AMD Radeon HD 7790 Duel - ASUS vs Sapphire

Meet the Radeon HD 7790

With the street price of AMD's Radeon HD 7770 averaging around S$170-$200 and the higher-end Radeon HD 7850 priced between S$255-335, there's a rather obvious price gap in the mid-range graphics card market right now, right at around the low-mid S$200 point - which also happens to be the sweet spot for many consumers. As such, today AMD is releasing the new Radeon HD 7790 graphics card, which has a US SRP of US$149, which should translate to about S$200-250 locally. While the card is officially available today, it is expected to be available in volume only from 2nd April onwards.

The Radeon HD 7790 utilizes a completely new GCN (Graphics Core Next) 28nm GPU, codenamed Bonaire, which has 2.08 billion transistors, 896 stream processors, 56 texture units and 16 ROPs. The reference model has a core clocked at 1000MHz with 1GB of VRAM clocked at an impressive 6000 MHz DDR.

One of the key enhancements for the Bonaire GPU is the increased number of digital power management (DPM) states at eight, as opposed to the four states on the rest of the existing Radeon HD 7000 and high-end HD 6000 series. This essentially means it can optimize voltage supply better for more efficient power consumption. As part of an enhancement of AMD's PowerTune technology, all of this allows the GPU to manage its power/performance balance more efficiently depending on the workload and processing requirement at any one point of time. The other improvement is to support high speed GDDR5 memory on it 128-bit interface for a good boost in memory bandwidth, which AMD claims accounts to a 10% improvement across the board.

Compared to the HD 7850, the HD 7790 has 800 million less transistors and 128 less stream processors - most notably, the Radeon HD 7850 also utilizes 2GB VRAM, whereas the HD 7790 only has 1GB, making it less suitable for higher resolution gaming. Compared to NVIDIA, the HD 7790's specs puts it somewhere between the GeForce GTX 650 Ti and GeForce GTX 660, but closer to the 650 Ti side of things.

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Meet the Radeon HD 7790 Custom Cards

With the Radeon HD 7790 positioned as a mainstream mid-range card, all of AMD's add-in partners are expected to release custom variants with their own coolers and specifications. Initially, rumors were afloat pointing out that no OC-version of the card will debut at launch, but the good thing is that we can safely say that it was nothing more than a rumor. Today we'll be taking a look at two of the earliest versions of the Radeon HD 7790 cards to hit the market, from ASUS and Sapphire respectively.

ASUS Radeon HD 7790 DirectCU II OC

ASUS' DirectCU II OC version of the Radeon HD 7790 is overclocked to 1075MHz with memory ramped up to 6400MHz DDR. It uses ASUS' popular DirectCU II custom cooler which consists of  two copper heatpipes in direct contact with the GPU, cooled by two 80mm fans.

The card measures 215 x 120 x 35mm. Like the reference design, it has two DVI ports, one HDMI port and one DisplayPort port. As with all ASUS custom cards, it comes with ASUS' GPU Tweak software that lets you monitor GPU activity as well as adjust clock speeds and voltage for overclocking.

The ASUS Radeon HD 7790 DirectCU II OC is priced at S$239.

Sapphire Radeon HD 7790 OC

Sapphire's custom Radeon HD 7790 OC model is very similar to ASUS', utilizing the same 1075MHz core clock speed and 6400MHz DDR memory speed. Cooler design is also very similar to ASUS, with Sapphire's model using its Dual-X branded cooler, which again features two copper heatpipes in direct contact with the GPU and two 80mm fans. 

The card is slightly bigger than ASUS' version, measuring 220 x 120 x 37mm. Like ASUS and the reference design, it also has two DVI ports, one HDMI port and one DisplayPort port.

Pricing on the Sapphire Radeon HD 7790 is currently unavailable.

Test Setup

For those who've been following our reviews, take note that we've replaced our old test rig with a brand new one for 2013. Here are the new specs we'll be running with:

• Intel Core i7-3960X (3.3GHz)
• ASUS P9X79 Pro (Intel X79 chipset) Motherboard
• 4 x 2GB DDR3-1600 G.Skill Ripjaws Memory
• Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive (OS)
• Western Digital Caviar Black 7200 RPM 1TB SATA hard drive (Benchmarks + Games)
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

Here's the list of cards we'll be testing and the drivers used.

• ASUS Radeon HD 7790 DirectCU2 1GB GDDR5 (AMD Catalyst 13.3 Beta)
• Sapphire Radeon HD 7790 1GB GDDR5 (AMD Catalyst 13.3 Beta)
• AMD Radeon HD 7770 1GB GDDR5 (AMD Catalyst 13.2 Beta)
• AMD Radeon HD 7850 2GB GDDR5 (AMD Catalyst 13.2 Beta) 
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB GDDR5 (NVIDIA ForceWare 310.90)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 2GB GDDR5 (NVIDIA ForceWare 314.14)

Note 1: We were unable to acquire a reference version of the Radeon HD 7790 in time for this review to accurately pinpoint the reference card's performance, but our experience tells us that the mildly overclocked ASUS and Sapphire cards are more than adequate for this purpose as they shouldn't be much faster than the reference card. In any case, we expect that most consumers will opt for a custom cooler version of the card anyway, due to better cooler design and slightly improved performance.

Note 2: As both the tested cards utilize the same specifications, the ASUS and Sapphire cards posted almost identical benchmark scores. As such, we have grouped them together into one bar for easier viewing on our charts. Overclocking performance, temperature and power consumption are still shown individually.

Benchmarks

We've also updated our benchmark list, adding Unigine's new Valley benchmark, as well as 3DMark 2013 and the big one, Crysis 3! We've also updated Unigine from version 3.0 to 4.0.

• Futuremark 3DMark 11
• Futuremark 3DMark (2013)
• Unigine 4.0 "Heaven"
• Unigine "Valley" 1.0
• Battlefield: Bad Company 2
• Crysis Warhead
• Crysis 2
• Dirt 3
• Assassin's Creed 3
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 2
• Hitman: Absolution
• Far Cry 3
• Crysis 3

3DMark 11 Results

As always, we start with 3DMark 11, our trusty synthetic benchmark designed to test a GPU's performance at various aspects of DirectX 11 such as tessellation and DirectCompute. The HD 7790 was fairly impressive here, performing much closer to the HD 7850 and GTX 660 side of things, trailing behind the 7850 by just 4% at the Performance preset and 7% at the Extreme preset. Meanwhile, it outscored the HD 7770 by a huge 43% at Performance and 35% at Extreme.

3DMark (2013) Results

3DMark (2013)'s Fire Strike benchmark is Futuremark's most ambitious and technical benchmark to date utilizing a grueling two-part test with extreme levels of tessellation and volumetric illumination, as well as complex smoke simulation using compute shaders and dynamic particle illumination, while Fire Strike Extreme ramps up the difficulty with more tessellation, more particle effects and more taxing DirectCompute calculations.

The HD 7790 struggled a little bit here, falling behind the HD 7850 by about 13% on Fire Strike, although it still outperformed the HD 7770 by 34%. 

On Fire Strike Extreme, it wasn't able to keep up with the HD 7850, trailing by 60%. We suspect this is due to it having only 1GB VRAM, compared to the HD 7850 and GTX 660's 2GB.

Unigine 4.0 "Heaven" Results

Unigine's "Heaven" benchmark tests GPUs with extreme tessellation, dynamic sky with volumetric clouds, real-time global illumination, and screen-space ambient occlusion among others.

Across the board, the HD 7790 scored roughly halfway between the HD 7770 and HD 7850, trailing the HD 7850 by about 10-15%. The exception was at 2560 x 1600 resolution, at 8x AA settings, where again, it just did not have enough memory to benchmark successfully. Obviously, considering its mid-range specification, you shouldn't expect it to be able to perform well at higher than Full HD settings.

Unigine "Valley" 1.0 Results

Valley is a new benchmark from Unigine that renders a highly detailed seamless landscape covering a total area of 64,000 square kilometers. It also utilizes dynamic sky effects, volumetric clouds, sun shafts, DOF, and ambient occlusion.

We saw a similar result to our "Heaven" results here, with the HD 7790 trailing the HD 7850 by about 12% on average. Again, it was unable to handle the benchmark at 2560 x 1600 resolution at 8x AA.

Crysis Warhead Results

For our first gaming benchmark we'll be using DX10 game Crysis Warhead. While it's getting a bit old, it does feature a fairly heavy amount of tessellation, which is quite taxing on a GPU.

The HD 7790 wasn't as impressive here, scoring almost exactly halfway between the HD 7770 and HD 7850 across the board, trailing the HD 7850 by between 20 and 30%.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Results

The HD 7790 performed much better on Battlefield: Bad Company 2, trailing the HD 7850 by just 6% across all resolutions.

Crysis 2 Results

Crysis 2's Ultra setting puts GPUs through their paces with a grueling test of tessellation, Parallax Occlusion Mapping, water rendering, and particle motion blur and shadowing.

Surprisingly, the HD 7790 performed fairly well here, scoring closer to the HD 7850 than the HD 7770, and trailing the HD 7850 by just 10-15% - on average, a difference of just 5 FPS between them.

Dirt 3 Results

We saw a similar result on Dirt 3, with the HD 7790 trailing the HD 7850 by just 4% across all resolutions. At 2560 x 1600, this was just a 1 FPS difference.

Assassin's Creed 3 Results

Unfortunately, the HD 7790 fell behind on Assassin's Creed 3, again trailing by about 20% on all settings.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 Results

Black Ops 2 isn't that taxing and the HD 7790 performed fairly well as a result, trailing the HD 7850 by just a few FPS at the 1920 x 1200 and 2560 x 1600 resolutions. Surprisingly, it wasn't as good at the lowest 1680 x 1050 resolution, although it did still surpass the 60 FPS target.

Far Cry 3 Results

Moving onto some truly challenging games, first up, Far Cry 3, which is running on the Dunia 2 Engine, a modified version of Crytek's CryEngine. As such, this benchmark features heavy tessellation, high amounts of volumetric lighting, and deferred radiance transfer volumes (global illumination).

With AA off, the HD 7790 performed fairly well, trailing the HD 7850 by just a few FPS on all resolutions - a difference of about 6-12%. None of our cards were able to handle 8x MSAA above 1680 x 1050 resolution. In fact, these mid-range cards are best used for full HD resolution with post-processed antialiasing options like FXAA, not MSAA.

Hitman: Absolution Results

Hitman: Absolution is another challenging benchmark, running on IO Interactive's proprietary Glacier2 engine, a very hardware intensive engine which is able to render up to 1200 NPCs at the same time. The benchmark tool used to test this game is extremely intensive and features a massive crowd of NPCs, Reflective Shadow Mapping (RSM), Direct Compute accelerated Bokeh Depth of Field, extreme tessellation and Ambient Occlusion.

The HD 7790 wasn't as good here, again scoring about halfway between the HD 7770 and HD 7850. Again, we suspect that it just doesn't have the memory required to handle tougher benchmarks, especially at higher resolutions - as evidenced by it not being able to complete the 2560 x 1600 resolution benchmark at 8x MSAA.

Crysis 3 Results

Our newest gaming benchmark is the much anticipated sequel to Crysis 2 and, much like its predecessors, continues to be an absolute beast of a game, utilizing CryEngine 3 to the max with extreme amounts of tessellation, per-pixel per-object motion blur, Bokeh Depth of Field, displacement mapping on small terrain, particle and volumetric lighting and fog shadows, improved dynamic cloth and vegetation, dynamic caustics and diffuse shadows.

Crysis 3 is really not designed for mid-range graphics cards (especially at the maximum settings that we test at), although surprisingly, the HD 7790 performed quite well with AA turned off, trailing the HD 7850 by just a few FPS at all resolutions. While it wasn't able to achieve 30 FPS, dropping a few of the more intensive quality options down a notch should see playable frame rates.

Overclocking Results

For our overclocking efforts, we've once again split the ASUS and Sapphire custom cards into two separate bars. Having said that, they still managed to perform almost identically, with the ASUS achieving a marginally higher final core clock at 1210MHz compared to Sapphire at 1205MHz.

After overclocking, we saw about a 6% gain on the Performance preset and about 8% on Extreme, which is respectable but certainly not a huge increase. Compare this to the HD 7850, which saw a much bigger gain on both Performance and Extreme.

Temperature Results

With very similar coolers, it came as no surprise that both ASUS and Sapphire posted very similar temperature scores. Overall temperature was fairly good, and well within the expected range for a mid-range GPU. Both coolers were also relatively quiet.

Power Consumption Results

Power consumption was also nearly identical, with the ASUS card just 1 watt higher when performing at load. Again, there were no surprises here with the results well within our expected range, though a tad disappointing. With the improved number of DPM states supported on the Radeon HD 7790 GPU, we expected better power management, but it wasn't obvious at all.

Bridging the Gap

AMD's engineers faced a difficult proposition when building the HD 7790. It had to be sufficiently better than the HD 7770 to provide a worthwhile upgrade, but not quite as good as the HD 7850 to avoid cannibalizing its sales. They've done a fairly good job, with performance on the HD 7790 hovering about halfway between the HD 7770 and HD 7850, getting closer to the HD 7850 side of things on a few games. (Fortunately, this definitely turned out better than the reason for the Radeon HD 6790's existence, which was something that we were concerned about prior to testing the Radeon HD 7790.)

But does the HD 7790 present good value for money, or is it worth paying a bit more to upgrade to the HD 7850?

The biggest drawback to the HD 7790 is its limited VRAM, at only 1GB. While this is borderline acceptable at this point in time, newer games often utilize very high resolution textures, which require a higher memory buffer that the HD 7790 just can't deliver, resulting in choked up single-digit FPS, as we saw on a few benchmarks. 

If we consider overall potential too, the HD 7790 seems to already be performing close to its limit. Our overclocking efforts only saw about a 6-8% performance gain, which, while acceptable, was not all that impressive. On the other hand, the HD 7850 has plenty of room for overclocking, and we saw a much bigger gain in performance as a result.

All things considered, if you're trying to decide if it's worth paying a bit more to get the Radeon HD 7850, based on future proofing (make sure you get the 2GB VRAM version of the HD 7850) and much better overclocking potential, we would say yes, because you'll be able to get more out of the HD 7850 in the long run - and these hardly cost much more than the Radeon HD 7790.

Evaluating the Custom Cards

Our custom cards from ASUS and Sapphire both performed very similarly in all aspects, from benchmark scores to temperature, power consumption and overclocking potential. Both ASUS and Sapphire also supply their cards with standard three-year warranties. As such, the only factor separating them will be price.

Currently, ASUS has priced their HD 7790 DirectCU II OC model at S$239 which puts it slightly on the high side. Comparing it against ASUS' Radeon HD 7850, which is priced at S$335, the HD 7790 model seems like an appealing buy, but if you're willing to consider other brands, you can pick up a PowerColor or Sapphire Radeon HD 7850 with 2GB VRAM for just $16 more at S$255. Considering these price points, it's only natural to pander towards the more value for money option.

Sapphire has yet to release its HD 7790 pricing for now, however, we will update this feature with a score as soon as that information is available.

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