ATI HD 6990m

"Gimp the playing experience" is a pretty nice exageration. The image quality difference is relatively unnoticable in actual game play and only becomes an annoyance after someone points it out to you with a still frame or slo-mo capture.

It's one of those ignorance is bliss deals....and someone who hasn't heard of the secret code is likely still blissfully ignorant about the image differences and enjoying those couple of extra FPS.

 

PhysX isn't much more than a gimmick at this point, and is certainly not something I'd weight heavily in choosing between AMD and Nvidia cards. That could change in the future, I suppose.

 

Sigh.

It isn't an exaggeration. AMD made a deliberate choice to degrade the playing experience of their customers and turn them into unwitting accomplices in misinformation, all in the name of marketing. That's a fact. No one is denying that anymore.

'Ignorance is bliss' has nothing to do with it. If I steal twenty bucks out of your paycheck before you see it, I'm an asshat, whether you notice the theft or remain ignorant. 'Most of them probably didn't notice' is not a defense. AMD deserves to be raked over the coals for this, and it isn't happening to the level it deserves to.

 

I'd love to see you attempt to point out the difference in a screenshot.

 

17% shader increase plus 5% overclock yields a theoretical 23% boost in performance over the 6970M, so they are being somewhat realistic in their highly optimistic numbers.

 

Well normally I wouldn't care about PhysX. But when I'm spending top dollar for a GPU I would like to know if I can play Batman: Arkham City and Alice: Madness Returns at Max including full PhysX. I know AMD GPUs probably can "do it" too, but can they "enable" it in the settings menu?

 

Caveat Emptor. As long as my framerate is acceptable, I am maxing out quality settings in game and in Catalyst.

I think most PC gamers, just by the nature of the hobby (ie: installing (games + windows), optimizing, getting the latest drivers, and troubleshooting) are literate enough to fool around with cat ctrl center anyhow.
They're not all helpless sheep, because they would never get a game to load otherwise.

@Terminus: if you are rocking a decent cpu, there is really no advantage to off-loading that work onto the gpu, which is already going to be the bottleneck for performance on your system.

 

I know I can obvously run PhysX at high, but can I actually enable it in the settings of games? or can only Nvidia GPUs enable PhysX setting?

 

Well it went something like this for me (i wasn't on forums like I am now back then). Feb 2004 (Or so) the Mobility Radeon (MR) 9700 Pro was released - 4 pipelines 128-bit memory bus - basically a MR 9600 w/ an OC (with a hefty premium). There were a bunch of delays for major laptop in my mind that had it as an option, the Dell 9100 (a 2" thick desktop processor BEAST).

So I finally got mine sometime in late May, then in July they released the MR 9800 w/ 8 pipelines and 256-bit bus - basically x2 the performance (for a similar price). To add insult to injury, the MR 9800's could be unlocked to either 12 or 16 processing cores (full X800 core) with a simple hardware mod.

To put this in perspective, if the 6990M had ended up being a monster (ala desktop 6950 underclocked) w/ 2x performance of it's 6970m sibling for the same or slightly higher money I would have been ULTRA pissed. I'm ok with this

-- I went through a similar thing with my GeForce 8700m (basically an OC'd 8600) when they released the 8800m. Glad this doesn't seem to be the case here.

 

If not a CUDA GPU, then it is calculated in software by the CPU. It's an api, even xbox games (which have an AMD GPU fyi) use physx. Do many games even have a physx setting?

Regardless, this is fairly off-topic.


Let's get some resellers to chime in on the 6990M...

 

Seriously - anyone have an eta? They have been strangely quiet on this thread (unlike the 580m thread on day of announcement).

 

sigh...some of you complain too much in regards to things that can be resolved with just a few clicks...

who honestly cares if ATI waters down the visual effects? As it's already been pointed out it can be changed in Catalyst CC..

Let's say hypothetically that the 6990m is about the same as a 580m, there's a $700 difference on configuring the m18x between dual 6990's and 580's...

I'd be more than happy to spend a fraction of the cost even if it means not being able to see a few more pieces of grass that nobody notices... PhysX is a gimmick too imo, sure it's nice, but it doesn't affect anything whatsoever.. and I'm Nvidia oriented due to the ease of driver updates and such..

I'm more interested to see what the physical card(6990) looks like in case I want to upgrade without having to modify or purchase a separate heatsink...

 

I contacted Malibal. They said hopefully later today. I know Alienware has them--or at least has it for a config option.

 

Well some of the games I want to play have the PhysX setting (low/med/high). I just want to confirm--If I buy a 6990m...will I be able to enable high PhysX in the settings? or has Nvidia some how paid the developers to disable PhysX setting for AMD GPUs?

 

You'll just need to buy the P150HM 6990M + heatsink kit.

 

Plus, given that the 6970m has the same basic layout as the 5870m, I would wager that this "refreash" is fairly identical to the 6970m.
Some TDP numbers would be interesting.

 

Does anyone know about the Overdrive tech that AMD/ATI mentions?

 

That's there catch all term that says: We support overclocking!

Basically: AMD OverDrive? <-- utility that let's you OC that's about it. Unless I'm missing something.

 

Ahh, thanks

 

10% gain in FPS is just enough to overtake Nvidia. I don't really care if they use this gimmick or not as long as it is adjusted in benchmarks. So whoever is going to benchmark these to cards should take this into consideration. Otherwise it's all good under the sun.

 

I think it's hard to make a stance for bleeding-edge graphics cards for high resolution games with all of the effects turned on and curse PhysX in the same breath. If you care about the minutiae that are filtering, sampling etc., it's likely you'd appreciate the effects that PhysX brings along with it. As always, different strokes for different folks and it's hard to justify a feature with hundreds of dollars difference, but it's not a totally moot point.

 

Well, the 6970M tested at 20W lower than the 485M, so AMD had a lot of room to maneuver with the 6870 specs.

 

I was referring to the Radeon 9700 desktop debacle. The debacle was on nVidia's part. They introduced a GPU with claims of high power for the new direct x that games didn't use and made the GPU run very hot. ATI came out with the 9700 that just basically whooped up on nVidia, while running cooler. That was the product cycle that broke nVidia's monopoly on GPUs.

The nvidia chips right now claims huge tessellation performance, but no game takes advantage of it. It also runs hot. The 6990m looks like they're going to whoop up on the nvidia's GPUs.

 

I hope you like the 6990m because there's nothing faster coming for more than 9 months according to the roadmaps

 

hopefully resellers dont charge a ton to upgrade from 560m to these

 

do you have link to AMD's GPU roadmap? I'd like to see it before pulling the plug

 

28nm won't turn on in earnest until next year. We may see some desktop paper launches end of this year, but don't expect 28nm mobile cards until after the turn of the year.

 

I'm wondering, I haven't seen anyone mention it, if they're even going to sell this card. Remember the problem with the 6970m and the early phase-out? If this card is similar to the 6970m, wonder if the problem is still there.

 

hopefully they'll be compatible with the MXM on current notebooks

 

Kepler desktop chips should be out by Nov/Dec 2011, and Kepler mobile chips about 2-3 months later.

At least, thats what they promised

I dont keep up with AMD's roadmap

 

Look at the middle of page 5, all I will say

 

Yeah if the price/performance is as good as everyone says, Sager will be forced to offer it (in all reality). It makes sense the 6970m was phased out when it was since they were probably already prepping for the 6990m.

 

Plus, remember, the drivers have been listed on the Clevo site for a while

 

Ah yes the GeForce 5800 Ultra (hoover) (it wasn't DX version as much as it was pixel depth - 24bit on the Radeon, 32bit on the Nvidia, and it was Nvidia's hope to 'future proof' their card for the next DX version).

I think the nvidia cards mobile wise are decent, and I would have gotten a 485m if the price had been what it is now.

The 6990m looks like it will offer similar or greater performance to the 580m (give or take some) for a ton less - but my 6970m runs HOT, and I can't imagine this update to the Blackcomb XT chip will be any cooler (this isn't a die shrink from what I can tell - this is just a 6970m fully enable w/ a slight OC). I think the big part about the 6990m is the fact that on a m18x it's $700 CHEAPER than 580m SLI... combine that with the fact that Crossfire scales better in a lot of things, it puts some pressure on nvidia (however much pressure the vertical of 'gaming laptops' provides).

 

yeah im happy with my 485m it runs bfbc2 full detail at around 50fps and never goes over 80 and idles around 34, without max fan.

 

Yeah I hit 85C playing SC2 with IC Diamond compound w/ it on a laptop cooler. I've seen it as high as 91C in other apps w/ ambient of 24C.

Still I'm not disappointed with my 6970m, I'm just saying both AMD and Nvidia have great offerings right now, and AMD is doing what it's always done: compete on price - and in that it's excelling!

 

still i got a good deal, if i had ordered earlier i would have gotten the 6970m for about $260 more than the 560m, but they removed that, and when they released the 580m, they dropped the price for the 485m to $295 more than the 560m. so for better perfomance i only payed $35 instead of $235, and the 580m is still questionable, in performance and i think it has heat issues.

 

The clearance priced 485M was just $50 more than the original 6970M. I wish Nvidia had placed it there from the beginning.

Now the 6990M will likely come in right at the price of the lame duck 485M. I hope. On the M17x, the 580M is +$600, while the 6990M is just +$300.

 

Here is some official benchmarks with an ACTUAL 6990m and an ACTUAL 580m running on P150HM. Specs of the machines are on the linked PDF.

http://www.logicalblueone.com.au/docs/GPU Performance August.pdf

I would still recommend people to be looking at the 580m over the 6990.

 

wow $200 price differance? that's like a CPU upgrade, or a SSD (maybe), or you can just save $200 and buy $200 worth of food...which is always good too.

 

DANG - you're better than AMD! Thanks for the post - those scores are interesting and put the 6990M in the same ballpark as the 580m. It's not ahead, but frankly - as cheap as it's supposed to be it's going to dominate in sales.

 

interesting, wonder who was able to get those that early.

also "for the moment" notebook check ranks the GTX 580m higher than the 6990m (well it's just above it on the GPU list lol)

 

Yeah Terminus - if I were you I'd go 6990m assuming there is availability when you want to buy. Frankly if you were in a position to buy right now a 485m is a good card. 6990m though looks to be wicked for the money. I'm pretty happy with my 6970m aside from the fact that it tries to light my leg on fire if I use my laptop in my lap . Although I'm certain a 485m would do the same.

 

The benchmarks are from the first production of MP cards, so it is accurate. The reason these won't be out till August is that 'Dell/Alienware' had the rights to these cards first while it was under a short embargo on Clevo, which has lifted now.

It happens all the time in the manufacturing world. You guys have got to remember you are seeing parts of the manufacturing and R&D side that no other end-users get to see for themselves. Thank you Clevo!

We have an ETA on these cards (in Australia) of middle August. Some parts of the world will be longer. I would say to Europe would be late August.

 

o....I'm not a fan of lighting my leg on fire with a notebook not that kinky

 

I got the black version of this at BJ's warehouse for $20
Amazon.com: Belkin F5L028 Laptop Cooling Lounge (White): Electronics
And it works really well. It's oversized for a P150HM, but I actually like that it's more stable on my lap. Then heat isn't a problem

 

one thing that appeals to me about Nvidia mobile is their Verde, where they get driver updates the same as the desktop cards. One thing I learned is driver updates are crucial in getting the most out of a GPU. Does AMD have this kind of support for their mobile GPUs?

 

Seems odd that the CPU scores differ by almost 30,000 with the same cpus. I don't know how accurate this information feels on that alone. Also, why are they comparing games with PhysX on? That is a nVidia product that runs like crap on AMD/ATI cards. It seems like a silly thing to have that as one of the few compared games.

 

3dMark Vantage uses Nvidia Physx - that's why the CPU score is so different. The physx test is using the GPU (with the GPU basically doing nothing but physx - which is why it's a dumb test ). The GPU scores are more telling.

 

AMD offers mobile drivers... I don't know if they have a name for it like nvidia.

With the advent of MXM and the growth of the mobile GPU market they really have to offer a single driver instead of customized per platform (the old days). I installed the latest catayst 11.7 early beta and it 'worked' (crashed a bunch), but their 11.6 (current) work well.