AMD's Radeon HD 6790: Coming Up Short At $150
by Ryan Smith on April 5, 2011 12:01 AM ESTCompute & Tessellation
Moving on from our look at gaming performance, we have our customary look at compute performance, bundled with a look at theoretical tessellation performance.
Our first compute benchmark comes from Civilization V, which uses DirectCompute to decompress textures on the fly. Civ V includes a sub-benchmark that exclusively tests the speed of their texture decompression algorithm by repeatedly decompressing the textures required for one of the game’s leader scenes.
Civilization V’s compute benchmark cares little for memory bandwidth or the architectural differences between Barts and Juniper; SPs and clockspeed are what matter here. As a result the 6790 narrowly averts a tie with the 5770 of all things, and the performance relative to NVIDIA’s cards isn’t any better.
Our second GPU compute benchmark is SmallLuxGPU, the GPU ray tracing branch of the open source LuxRender renderer. While it’s still in beta, SmallLuxGPU recently hit a milestone by implementing a complete ray tracing engine in OpenCL, allowing them to fully offload the process to the GPU. It’s this ray tracing engine we’re testing.
SmallLuxGPU ends up being one of the best showings for the 6790, as while it’s obviously compute bound, it definitely benefits from the architectural differences between Barts and Juniper. The 6790’s performance relative to the 6850 almost identically matches the theoretical performance difference, and in spite of the 5770 having a slight theoretical advantage of its own, the 6790 easily beats the 5770 by 16%. This opens up a small window for the 6790 as a lower-priced GPGPU product, but it’s a very small window – the program would need to excel on AMD cards and on Barts over Juniper. Otherwise we see SLG where the 6790 does well versus the 5770, but very poorly compared to NVIDIA’s cards.
At the other end of the spectrum from GPU computing performance is GPU tessellation performance, used exclusively for graphical purposes. Barts’ tessellation improvements should give it an edge over the 5770, but it still has to contend with the 6800 series.
At this point in time none of our games closely match our tessellation results, which shouldn’t be a surprise given the low usage of tessellation. Although Barts isn’t a tessellation monster it could do quite well in the future if tessellation takes off in a manner similar to how these benchmarks use it, but that’s a very big if.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
69 Comments
View All Comments
Belard - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
Actually - AMD's 3000~5000 have been rather consistent. The 6000s is kind of like the 2000s. They should have stuck with the 3-5 series, everything would have made more sense.So that the 6850 should have been the 6750 since its not really better than an actual 5850. They said they did this to not cause confusion with the 5700 series which was not to be replaced - but INSTEAD ended up being relabeled into the 6600~6700s for the OEM market. The new "AMD" GPU first step with their branded was stupid and confusing. Not impressed.
Nvidia? Those nut-jobs are master at confusion.
GTX / GT / GTS are meaningless, especially in front of a model number. Seriously, to say "GeForce GTX 550 Ti" is plain stupid. "GeForce 550" is all that is needed or "Geforce 5 GTX, Geforce 5 GT etc".
Are there GF GTX 560 and a GF GT 560 and a GF GTS 560? Uh, no.
What happen to the Geforce 300 series? Oh yeah - OEM relabeled bottom end GF200 series. They skipped into the 400 series. Then there is the GF465 and GF 465 768MB... which is more than JUST a memory difference. They should have called it the 465 (with 1GB) and 460 (with 768) since there is ALWAYS a performance hit with the 768mb version of the card.
Then Nvidia brings back the "TI" tag to remind us OLD TIMERS of the days of excellent GF4000 series... which is idiotic as hell.
What?! Is there a GF 550 and a GF 550TI? Screw that, I want the NON TI version because its faster. Oh yeah, its just a few letters suck on the end that are meaningless.
The GF 500 series is the exact same tech as the GF400 series, but fully functional. ie: fixed. But calling them the 500 series makes them look better / newer.
I expect Nvidia to have the "GeForce GTX 785 TI Ultra" on the market around March 2012.
kedesh - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
my question is, can i crossfire this card up with my current one (5750)? consitering i have the correct motherboard? no where on the internet can i find an answer.WhatsTheDifference - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
is the 4890 excluded from ALL benchies? the problem is...? ban the 285 from just one article and we'll witness just exactly what?thanks.
Lex Luger - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
There hasnt been much improvement with video cards since the 90 nm 8800 GTX and GTS.Those were probalby the greatest cards ever in terms of performance boost vs the previous generation.
slickr - Thursday, April 7, 2011 - link
What is the point testing a mediocre graphic card at 1600 and higher resolutions?Most people are going to be playing at lower resolutions with that graphic card and their PC's are certainly not Core I 950 with 12GB ram, so they would be playing at resolutions of 1200x1024 or 1400x1050.
I mean we need more realistic representation of these cards and not some scenario that would never happen.
shady28 - Friday, April 8, 2011 - link
Seems GPUs are dead on the PC until and unless something that can actually use them comes along.
I agree with a previous poster - the 8800GT / GTS series was 'good enough'. There are only a handfull of games that really need anything more, so now all these cards are relegated to a niche market.
Now tablet GPUs, that's a different story, but people are still mostly developing for the lowest common denominator there too.
IloveCharleneChoi - Friday, April 8, 2011 - link
I don‘t care more about HD6790 and 550TI,The cards new released are usually expensive . hd6850 here is less than $150 in Nanjing,China.HD6850 can do better than GTX460 in many games,and of course it can beat 6790 or 550TI.SO WHY CHOOSE 6790?iamezza - Sunday, April 10, 2011 - link
Thanks Ryan for another great article :)I can't believe all the fruit loops posting in the comments here!
thenemesis2 - Monday, October 3, 2011 - link
I this the best card for mild gaming on a Shuttle SandyBridge box with only one 6 pci-e connector and 300w psu?