News AMD Radeon HD 6990 Pictured

The only glaring problem I see with this is the single DVI port. Displayport still hasn't gone mainstream and as such you either need to hunt around for a supporting monitor, or shell out $20 or more for an adapter.

 

OMG IT'S HIOOJ!!! KILL IT! KILL IT!!! KILL IT BEFORE IT EATS US ALL!!!

 

4GB of ram = 2GB/ GPU Mirrored in CF. so no different to a 6950 or 6970 :-/ don't get what the fuss is about

 

also only way to get crossfire on a mini-itx board

yes i know, its a big card for mini-itx setup, and you would need to find a case to match, along with a pokey power supply, also not ideal for mini-itx, but hey, thats what modding is about, isn't it?

 

The point of this card is so that AMD have something to compete against the 580, The red fanboys will be lapping it up

 

it will be mine oh yes it will be mine

 

Why price it strategically in competition to nVidia? If this card is what it may appear to be (for now), then you simply get what you pay for. But that's just me being impulsave.

 

I guess this will be £500 or £550
Even if my mb couldnt crossfire/sli, I'd buy a new one and 2 x 560ti's
will be faster, cooler, quieter and cheaper.
I'm sure there is some sort of single slot niche for this card but surely gamers get bigger e-peen if they have 2 graphics cards.

 

Given that the 5970 was based on two 5850's, will this one be based on two 6950's? And if so will each gpu unlock?

 

No... the 5970 is two 5970s at lower clocks. Both of the GPUs in the 5870 had all 1600 shaders of the 5870, not the 1440 shaders of the 5850. They just were underclocked in comparison to the 5870.

It shouldn't make anything of it. The GPU is addressing it, not the CPU.

Both cards duplicate the VRAM in crossfire and SLI. So each GPU only has 2GB, the same as a reference 6950 or 6970. It might be a little high at the moment, but Eyefinity triple monitor setups are being bottlenecked by 1GB per GPU. They might have been fine with 1.25gb or 1.5gb like some nvidia chips, but why not just do an even 2gb?

 

As you and others have said, the 4GB of RAM on the 6990 is a 2x2GB pair, and so only exposes 2GB of addressable memory to the OS, if that's what you mean by the GPU addressing it.
XP 32-bit can address ~4GB of RAM in total, including GPU RAM - Which would leave roughly 1.75GB of usable physical memory judging by how XP typically addresses memory; which was my point.

It's purely an academic thing, as nobody in their right mind would pair a 6990 with XP, but I'm curious to see just what would happen if XP was forced to deal with a graphics card that actually exposed 4GB of addressable RAM to the OS, or multiple cards that do so collectively; on top of the system RAM, since it usually addresses the graphics memory before the system, thus squeezing the system RAM into the remaining addressable range.

If it were left with no address space for the system RAM would it refuse to boot, or is it smart enough to reserve enough system memory for itself before addressing the graphics memory?
The notion reminds me of how 98SE behaves on systems with more than 512MB of system RAM.

 

is it just me or is this card missing another Display / DVI port?
I can only see 5 - shouldn't a card like thise one support 6 monitors for eyefinity?

 

A quick google, cofirmes that the CPU sees 256MB of memory of GFX card present in the system (not sure if additional SLI/xfire cards require 256mb each as well?) and the rest is somehow hidden.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3602/sponsored_feature_ram_vram_and_.php?page=3

edit: correction of facts

 

At the point I got my 4870x2 it was the best card on the market. If this 6990 can earn that crown then it's likely to be on my next upgrade list.

Will Nvidia have a single card solution to compete?

Although I guess the actual benchmarks we want to see, are this card, vs Nvidia's equivalent, vs ATi's most powerful single card, vs Nvidia's most powerful single card, vs both ATi's and Nvidia's most powerful single cards in crossfire and SLI setups. A benchmark I look forward to immensely!

 

Overkill for most, but fascinating anyway. It will be interesting to see if the improvements already seen on 6xxx series crossfire results, when compared to the 5xxx series, are carried over or even bettered on the 6990.

The next few months looks like it will be a great time to pick up a new card, particularly at the sub £200 segment of the market.

 

I'm thinking this will be a pretty epic card, actually. Everything I've seen and head of 6000 series crossfire is good. The scaling is incredible and there seem to be far fewer of the traditional multi-gpu problems. I've been asking around the forums for the impressions of people who are now using such a set up and none of them have told me of any micro-stuttering or performance variability problems - just epic performance at a great price.

Also, guru3d tested the 6800 cards in crossfire and said "I can already tell you this though, this was the first time ever we had no issues with drivers, and yeah, in most cases the CrossfireX scaling was just extraordinary good."

A card like this would be great for eyefinity (obviously)

 

4 DisplayPorts, if those are 1.2, this card might just be able to support 12 monitors... assuming of course that they ever actually get around to releasing the DisplayPort 1.2 video splitter.

 

Or screens which allow you to daisychain displayport.

When you consider that angle, it would be pretty incredible to build a smaller system (12 x 20 x 32cm) which can power 12 displays. Granted, when you have a display array like that, I'm sure a computer tower wouldn't get in your way so much.

 

This article:
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/news/video/amd-shows-upcoming-radeon-hd-6990-flagship/

Answers the question of the power connectors: we will have 1 8 pin and 1 6 pin.

It also claims that 3072 stream processors is confirmed.

 

id love to see how it competes against the dual gtx 560 EVGA are going to release interesting...