they scale better than they used to - 100/90/55/20 ish. Plus, there are plenty of other things apart from games that make full use of GPUs, which I require on a daily basis. It's not all games games games, you know.

 

Bit-Tech benchmarked 4 games using the old 10.9 drivers for AMD cards, old 260.89 drivers for Nvidia cards, New 262.99 for the GTX 580 and it was a 2 to 2 split at 2560 x 1600. I based my comment from other data gathered using more games all settings to high 2560 x 1600 resolution 4 xAA 16xAF and where 262.99 and 10.10 drivers were used and the HD 5970 holds a higher percentage of performance versus the GTX 580.

 

Where did you see those benchtests?

 

Fudzilla has just posted that the 69xx delays aren't down to yield issues after all. It seems it is all down to other components being delivered late from Texas Instruments.

You see, you can't take what Fuad says too seriously. It is a gossip site masquerading as a news site. And when Fuad has nothing to report, he recycles something old for the page hits or he just makes crap up.

 

I'm torn between buying a NVIDIA GTX 580 card now or waiting until the HD 6970 to see how that compares.

I'm currently using two HD 5870s in CrossFireX but I can't wait to ditch them for a more powerful single card to be frankly honest. Very few games actually use CFX, running with either negative scaling or have multi-GPU support disabled altogether by AMD in the drivers, and those that do use CFX don't scale particularly well, certainly not compared with NVIDIA. So overall my first taste of multi-GPU gaming has been a disappointment and I seem to have spent more time trying to get games working properly than actually playing them. For 85% of the games I play my second HD 5870 sits idle gobbling up electricity, which is not why I bought it!

I knew I should have stuck with a single GPU card but lacklustre GTX 480 reviews made me cancel my original pre-order and buy an HD 5870 instead. Knowing that wasn't as powerful as the card I had wanted I decided to buy a second in the hope that CFX would be well supported. How wrong I was. Had I only had one HD 5870 card then I'm sure my experience would have much more positive. However, AMD's CFX drivers are terrible IMO to the point where I almost believe they don't care about it.

I admit that I was an NVIDIA card user since 1998 up until March when I upgraded my GTX 280 and that I much prefer their drivers as they seem to be more committed to supporting games than ATI are. I also like the per-game profiles, something the AMD drivers still lack after FIVE years! So unless the HD 6970 is exceptional and by that I mean as powerful or more powerful than the GTX 580 but cheaper, running cooler and more efficiently then I think the GTX 580 will very likely be my next card. I'm resisting the urge to order one right now actually.