AMD’s Radeon HD 6670 & Radeon HD 6570: Two’s Company, Sub-$100’s A Crowd
by Ryan Smith on April 19, 2011 12:01 AM ESTBattlefield: Bad Company 2
Now approaching a year old, Bad Company 2 remains as one of the cornerstone DX11 games in our benchmark suite. Based on the Frostbite 1.5 engine, it will be replaced in complexity by the DX10+ only Frostbite 2 engine (and Battlefield 3) later this year. 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 is another game where the 6670 delivers technically playable performance at 1680. Given that it’s a first person shooter it might be reasonable to drop down in resolution and/or quality to keep the entire experience smooth, but it’s playable. Indeed of the cards we test at 1680, it’s the slowest card we’d call playable.
In any case, depending on the resolution the 6670 has a 12-14% lead over the 5670, while the 6570 trails the 5670 by as little as 2%. Everything here is well ahead of the GT 430 and other slower cards, but well behind the GTS 450 and faster cards. Turks fits in very well between GF108 and GF106, it would seem.
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ClagMaster - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
The HD6670 is a nice upgrade for a 9600GT, both of which are 65W cards.I beleive, based on 240GT performance, that the HD6670 has about 40-50% more performace over the 9600GT.
This card has plenty of performance for games published 4 years ago.
arthur449 - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
Last page, middle of fourth paragraph:"... the Radeon HD 5770 and GeForce GTS 450 are both regularly on sale for under $100 and are easily 30% faster than the 6770."
Shadowmaster625 - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
Newegg has a sapphire 5750 for $103 ARhttp://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
Best part is it can apparently be flashed into a 5770.
A 5770 curbstomps a 6670, by more than 50%.
Jasker - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
Finally an actual comparison using an older card. I've been using my 8800 GTS 512 for years and yet to really see a game I could determine for sure was GPU bound (I have an old dual Operaton CPU). Thanks to this article I know I can almost definately see some games with todays mid range cards. Thanks!mosox - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
you don't include the HD video quality benchmark but a load of TWIMTBP games instead.Read Tomshardware for a decent review.
Spivonious - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
Agreed. These cards are not marketed towards gamers. They will more likely be used for media playback and casual gaming, not running Crysis.SlyNine1 - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 - link
No, I wouldn't buy a 6670 for someone thats just going to use it for media playback. There are much better options for that.casteve - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
"The 5570 was the ultimate HTPC card, but the 6450 has dethroned it. "Except Ganesh is still in hiding.....so, you can't say it definatively.
I was going to say, these aren't gaming cards. Then I wandered over to the March 2011 Steam Hardware survey and found ~29% of users had 1280x1024 or less monitors. Yow.
The other humorous factoid was how the 6670 was the equivalent of the venerable 8800 GT; using 30W less in idle and half the power under load. Sort of a nice data point for progress.
But, the biggest missing piece to this article is the analysis for HTPC. How well do the 65xx/66xx score versus the 55xx/56xx/etc? How well do they implement 24fps?
Finally, Adobe is using gpu acceleration for some Photoshop/Lightroom/etc features. It would be nice (instead of Adobe's vague 'you can use your gpu card to accelerate' premise) to have some benchmarks for these lower tier cards to see what they actually do and whether a bottom end card is all you truly need for these apps.
Belard - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
Agreed.Thing is, these new cards are quite usable for people on a budget - for gaming, or to do some gaming in an HTPC, which the 6450 cannot do. I still play games on my rather old 4670.
The video quality and feature set is what makes the 6000 series better than the 5000 and of course the GeForce cards which have severe HTPC / video output issues.
Spivonious - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
Can the charts with noise levels please include the noise floor of the room, or of the system without the video card installed (which I'm assuming is around 41dBA in this case)? Also, can the distance of measurement be included? I would love to see measurements taken at two distances - one next to the case and one about 3-5 feet away to get the level at a normal seating distance.