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 - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
Indeed CPU bottlenecking is a concern, and we always try to remove it as much as possible. Replacing the CPU means throwing out our entire body of work, so as important as it is to avoid being CPU bottlenecked, we can't do it frequently.The issue for us right now is that SNB-E isn't due until late this year, and that's the obvious upgrade path for our GPU testbed since SNB has a limited amount of PCIe bandwidth.
7upMan - Wednesday, January 26, 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.
IceDread - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
Good reviewAs a sidenote, sort of fun to see my one year old card 5970 is still the best when looking at single cards.
IceDread - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
There was not much talk about SLI and crossfire btw, there the value in AMD is higher today day with a fair bit than with SLi solutions comparing AMD 6xxx series with new nvidia cards.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
We had to leave our SLI & CF for this article because of all the driver changes from both parties - as it stands I need to rerun most of those numbers.You'll be seeing a lot more on SLI and CF in a week or two; we have a trio of 580s and 6970s in house for some tri-SLI/CF testing.
Scootiep7 - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
Not going to add much to the discourse at this point. I just want to say that I really liked this article and thank you for your time and due diligence in writing it.blackshard - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
Why they are so different from previous articles? NVIDIA numbers have grown about three times and some AMD numbers are grown too.Previous article about HD6950 and HD6970 showed this:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4061/amds-radeon-hd-...
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
In the GTX 560 Ti article I explained what was going on.http://www.anandtech.com/show/4135/nvidias-geforce...
"Small Lux GPU is the other test in our suite where NVIDIA’s drivers significantly revised our numbers. Where this test previously favored raw theoretical performance, giving the vector-based Radeons an advantage, NVIDIA has now shot well ahead. Given the rough state of both AMD and NVIDIA’s OpenCL drivers, we’re attributing this to bug fixes or possibly enhancements in NVIDIA’s OpenCL driver, with the former seeming particularly likely. However NVIDIA is not alone when it comes to driver fixes, and AMD has seem a similar uptick against the newly released 6900 series. It’s not nearly the leap NVIDIA saw, but it’s good for around 25%-30% more rays/second under SLG. This appears to be accountable to further refinement of AMD’s VLIW4 shader compiler, which as we have previously mentioned stands to gain a good deal of performance as AMD works on optimizing it."
blackshard - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
Ok, got it. I have not read the gtx560 review. Thanks ;)ibudic1 - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
Don't forget that you can unlock 6950 to 6970, at which point Nvidia is just NOT competitive.http://www.techpowerup.com/137140/AMD-Radeon-HD-69...