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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
130 Comments
View All Comments
MarkLuvsCS - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
Thanks for an awesome article!Minor typo in section "ONCE AGAIN THE CARD THEY BEG YOU TO OVERCLOCK" second to last paragraph second sentence says "...the 6690OC’s core clock is only 6% faster and the memory clock is the same, versus..."
Figaro56 - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
Yes this is the article I as waiting for. Time to get rid of my 2 HD 5870 cards and purchase 2 HD 6970 ones. I wouldn't get an HD 6990. That is pretty clear.Thanks AnAndTech!
mino - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
AT has CHOSEN to not overclock the card based on its THEORETHICAL (Furmark) load temperatures ...Go bash AT for writing "OC" on the slides while they enabled ONLY the performance BIOS. Not doing ANY overclocking whatsoever by fear of Furmark ...
In effect what they have done was in effect a factory OC, not a traditional OC of the what-it-can-handle kind.
Great, so Furmark has achieved one more evil goal: it prevents (AT?) journalists to do overclocking reviews ...
mino - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
Here come some real OC numbers: www.legitreviews.com/article/1566/14BTW, they did not even bother with the #1 BIOS option to achieve it ... so, lets talk about biased reviewing, shall we?
RaistlinZ - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
Looks like the 2x6950 is a much better option, given you'll have much less noise to deal with and that they can be flashed to 6970 shaders.If this card had been $599 I probably would have picked one up. But at $699 I think I'll just wait for 28nm generation of cards.
Thanks for trying, AMD.
MarcHFR - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
Hi,Drivers used are :
NVIDIA ForceWare 262.99
NVIDIA ForceWare 266.56 Beta
NVIDIA ForceWare 266.58
AMD Catalyst 10.10e
AMD Catalyst 11.1a Hotfix
AMD Catalyst 11.4 Preview
Is it possible to know wich driver is used for each card ?
Thanks
jcandle - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
Ryan, any chance you'll be doing a thermal compound review soon? 8% against their stock compound. How much better is it than current performance aftermarket compounds?IanCutress - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
Quite difficult to get accurate thermal compound numbers. There's no way you can guarantee that the compound will be spread evenly and accurately every time. Any big 8ºC differences will show sure, but you're always playing with statistics to +/- 3ºC. Then there's the inevitable argument about the right way to apply the paste...7Enigma - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
More importantly is the normal compound most manufacturers use is junk compared to a good thermal compound such as arctic silver (don't keep up on the latest brands as I still have Arctic Silver 3 that works great for me). So that 8% might very well be true since the normal stuff is of poor quality.ypsylon - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
But few issues need to be addressed. Noise for starters, nearly 80dBA. Thats like working in a foundry. Also cooling is highly inefficient for card of this size. Need some 3rd party solution or water cooling altogether.Biggest problem for 6990 could be (or rather will be) nVidia. If they price GTX590 at the same level or even below $700 price tag then AMD will be screwed totally. For now waiting for GTX590 and 6990 with some after market coolers as stock solutions are completely unacceptable.
One thing straight - I do not sleep on ca$h and if I buy 6990/590 it will be ma$$ive expense for me, but... What swings things for me with cards like this, is that I do not need uber VGA for 30 monitors. All I want is card with large frame buffer, which will live in my PC for ~10 years without need to upgrade, and it will occupy only 1 PCI-ex x16 slot. SLI/CF is totally misguided if you do have some more hardware installed inside. Sometimes (with all that SLI/CF popularity) I wonder, why 7 slot ATX is still alive and 10-12 slot motherboards are not a standard?