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 ESTCompute & 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. Note that this is a DX11 benchmark.
While Turks and the 6670/6570 are quite a bit faster than the 6450, both are still so-so as compute cards. Although the unit of measurement (fps) is effectively arbitrary, what isn’t arbitrary is that the 5750 is nearly 33% ahead of the 6670. Juniper (5750/5770) seems to be the floor for good compute performance on AMD cards.
Our second compute benchmark of the day 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. AMD in turn recently hit a milestone by offering the OpenCL runtime with their drivers, so SmallLuxGPU will now run out of the box without the AMD Compute SDK.
At 3200K rays/sec, the 6670 actually beats the Radeon HD 4870 by about 10%, showcasing just how far AMD’s compute performance has come compared to the 4000 series. The 6670 also enjoys a similar lead over the 5670 thanks to its additional shaders, but the 720SP 5750 looms large above it.
At the other end of the spectrum from GPU computing performance is GPU tessellation performance, used exclusively for graphical purposes. Barts’ tessellation improvements are inherited by Turks, which should give it an edge over the 5670.
What ended up surprising us the most with our DX11 Detail Tessellation Sample test wasn’t so much the raw performance of the 6670, it was the performance relative to some other AMD cards. At a high tessellation factor the Radeon HD 5870 isn’t all that far ahead, and meanwhile the 5750 is edged out by the 6670 in all cases. Given that our most tessellation-intensive games struggled at 1680x1050 on the 6670 it may not be powerful enough to really use its tessellation abilities in full on top of a heavy graphical workload, but the basis for respectable tessellation performance is there.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
53 Comments
View All Comments
Taft12 - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
Courtesy of Hardwarezone (and Techconnect), here's a look at what many of the major AMD video card hardware partners have for us on release day:ASUS:
http://www.hardwarezone.com/tech-news/view/166085
Gigabyte:
http://www.hardwarezone.com/tech-news/view/166139
MSI:
http://www.hardwarezone.com/tech-news/view/166128
Sapphire:
http://www.hardwarezone.com/tech-news/view/166079
HIS:
http://www.tcmagazine.com/tcm/news/hardware/37325/...
Powercolor:
http://www.tcmagazine.com/tcm/news/hardware/37324/...
Highlights (for me): the HIS fanless 6570 and that dual-fan MSI 6670! I'm sure many more overclocked and exotic cooler models (like MSI Cyclone and HIS IceQ) are on their way
LB-ID - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
The eternal question.ekoostik - Thursday, April 21, 2011 - link
I just read all the comments looking for something like this. Thanks for not letting me down. Ryan, nice TMBG reference.larson0699 - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
We know, we know. The article immediately reads "copypasta" when I see this. *sigh*jah1subs - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
Personally, I expect my next build to be used mostly as a work (browser + Office 2010) PC (no games) and to be used sometimes as an HTPC and -- very infrequently -- a video encoder since our only child will probably be more than 500 miles away, going to college. I am cheap, especially about electricity. My apartment is all fluorescents today and I am impatiently waiting for 5000K LED bulbs.Therefore, I may be looking at the 6570, or, more likely, the 6450. But what about the Sandy Bridge integrated 3000 graphics? Below, I have copied several paragraphs about the 23.976 fps problem from The Sandy Bridge Review, "A Near-Perfect HTPC." What is the current status of the software fix mentioned in the last paragraph? Is it available? Have you tested it?
"What happens when you try to play 23.976 fps content on a display that refreshes itself 24.000 times per second? You get a repeated frame approximately every 40 seconds to synchronize the source frame rate with the display frame rate. That repeated frame appears to your eyes as judder in motion, particularly evident in scenes involving a panning camera."
"How big of an issue this is depends on the user. Some can just ignore the judder, others will attempt to smooth it out by setting their display to 60Hz, while others will be driven absolutely insane by it."
"If you fall into the latter category, your only option for resolution is to buy a discrete graphics card. Currently AMD’s Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series GPUs correctly output a 23.976Hz refresh rate if requested. These GPUs also support bitstreaming Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA, while the 6000 series supports HDMI 1.4a and stereoscopic 3D. The same is true for NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 430, which happens to be a pretty decent discrete HTPC card."
"Intel has committed to addressing the problem in the next major platform revision, which unfortunately seems to be Ivy Bridge in 2012. There is a short-term solution for HTPC users absolutely set on Sandy Bridge. Intel has a software workaround that enables 23.97Hz output. There’s still a frame rate mismatch at 23.97Hz, but it would be significantly reduced compared to the current 24.000Hz-only situation."
Anandtech, thank you in advance for your reply.
Belard - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 - link
For an office/browser setup. Any current technology will work just fine. My old 2009 ThinkPad runs Windows7 pretty good with a PDC 1.8Ghz (bottom end Core2) with crappy intel graphics and 2GB of RAM.The AMD Fusion Llano platform is pretty exciting and its not even the top-end bulldog. Its onboard graphics destroys intel and it'll help the CPU with other tasks.
Sandy bridge is very good of course, so just add a $60~80 video card and you are ready to go. Sad we have to talk about todays CPUs by their code-names.
** Don't expect an answer concerning the 23.976fps issues. Call intel on that one. intel always had and always will have sub-par graphics. Check out HOW stupid Intel is.
For the bottom end SB, it has the worst performing built-in GPU. The top-end has their best, which is still pathetic compared to the graphics built into AMD chipsets. Logic should dictate that the person who spends $500+ on a CPU, is most likely going to have a dedicated video card - DUH! Even a $40 6450 will smoke any built-in Sandybridge graphics. Its the entry level systems that need better graphics.
papapapapapapapababy - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 - link
i got 640 sp in 2009 for 99$... (4770) screw u AMD... go sell this POS to NintendoSpoelie - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 - link
Sapphire just launched an 5850 SKU ("xtreme") at sub 150$ prices...euroland: 115€
http://azerty.nl/0-970-401029/sapphire-radeon-hd-5...
newegg: 145$
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
crazy prices for the performance
don't know how long supplies will last but it launched less than 10 days ago..
Spazweasel - Friday, April 22, 2011 - link
Has anyone actually seen a low-profile 6670 offered for sale anywhere? I see only a small handful of full-height cards when I search.Taft12 - Monday, April 25, 2011 - link
No OEM ever made a low-profile 5670 and I don't imagine there will be a low-profile 6670 either.