AMD's Radeon HD 6990: The New Single Card King
by Ryan Smith on March 8, 2011 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- AMD
- Radeon HD 6990
- GPUs
Civilization V
The other new game in our benchmark suite is Civilization 5, the latest incarnation in Firaxis Games’ series of turn-based strategy games. Civ 5 gives us an interesting look at things that not even RTSes can match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world, and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.
In January we saw NVIDIA’s performance significantly improve in Civilization V. Since then AMD seems to have found their footing, albeit not as well as NVIDIA had. AMD’s primary gain here seems to be in CrossFire versus a boost in base performance, which works out well enough for the 6990’s launch. Interestingly Civ 5 is still so shader bound here on AMD’s cards that the 6990OC’s performance boost almost perfectly matches the increase in the core clockspeed. Still, at the end of the day the 6990 and the rest of the Radeons are still well outgunned by NVIDIA.
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HangFire - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
As usual no reply after the first few pages... or on the topic of Linux.If they only had any clue how many Linux workstations get ordered with "are you sure this has the top processor, top video card and most RAM available?" on a post-it note stuck on the Req.
Azfar - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
Crysis Killer that is.....Finally !!Euchrestalin - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
Why is this card named after Wedge Antilles? Why not Vader, Skywalker or my personal favorite Mitth'raw'nuruodo?gorgid - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
I'm big RADEON fan. I had many ATI cards ( 3870 x 2 , 4870x 2, 5970 etc). Most of them water cooled. So i don't care about noise. My temperatures always at 40C ( for the chips) overclocked. I was planning to sell 5970 and get 6990, but after first reviews i decided to wait to see what NVIDIA will bring in form of GTX 590.The AMD made great first step with DirectX 11, cards came 6 month earlier then Nvidia.
First time ( may be not) ATI cards were on the top charts for long time.
But this time almost 1 1/2 years past since 5970 came to the market. 6990 shows about 20% gain of performance comparing to 5970. Why somebody would pay $700 for that kind of performance?
In my opinion NVidia will beat 6990 pretty easy, will take a crown and will keep it for a while.
Thank you all.
slickr - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
I've read the review on most of the other English sites and there seems to be a big fluke in anand's battlefield benchmark.Seems like yet another shady bench.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
We of course strive to make the best benchmark possible. So if you believe there is a problem, I'd like to hear what you think is amiss with our benchmarks. We can't fix things unless you guys chime in and let us know what you think is wrong.HangFire - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
So, you do read past page 5 of the comments... but you still can't bring yourself to even mention Linux.We are working our contacts with AMD but can't get much out of them. I guess no news is bad news.
andy5174 - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
Is this performance based on AMD's image quality cheat?http://www.guru3d.com/article/exploring-ati-image-...
Ryan Smith - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
That article is out of date as of Catalyst 11.1a.noxyucT(RUS) - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
куда стока мощностей это же пздец,295 жифорс в несколько раз рвет.Интересно какой процессор участвовал в тесте, и7 ито не потянет такова монстра.Жесть кароче.