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
Battlefield: Bad Company 2
The latest game in the Battlefield series - Bad Company 2 – remains as one of the cornerstone DX11 games in our benchmark suite. As BC2 doesn’t have a built-in benchmark or recording mode, here we take a FRAPS run of the jeep chase in the first act, which as an on-rails portion of the game provides very consistent results and a spectacle of explosions, trees, and more.
Bad Company 2 ends up being another game heavily reliant on memory bandwidth, so once again the 6970CF takes a solid lead over the 6990, effectively matching the 10% memory bandwidth difference with 10% more performance. Interestingly the 6990 still has an edge on the 6950CF, showing that there’s more than 1 bottleneck with Bad Company 2. Meanwhile compared to the 5970 the 6990 once again takes a respectable lead of 18%. AMD is fortunate here though that the Radeons have an advantage in this game, as giving up 10% in performance almost anywhere else would be enough to fall below the GTX 570 SLI.
Our waterfall minimum framerate benchmark ends up being quite similar in order to our general chase benchmark. The 6990 is noticeably behind the 6970CF, and in fact it’s just a bit worse this time as the 6950CF edges out even the 6990OC. Memory bandwidth and PCIe bandwidth, take your pick, both play a part here.
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Figaro56 - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
Just be prepared to upgrade your GPU every year. If you think they are going to stop leap frogging performance you are not being realistic.san1s - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
"AMD even went so far as to suggest that reviewers not directly disassemble their 6990"The next picture: The card disassembled
haha
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
To AMD's credit, they were good sports offered to take any pictures we needed. So all of those disassembled shots came from them. They were really adamant about it being a bad idea to take these things apart if you intended to use them in the future.strikeback03 - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
I was looking for a comment on whether you did all your testing before disassembling or whether you got some of their super paste to reassemble.7Enigma - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
My problem with the shot is the poor application of thermal paste from the picture. In a card of this magnitude having a perfect coating of thermal compound is critical. And knowing marketing if that is the shot they SHOW, how good do you really think the application is on one purchased in retail channels?iwod - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
I haven't been following CrossFire / SLI or these Single Card Dual GPU closely. ( Which to me are the same as two card anyway )Do they still need drivers to have a specific profile of the game to take advantage? I.e an Unknown Game to the Drivers will gain 0 benefits from the 2nd GPU?
If that is so, then they are not even worth a look.
Figaro56 - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
Most of the big games support SLI and CrossfireX today. For example, I play Battlefield BC2 myself and using 2 video cards blows the doors of a single card and is well worth the investment, especially if you have a 2560x1600 resolution monitor like I do. For 2 ATI cards in Crossfire you install a separate crossfire profiles pack in addition to the catalyst drivers. The profiles pack supports all the game crossfire optimization. The AI mode in the catalyst drivers exploits the game profile pack setting for crossfire so you want that enabled.A dual GPU HD 6990 is essentially crossfire on a single card, but for some reason it doesn't perform as well as dual single GPU cards in crossfire. Go figure.
If you play old games that don't support SLI or Crossfire then YES there is 0 gain. If you have not tried any of the new games what are you waiting for? It doesn't suck you know?!
cactusdog - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
I agree, unless you have eyefinity and one slot, paying a premium for heat and noise doesnt make sense. For most people with 1 screen a 6970 or 580 is more than enough.Samus - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
i'd be shocked if they sold even one of these without it being returned at some point. the noise levels are astonishing. at full blast the thing doesn't even meet federal vehicle emissions noise regulations without being classified as a motorcycle!MadAd - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
8%? where do we buy tubes of this phase change material? do they sell it like arctic silver?