14 DAY TRIAL // As new video board generations near, older cards have to step aside and make way, and this goes for even the strongest of them, as much as some might not be willing to think so.
One of those “strongest” graphics cards is about to reach the end of its life. It won't happen right away, but the time is close enough that the Internet got wind of the plans.
Essentially, Advanced Micro Devices is getting ready to cease production of the Radeon HD 7990 dual-GPU Malta graphics adapter.
Malta was released back in April (2013), as a replacement for all the dual-HD 7970 launched by AMD's partners throughout 2012 and early 2013.
The reason for pulling the board out is the small customer base it gathered.
Despite the Malta being the fastest in many benchmarks, and the lower power consumption (compared to those aforementioned custom OEM boards), it has never sold all that well.
That's because it has exhibited some frame pacing issues that make it hard, if not annoying and impossible, to play some games on Crossfile Dual-GPU computers.
Obviously, when people learned of this on support forums, they had one extra reason to look for alternatives.
There's also the fact that single-chip cards, especially top-tier ones, are perfect for most games, even in multi-monitor setup sometimes.
Thus, getting the dual-Tahiti was never a priority for anyone other than hardcore enthusiasts, despite the 950 MHz Engine Clock (up to 1.0GHz with Boost), 6GB GDDR5 Memory (6 GHz clock), 288GB/s memory bandwidth, and AMD App Acceleration technology.
Speaking of hardware specs, the board comes with 64 Compute Units (4096 Stream Processors), 256 Texture Units, 64 Color ROP Units, 256 Z/Stencil ROP Units, Quad Asynchronous Compute Engines (ACE), and quad geometry units.
This report from Overclockers.Ru about a likely phase-out seems to support the rumor of Radeon 9000 cards being scheduled for October.