AMD's Radeon HD 6970 & Radeon HD 6950: Paving The Future For AMD
by Ryan Smith on December 15, 2010 12:01 AM ESTBattlefield: Bad Company 2
The latest game in the Battlefield series - Bad Company 2 – remains as one of the cornerstone DX11 games in our benchmark suite. As BC2 doesn’t have a built-in benchmark or recording mode, here we take a FRAPS run of the jeep chase in the first act, which as an on-rails portion of the game provides very consistent results and a spectacle of explosions, trees, and more.
Bad Company 2 has ended up being a rather balanced game. Neither AMD or NVIDIA GPUs end up being favored giving us performance close to our global average. At higher resolutions the 6970 can meet or beat the GTX 570, while we have to drop to 1680 for the 570 to take a real lead. Meanwhile the 6970 CF is but a hair’s width away from the GTX 580 SLI.
Curiously this is another game where the 5870 holds an advantage over the 6950. Bad Company 2 is another game that normally appears shader-bound, so this may be an outcome from AMD’s shader change. At the same time it’s a very recent game, so it shouldn’t have any particular attachment to the older VLIW5 design.
As for our Water benchmark, it produces disappointing result for the 6900 series. AMD has simply never done well here and the 6900 cards don’t seem to have what it takes to break that curse. The result is that while the averages are close, the worst case scenario of minimum framerates looks much worse for AMD.
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fausto412 - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
6970 just 4 to 6 fps faster in Bad Company 2 than my 5870? WTF!not worth the upgrade. what a lame ass successor.
Kibbles - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
It's 7% faster at 1920 and 9% faster at 2560. BC2 obviously doesn't need the extra GPU power at 1680.I wouldn't call it weak, but this card certainly isn't the clear winner that the 5870 was.
fausto412 - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
its weak if i was expecting a response to the gtx580 to upgrade to.may as well stay with my 5870.
ClownPuncher - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
For now... But who really bases their purchase on one game anymore? It looks like 10.12 or 11.1 drivers will help performance a good amount.fausto412 - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
I base my performance on 1 game...because it is a very taxing game and my #1 game right now.MeanBruce - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
Yup, dude I heard the AMD 7000 series might make an early appearance next July, with the die shrink @28nm you might want to wait and pick up a 7970!fausto412 - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
that's what i'm considering now. need to upgrade for 30% more performance than 5870 for it to make sense.Stuka87 - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
The game is CPU limited at lower resolutions. BC2 is known for being more CPU bound than GPU bound.But I was hoping for a larger jump over the previous cards :/
fausto412 - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
I understand BFBC2 is more cpu bound. But in this testing Anandtech did they use a TOP TOP TOP of the line cpu so that rules that out as a bottleneck.Belard - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
Yeah... at least the model numbers didn't make things confusing!In some benchmarks, the 6950 is faster than your 5870... but it would have made far more sense to call these 6850/6870 or even 6830/6850..
AMD screwed up with the new names...