AMD’s GTX 560 Ti Counter-Offensive: Radeon HD 6950 1GB & XFX’s Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition
by Ryan Smith on January 25, 2011 12:20 PM ESTThe Test & Gaming Performance
For our testing we are using both AMD and NVIDIA’s latest drivers where suitable. For AMD this means the 11.1a Hotfix, and for NVIDIA this means the 266.58 drivers for the GTX 400 and 500 series, 266.56 for the new GTX 560 Ti, and 262.99 for the GTX 200 series. Compared to our previous benchmarks NVIDIA Civilization V performance is way up, and SmallLuxGPU performance is up for both AMD and NVIDIA. There are no significant performance improvements elsewhere.
For NVIDIA cards all tests were done with default driver settings unless otherwise noted. As for AMD cards, we are disabling their new AMD Optimized tessellation setting in favor of using application settings (note that this doesn’t actually have a performance impact at this time), everything else is default unless otherwise noted.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Asus Rampage II Extreme |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | OCZ Summit (120GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 6970 AMD Radeon HD 6950 2GB AMD Radeon HD 6950 1GB AMD Radeon HD 6870 AMD Radeon HD 6850 AMD Radeon HD 5970 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 5850 AMD Radeon HD 5770 AMD Radeon HD 4870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 262.99 NVIDIA ForceWare 266.56 Beta NVIDIA ForceWare 266.58 AMD Catalyst 10.10e AMD Catalyst 11.1a Hotfix |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
For our look at gaming performance we’re going to skip our running commentary at this time. In practice the 1GB 6950 is just as fast as the 2GB 6950 at 1920x1200 and 1680x1050 – the essential resolutions for a $260 card. It’s only at 2560x1600 and Eyefinity resolutions that the 2GB card makes a difference with most games at this time. This is likely to change in the near future, but for the time being –and as you’ll see – there’s little disadvantage to a 1GB 6950 right now.
Meanwhile we’re also including the XFX Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition in these charts. In general it’s around 5% faster than a stock-clocked 6870, which isn’t enough to cut in to the GTX 560 Ti’s 10-15% lead. At $20 less than the GTX 560 Ti this makes it a potential value spoiler, but not a direct competitor.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
111 Comments
View All Comments
ibudic1 - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
you can unlock the 6950 to a 6970 for free.just google: unlocking HD6950
and the NVIDIA value proposition goes down the toiled. End of discussion.
Ananke - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
So much agree!!!5850 2Gb is the way to go.
Ananke - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
6950 :) I meanMr Perfect - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
None of the sites I frequent have said anything about a reduction in texture filtering quality with the new Catalyst versions. Could someone post some links to articles about the issue? Why didn't Anandtech mention it, anyhow?silverblue - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
Toms did something...http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/radeon-catalyst-imag...
I believe it has been mentioned that any such performance enhancements have been rolled back, so to speak.
Mr Perfect - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Hmm, interesting. Tom's points back to an Nvidia post on the issue( http://blogs.nvidia.com/2010/11/testing-nvidia-vs-... ), who themselves quote four review sites I'm not familiar with. Guess I'll check out those sites and see what they're reporting.silverblue - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
I think they were German sites or something? It's been some time since I read this.ezinner - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
How about putting the price of the cards in the benchmarks? It isn't enough to know how fast a card is, but rather at what cost.swaaye - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
8X SSAA :DGTVic - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
This looks nothing like the black edition sold at ncix or newegg? This one has two fans so what is the difference?