AMD's Radeon HD 6970 & Radeon HD 6950: Paving The Future For AMD
by Ryan Smith on December 15, 2010 12:01 AM ESTBattlefield: Bad Company 2
The latest game in the Battlefield series - Bad Company 2 – remains as one of the cornerstone DX11 games in our benchmark suite. 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 has ended up being a rather balanced game. Neither AMD or NVIDIA GPUs end up being favored giving us performance close to our global average. At higher resolutions the 6970 can meet or beat the GTX 570, while we have to drop to 1680 for the 570 to take a real lead. Meanwhile the 6970 CF is but a hair’s width away from the GTX 580 SLI.
Curiously this is another game where the 5870 holds an advantage over the 6950. Bad Company 2 is another game that normally appears shader-bound, so this may be an outcome from AMD’s shader change. At the same time it’s a very recent game, so it shouldn’t have any particular attachment to the older VLIW5 design.
As for our Water benchmark, it produces disappointing result for the 6900 series. AMD has simply never done well here and the 6900 cards don’t seem to have what it takes to break that curse. The result is that while the averages are close, the worst case scenario of minimum framerates looks much worse for AMD.
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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.