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.
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Ryan Smith - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Apparently there are 2 Black Edition cards. The one we looked at is the newer of them (687A-ZDBC), whereas the old one used the reference cooler. I'm not sure the newer Black Edition has as widespread availability as the older one, but it's been available at Newegg for as long I've had the card in my hands.antifuchs - Saturday, March 5, 2011 - link
That would be very interesting to note in the article - could help prevent some annoying mis-purchases: Newegg don't list the newer one (-ZDBC) as a "Black Edition", and searching for "black edition" will only find the reference-cooled card, whereas this article doesn't mention the full model number.I would almost have bought the loud reference edition one. Thank god I re-read the comments and re-did the search on Newegg one final time.
Hrel - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
So, when am I gonna start seeing 1080p in these charts; as that's really all I care about. I was hoping 2011 would be the year of 16:9 only, to my great dismay this is wrong. Please update soon, 16:9 has been the standard for like 2 years at this point, longer depending on how you look at it.AnnonymousCoward - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
16:9 sucks.ibudic1 - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
if you did share your experience.This is how you unlock...
http://www.techpowerup.com/137140/AMD-Radeon-HD-69...
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=335318
erple2 - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
The problem with this is that it's not guaranteed. While you can always flash back if problems arise, making buying decisions strictly based on what the card might be able to do (granted, there's not a lot of cards in the general review cycle that haven't shown that it can be unlocked) sounds an awful lot like "two in the bush".7upMan - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
RYAN: Hi Ryan, while I usually find AnandTech articles quite entertaining and informative, I always wonder why the f*ck professional editors won't get it into their head to test 2GB cards in areas where they belong to. Meaning: a 2GB vs. 1 GB card test should be about graphically overly intensive games and game mods, like the Half-Life 2 Fake Factory mod, or the STALKER Complete mod (Oblivion too has such mods). There are a number of other mods that put massive numbers of huge textures into the graphics RAM, and I think they should be the ones you need to test the cards with. After all, you can't expect games that were written with 1GB VRAM in mind to utilize the full power of double VRAM.So please, please run some tests with the above mentioned mods. Thanks in advance.
snuuggles - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
The chart for Stalker call of pripiate, is repeated on this page:http://www.anandtech.com/show/4137/amds-gtx-560-ti...
it just shows the same chart twice...
Also, canyou post an edit in the article itself with a link to the actual xfx card or a picture or something? The link you have currently seems to go to one with a stock cooler, and I don't want to just guess which one it is that you tested. Thank you!
snuuggles - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
woopsies! I didn't see the *multiple* pictures you posted of the card. But it would still be awesome to get a corrected link to the exact card, I'm still not 100% clear which one you tested. I apologize if I (again) missed this bit if informationThanks!
Figaro56 - Friday, March 4, 2011 - link
For the same price of $500 you can get a couple of HD 5870 Crossfire that will kick the GTX 580's teeth down it's throat.