Value and Conclusion

These aren't bad times for PC gamers, but a little gloomy for connoisseurs of PC graphics, and visual detail in games. There are many who hated Crysis for being heavy on resources, but then there are many who later liked it for rewarding them with stunning visuals as newer graphics hardware were able to afford that load at playable framerates. Sadly, PC game developers are getting timid by the day, they fear that limitations in the audience’ gaming hardware shouldn’t hamper the quality of the experience, their sales, and at the same time, they should stay as close to the console version's development as possible, to minimize production costs. AMD and NVIDIA patiently listened to gamers and slogged it out in the “sweet-spot” price points to give phenomenal increases to performance per dollar in the segment. There also seems to be a cartel working non-conducively to the introduction of relatively affordable 2560x1600 or 2560x1440 displays, with the display industry holding up at 1080p for longer than required. The cumulative result is a potential stagnation of the graphics hardware industry lurking in the wild. Scary.

The AMD Radeon HD 6990 CrossFireX is already a victim of that future stagnation. It’s got unimaginable graphics computing power, but is already hampered by various factors: Firstly, the rest of the system. HD 6990 is not even meant for 1080p, rather, 30-inch displays. At lower resolutions, it is getting bottlenecked by our CPU. Does that mean that it’s time to change that Core i7 Bloomfield doing 3.80 GHz? Of course not, because there’s no game out there in the near future that would warrant a CPU upgrade. Secondly, if scaling between two GPUs on a card wasn’t bad enough for games that are not optimized, add four GPUs to the equation. There are potentially three GPUs twitching thumbs as one slogs it out. Thirdly, the power consumption of two of these cards is very high. You will need a 1100~1200W PSU to stay on the safe side. The icing on this salty cake is the staggering price of $1400 for two HD 6990 graphics cards itself.

On the other hand, HD 6990 CrossFireX has humungous computational power. It munched through Crysis at 2560x1600 resolution with a frame rate of over 60 FPS. To whichever game that is optimized for CrossFireX and is running at 2560x1600, HD 6990 CrossFireX shows similar results. When the game industry decides to step up in terms of visual experience, HD 6990 CFX will be a formidable platform to game on. At the end of the day, HD 6990 CrossFireX is the fastest that two graphics cards have ever managed to be. The HD 6990 really likes synthetic benchmarks such as 3DMark and Unigine Heaven, and will be a really good setup to chase benchmark records on.

One real benefit of HD 6990 CrossFireX is its wealth of display management features. With up to six displays connected to a card over DisplayPort multi-streaming, and backed by four Cayman GPUs, I can imagine Eyefinity-enhanced gaming setups really taking off. Vehicle simulators that took tens of thousands of Dollars to make for bigger companies will become accessible to indie/small-time simulator manufacturers. In the end, careful decision-making, and not blind splurging should go into buying HD 6990 CrossFireX. Don’t get me wrong, the HD 6990 is an awesome card to have, but HD 6990 CrossFireX will take some compelling to do. Is HD 6990 a nice graphics card? Yes. Should you look forward to NVIDIA’s upcoming dual-GPU graphics card? Yes, just in case. Should you look forward to NVIDIA’s upcoming dual-GPU card in SLI? Well, things are not encouraging, but the GPU vendors are not the ones to blame for.