AMD's Radeon HD 6970 & Radeon HD 6950: Paving The Future For AMD
by Ryan Smith on December 15, 2010 12:01 AM ESTMetro 2033
The next game on our list is 4A Games’ Metro 2033, their tunnel shooter released earlier this year. In September the game finally received a major patch resolving some outstanding image quality issues with the game, finally making it suitable for use in our benchmark suite. At the same time a dedicated benchmark mode was added to the game, giving us the ability to reliably benchmark much more stressful situations than we could with FRAPS. If Crysis is a tropical GPU killer, then Metro would be its underground counterpart.
The Crysis comparison seems particularly apt here, as our rankings closely mirror Crysis. The 6970 takes a small lead over the GTX 570, while the 6950 rides shotgun with the GTX 570. Note that none of these single-GPU cards, not even the GTX 580, get exceptionally good framerates at 1920 or 2560, so we have to resort to CF/SLI to get there. CF/SLI makes things all the more interesting, as any kind of parity the GTX 400/500 series has goes right out the window at 2560. AMD simply outscales NVIDIA here, leading to the 6970 CF surpassing the mighty 580 SLI by 30%. Reality reasserts itself at 1920 however where we end up with a more typical order.
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DoktorSleepless - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
Is it just me or are all the graphs missing?Ryan Smith - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
They're not missing. They're fashionably late.In all seriousness though, they're going up now. We had less than a week to cover all of this, so it's very much down to the wire here.
DoktorSleepless - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
They're still missing in some of the non-benchmark pages including the "Enhanced Quality AA".AnnihilatorX - Thursday, December 16, 2010 - link
They are all here.You should clean your browser cache.
AstroGuardian - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
It's you. The graphs are drawn in infrared. Your fault you can't see them :)mmatis - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
They all look fine to me. Surely you aren't trying to use an NVidia card to read a favorable article about AMD?Stuka87 - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
Err, did you even read the article?!opticalmace - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
also missing the conclusion right now. :)tipoo - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
In their defense, you can't have read the whole article that fast :-PHOOfan 1 - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
Doesn't look to me like the HD6970 is worth $70 more than the HD6950 at this time.Hopefully for AMD/ATI's sake, drivers updates will catapult it ahead.