AMD's Radeon HD 6970 & Radeon HD 6950: Paving The Future For AMD
by Ryan Smith on December 15, 2010 12:01 AM ESTCivilization V
The other new game in our benchmark suite is Civilization 5, the latest incarnation in Firaxis Games’ series of turn-based strategy games. Civ 5 gives us an interesting look at things that not even RTSes can match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world, and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.
Once more Civilization V throws us a curveball, with some interesting results. At 2560 we’re GPU limited to the point where the 6900 series pulls ahead of the 5870, while at 1920 there’s something going on that doesn’t sit well with Civ V, leading to sub-5870 performance. In any case this is another game where NVIDIA traditionally does well, leading to even the fast 6900 series coming in well below the GTX 570 and even the GTX 470. AMD’s CrossFire scaling reigns supreme however, giving all the CF configurations an edge over their NVIDIA counterparts.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
168 Comments
View All Comments
529th - Sunday, December 19, 2010 - link
Great job on this review. Excellent writing and easy to read.Thanks
marc1000 - Sunday, December 19, 2010 - link
yes, that's for sure. we will have to wait a little to see improvements from VLIW4. but my point is the "VLIW processors" count, they went up by 20%. with all other improvements, I was expecting a little more performance, just that.but in the other hand, I was reading the graphs, and decided that 6950 will be my next card. it has double the performance of 5770 in almost all cases. that's good enough for me.
Iketh - Friday, December 24, 2010 - link
This is how they've always reviewed new products? And perhaps the biggest reason AT stands apart from the rest? You must be new to AT??WhatsTheDifference - Sunday, December 26, 2010 - link
the 4890? I see every nvidia config, never a card overlooked there, ever, but the ATI's (then) top card is conspicuously absent. long as you include the 285, there's really no excuse for the omission. honestly, what's the problem?PeteRoy - Friday, December 31, 2010 - link
All games released today are in the graphic level of the year 2006, how many games do you know that can bring the most out of this card? Crysis from 2007?Hrel - Tuesday, January 11, 2011 - link
So when are all these tests going to be re-run at 1920x1080 cause quite frankly that's what I'm waiting for. I don't care about any resolution that doesn't work on my HDTV. I want 1920x1080, 1600x900 and 1280x720. If you must include uber resolutions for people with uber money then whatever; but those people know to just buy the fastest card out there anyway so they don't really need performance numbers to make up their mind. Money is no object so just buy nvidia's most expensive card and ur off.AKP1973 - Thursday, October 13, 2011 - link
Have you guys noticed the "load GPU temp" of the 6870 in XFIRE?... It produced so very low heat than any enthusiast card in a multi-GPU setup. That's one of the best XFIRE card in our time today if you value price, performance, cool temp, and silence.!Travisryno - Wednesday, April 26, 2017 - link
It's dishonest referring to enhanced 8x as 32x. There are industry standards for this, which AMD, NEC, 3DFX, SGI, SEGA AM2, etc..(everybody) always follow(ed), then nVidia just makes their own...Just look how convoluted it is..