AMD's Radeon HD 6790: Coming Up Short At $150
by Ryan Smith on April 5, 2011 12:01 AM ESTCivilization V
Civilization 5 is 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.
Civilization V is another title that we don’t use MSAA on at 1680 due to the game’s already low performance and the additional strain of MSAA. This works to the advantage of the 6790, giving it some of the best results relative to the 6850 of our entire test suite. Here the two cards are in fact virtually tied, and Barts’ improved tessellator gives it 20% over the 5770. However NVIDIA’s continued strong showing here means that the 6850 is largely tagging out for the GTX 460 768MB here, which is why the GTX 460 is nearly 20% ahead, and even the GTX 550 isn’t too far behind. If more games were like Civilization V the 6790 would be in better shape, but the rest of the Barts lineup wouldn’t be doing nearly as well.
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silverblue - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
Until we shift from 40nm, probably.mgl888 - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
Not much they can do without a process shrink. Architectural improvements can only go so far.Taft12 - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
No, there is no wall to speak of. The 4870 was a "first tier" part and this 6790 is "third tier". Compare the performance of the 4870 with a 6970 instead (and indeed the launch price of the 4870 with the launch price of the 6970) and you'll see we are doing just fine thank you very much.tno - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
But not long after release the 4890 was retailing after discounts for $160-150. That's what I bought mine at and I have yet to find a compelling card to take its place. Part of that does have to do with a decrease in my gaming, but if I was a budget gamer, I would look long and hard at a used 4890.tno - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
+1pandemonium - Wednesday, April 6, 2011 - link
Only if you don't consider the broad picture and are looking at performance individually.marc1000 - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
I have a 5770. and even with the desire to upgrade to 6950/gtx570, i try to remain honest with me and tell to myself: "I don't need it"this level of performance if perfectly fine to play all current games, because we are all stuck with console ports...
jordanclock - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
I have a 5770 as well, and at 1680x1050, almost everything runs flawlessly, even with AA at 2x or 4x. The situation with multiplatform development is starting to really agitate PC gamers, I think. Crysis 2 looks infinitely better on PC (And ultra high end setups run tri-monitor quite well!), Dragon Age 2 has a texture pack that consoles wouldn't even have the memory to use, and so many games are looking identical on PC and console, meaning that while they run at high framerates on modest hardware, there is no option to increase visual fidelity to offset the increased hardware.tno - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
I concur. I have a 4890 that I picked up for $160 not long after its release after discounts. This thing was top tier, and it was pretty unique product coming out when ATI started treating their multi-GPU single card solutions as their true halo products. And for its flaws (noisy, power hungry and no DX11) it competes for performance at its original price.This is mirrored, frankly, in the PC market where the effective performance increase, that is performance that the average PC user (not us) will notice, has remained fairly flat since Conroe. What has improved is features. For that same budget dual-core Conroe price you get an integrated GPU worth its salt, improved efficiency, improved encoding/decoding performance (the thing users might notice most) and, possibly, more cores.
kmmatney - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
I also have a HD4890, bought for $170, and attached an Accelero S1 cooler, so its virtually silent (only a very slow spinning fan that I can't hear across the heatsink). I'm still amazed after so much time that I cannot get a better card for the same price - things just haven't progressed much in the bang-for-buck department.