AMD's Radeon HD 6970 & Radeon HD 6950: Paving The Future For AMD
by Ryan Smith on December 15, 2010 12:01 AM ESTMass Effect 2
Electronic Arts’ space-faring RPG is our Unreal Engine 3 game. While it doesn’t have a built in benchmark, it does let us force anti-aliasing through driver control panels, giving us a better idea of UE3’s performance at higher quality settings. Since we can’t use a recording/benchmark in ME2, we use FRAPS to record a short run.
With Mass Effect 2 we’re looking at a fairly typical scenario. The 6970 holds a slight-to-no lead on the GTX 570, while the 6950 sits between the GTX 570 and the 5870. As one of the only DX9 games still in our benchmark suite we’d expect the 6900 series to take a hit due to the shader overhaul, but either that’s not the case or it’s masking better performance.
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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...