XFX Radeon HD R7790 Video Card

Full Disclosure: XFX provided the product sample used in this article.

The PC graphics card industry has been somewhat turned on its head in 2013. As consumers, we've grown accustomed to the annual launches of a new and improved series of GPUs from both sides of the competition. The Radeon HD line has followed this pattern for a while now. With AMD's announcement of the 8000M series plans at the end of 2012, everything seemed to be progressing normally. Throughout Q1, 2013, however, we have been kept waiting for a retail desktop GPU release. With confusing rhetoric in their press releases, it almost appeared as though AMD had disappeared completely from the desktop market this year.

As it turns out, AMD's graphics plans seem to have taken an unexpected turn. Rather than seeing 8000 series GPUs, we are hearing from AMD that their existing line of 7000 series GPUs are stable through 2013. AMD has ensured consumers that this does not mean they won't be releasing any new GPUs in 2013 and the first proof we have of that is the release of Radeon HD 7790. Manufacturing partners are now releasing their versions of the Radeon HD 7790 and Benchmark Reviews has received a sample of the XFX Radeon HD R7790 video card for testing. This article is dedicated discovering what XFX has done with the latest Radeon HD 7000 series GPU, the 7790.

The Radeon HD 7790 is codenamed Bonaire and is the first GPU release from AMD in 2013 for the retail desktop market. The Radeon HD 7790 fills an important performance gap between the HD 7770, known as Cape Verde, and the HD 7850, known as Pitcairn. In fact, it fits into a slot previously only occupied by NVIDIA's GTX 650 Ti. That gap sits between $110 and $180, roughly. On a performance level, the gap between the Radeon HD 7770 and the 7850 is just as large, with the HD 7850 doubling nearly every spec in the HD 7770.

In the Radeon HD 7790, the Bonaire GPU comes fully enabled. This parts a little with conventional die usage, where we generally see an XX50 and an XX70 using the same part but with some functionality disabled on the lower card. What the HD 7790 gives us is 14 CUs for a total of 896 stream processors and 56 texture units. Those numbers look just right for the product's placement. Interestingly enough, though, Bonaire has twice the geometry engines and command processors as Cape Verde, allowing for two primitives per clock over one in Cape Verde. This is on par with Pitcairn and Tahiti. Of course, the ROPs, memory bus, and clock speed all mimic Cape Verde at 16, 128-bit and 1GHz respectively. The memory clock on the HD 7790 has also been increased to 6GHz, higher than both Cape Verde and Pitcairn. Finally, because 28nm Bonaire die is slightly larger than Cape Verde, it naturally comes with higher power consumption. AMD puts the typical board power at 85W for the reference design.

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