Last Friday, AMD introduced the Radeon HD 7790 graphics card, and partners supported the announcement with graphics accelerators in alternative version.
Radeon HD 7790 will exist side by side with old video cards, and any discrepancies could confuse consumers and potential harm to the sales of other solutions, enjoying similar conditional price range. But even in such circumstances, AMD had to end production of Radeon HD 7850 with 1 GB of memory, Radeon HD 7790 will replace it in the market.
The changes have affected the microarchitecture GCN since its first appearance can not be called global. In the generation of graphics solutions Sea Islands AMD engineers have implemented a number of new regulations that will interest the supporters of hybrid systems (HSA), increased the number of computational problems bursts (also useful for HSA) and added new power management mechanisms PowerTune.
First PowerTune technology was introduced in 2010 together with GPUs Cayman (Radeon HD 69xx). The objective of this simple mechanism was to optimize energy card with a workload.
In Sea Islands, and in particular, Bonaire, AMD goes further for the GPU harvested eight typical states with different values of supply voltage and core frequency (the difference in frequency between the extreme conditions is 700 MHz). Switching between states based on the data on the current load, power consumption limitation and temperature characteristics. To move from one state to another, the video card take only 10 milliseconds (up to 100 switches per second).
New algorithms AMD PowerTune forced to make changes in API, used to write third-party utilities. Now a program like MSI Afterburner or GPU-Z will show the average frequency of the GPU core, taken over a period of time.
But one more question, is the effectiveness of two Radeon HD 7790 in CrossFire conjunction. Can the average pair of adapters compete with older solutions? This question was answered by our colleagues .
Traditionally, popular games can be divided into two categories: one CrossFire mode gives a significant boost to performance, but other adding a second graphics card brings a minimal effect. In the first case, a pair of Radeon HD 7790 reach out to older cards, Radeon HD 7950 and Radeon HD 7970.
Least sensitive to the regime CrossFire game Assassin's Creed 3, F1 2012, Hitman Absolution, Skyrim and World of Warcraft.
The pair of Radeon HD 7790 looks pretty interesting combination:
But from a practical point of view, the duo Radeon HD 7790 does not look so advantageous. For the price of two Radeon HD 7790 ($ 300) is available Radeon HD 7950, which, incidentally, has no problems with scaling mode CrossFire, because it works in splendid isolation. Related Products :
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