AMD's Radeon HD 6970 & Radeon HD 6950: Paving The Future For AMD
by Ryan Smith on December 15, 2010 12:01 AM ESTWolfenstein
Finally among our benchmark suite we have Wolfenstein, the most recent game to be released using the id Software Tech 4 engine. All things considered it’s not a very graphically intensive game, but at this point it’s the most recent OpenGL title available. It’s more than likely the entire OpenGL landscape will be thrown upside-down once id releases Rage next year.
Wolfenstein is a game that normally favors AMD’s GPUs, and even an architectural refresh can’t change this fact. It takes running in to the game’s CPU bottleneck to slow things down for AMD, otherwise even the 6950 is faster than the GTX 570, while the 6970 manages to take down the GTX 580. The million dollar question of course is whether we’ll see a similar outcome for Rage next year.
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Roland00Address - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
1) The architecture article is something that can be written before hand, or written during benching (if the bench is on a loop). It has very little "cramming" to get out right after a NDA ends. Anand knows this info for a couple of weeks but can't discuss it due to NDAs. Furthermore the reason anandtech is one of the best review sites on the net is the fact they do go into the architecture details. The architecture as well as the performance benchmarks is the reason I come to anandtech instead of other review sites as my first choice.2) The spelling and grammar errors is a common thing at anandtech, this is nothing new. That said I can't complain for my spelling and grammar is far worse than Ryan's.
If you don't like the style of the review go somewhere else.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
1) That's only half true. AMD told us the basics about the 6900 series back in October, but I never had full access to the product information (and more importantly the developers) until 1 week ago. So this entire article was brought up from scratch in 1 week.It's rare for us to get too much access much earlier than that; the closest thing was the Fermi launch where NVIDIA was willing to talk about the architecture months in advance. Otherwise that's usually a closely held secret in order to keep the competition from having concrete details too soon.
Dracusis - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
Neither the AMD 6xxx series or Nvidia's 5xx series have been added. Would like to see how my 4870x2 stack up against this latest generation and weather or not it's worth upgrading.Makaveli - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
The Canadian pricing on these cards are hilarious.Ncix is taking preorder for the 6970 at $474.
While they sell the 570 for $379.
Can someone explain to me why I would pay $100 more for the radeon when the 570 gives equal performance?
Are these retailers that retarded?
stangflyer - Thursday, December 16, 2010 - link
They will price the 6950/6970 high for a few days to get the boys that bleed red and have to have the new cards right away to pay top dollar for the card.After a week they will probably be about the same price.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, December 16, 2010 - link
Bench will be up to date by the start of next week.Paladin1211 - Thursday, December 16, 2010 - link
Whats wrong with you rarson? Do you even know whats the difference between "Graphics card review", "Performance review", "Performance Preview"? I dont know how good your grammar and spelling are, but they dont matter as long as you cant understand the basic meaning of the words.Most of the sites will tell you about WHAT, but here at AnandTech, you'll truly find out WHY and HOW. Well, of course, you can always go elsewhere try to read some numbers instead of words.
Keep up the good works, Ryan.
Belard - Thursday, December 16, 2010 - link
The 3870 and 3850 were the TOP end for ATI, as was the 4800 and the 5800. Their relationship of model numbers do not have anything to do with the status of Nvidia.When the 3870 was brand new, what was the HIGHEST end card ATI had back then? Oh yeah, the 3870!
4800 is over the 3870, easily.
4600 replaced the 3800
The 5800s replaces the 4800s... easily.
the 5700s kind of replaced the 4800s.
The 6800s replaces the 5700 & 5800s, the 6900s replace the 5800s, but not so much on performance.
I paid $90 for my 4670 and a much better value than the $220 3870 since both cards perform almost the same.
AmdInside - Thursday, December 16, 2010 - link
I can't think of a single website that has better hardware reviews, at least for computer technology than Anandtech. Ryan, keep up the great work.George.Zhang - Thursday, December 16, 2010 - link
BTW, HD6950 looks great and affordable for me.