Throwback Thursday – AMD Radeon HD 6990 turns eight years old

In a bygone era, it was graphics cards with dual circuits that fought for the performance throne. One of the last models that many enthusiasts actually found interesting was the Radeon HD 6990, which with a recommended price of 699 USD was the undeniable best money could buy – at least for a couple of weeks.

“The new graphics card and its components are designed for significantly higher power consumption and heat generation than usual. The Radeon HD 6990 can in what is called Uber Mode reach a full 450 W, significantly more than the PCI Express standard allows.” – Jonas and Emil in SweClocker’s test of AMD Radeon HD 6990.

It also became one of the first graphics cards to officially draw over 300 W, which is a limit on what plug-in cards can draw to be certified according to the PCI Express standard. With a TDP value of as much as 375 W, it was a power-consuming best for its time and the circuit board was designed with plenty of room for more.

The Cayman graphics circuit was a giant with its 389 mm². At least from AMD, for Nvidia it was normal in graphics cards for the middle class.

The graphics circuits in question were the Cayman XT, which was manufactured at 40 nanometers and was, as usual, AMD’s highest performing circuit in 2011. While AMD was known for its small and efficient circuits, the Cayman was a real bastard with its 389 mm², which was a good bit below Nvidia’s then flagship circuit GF110 (GTX 570, GTX 580 and later GTX 590) of 520 mm². Nvidia’s mid-range graphics circuit was called GF114 (GTX 560 and GTX 560 Ti) and was 360 mm².

A graphics card that consumes 450 W exceeds the specification for PCI Express by far and there can be problems, not least with undersized power supplies and sky-high heat generation. Anyone who does not plan to overclock should keep their fingers away.

The Cayman XT duo came with all 1,536 stream processors active for a total of 3,072, which had a fixed clock frequency of 830 MHz. This was only 50 MHz during a single Cayman XT circuit in the Radeon HD 6970, which had a TDP value of 250 W – even that high from AMD at the time. With Uber Mode, the clock frequency rose up to 880 MHz and the TDP value to a massive 450 W.

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The memory buses were 256 bits and each circuit was equipped with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory at an effective clock frequency of 5,000 MHz, for a bandwidth of 160 GB / s per graphics circuit. AMD’s flagship with a single Cayman XT, the Radeon HD 6970, had 2 GB of GDDR5 at 5,500 MHz (176 GB / s).

The fact that AMD needed to increase its circuit size and power consumption was not due to shortcomings in the Terascale 3 architecture, as AMD, unlike today, was more energy efficient than Nvidia. Instead, it was TSMC’s 40-nanometer technology that made it difficult for both graphics card makers to further increase performance. With the transition to 28 nanometers later in 2011, the paradigm shift that is a fact began today.

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Once at SweClockers, it quickly turned out to be the world’s fastest graphics card. In Crysis Warhead and the resolution 1,920 × 1,200 pixels, the model received an average of 69 FPS and a minimum value of 44 FPS. To beat it required two Radeon HD 6970s that were marginally faster or a dual set of Geforce GTX 580, which made a bigger and in some cases noticeable difference.

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► SweClocker’s test of the AMD Radeon HD 6990

The AMD Radeon HD 6990 was launched on the day of March 8, 2011 and it would only take 16 days for Nvidia to counter with the Geforce GTX 590 with dual GF110 circuits. Nvidia, which had a less energy-efficient architecture at the time, had a hard time keeping up. Then we should not forget that a copy created a minor fire in SweClocker’s test lab. More on this in the next retrospective in two weeks.

This is how the Radeon HD 6990 performs in 2019

Testing old graphics hardware in today’s games can sometimes prove difficult, where for example support for newer versions of the DirectX graphics interface is not in place. In the case of the Radeon HD 6990, however, there is support for DirectX 11, which in theory should give us the opportunity to run through some of the titles in SweClocker’s test suite.

Unfortunately, the theory does not always coincide with practice, and in the case of the Radeon HD 6990, we encountered a lot of problems in modern game titles. It was about everything from games that did not start at all to strange graphic artifacts. The latter could in many cases be connected to the multi-graphics system Crossfire, as these were not found together with the Radeon HD 6970 which has a single graphics processor.

AMD discontinued the official driver support for the model at the end of 2015 and pumped out one last beta-labeled driver in 2016. This does not work wonders for Crossfire functionality in newer games, as it often fails or scales very poorly.

In the end, we were considered defeated to get some sensible measurement figures from the games in the usual test suite and instead turned to a test that works in wet and dry – 3DMark Fire Strike.

When everything works as it should and the card’s two graphics circuits can work together, the Radeon HD 6990 is still not a completely tedious graphics card eight years later. The model does not take a completely unexpected place very far down in the diagram, but still performs 34 percent better than a Geforce GTX 580 in terms of graphics score.

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When we compare the model against its little brother Radeon HD 6970, we see a performance gain of almost 75 percent in graphics points, which can be seen as a good result considering that HD 6990 runs its graphics circuits at a lower clock frequency than that model.

Apart from the few cases where everything works as it should, we unfortunately have to state that time has caught up with the Radeon HD 6990. Without proper software support for newer titles, it will be difficult to play the latest cut games in a sensible frame rate and without problems on this worst from 2011 .

Did you own a Radeon HD 6990 when it went? Feel free to share your experiences and memories in the comments field!


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