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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Ryan Smith - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
Exactly the same as on Cypress.L2: 128KB per ROP block (so 512KB)
L1: 8KB per SIMD
LDS: 32KB per SIMD
GDS: 64KB
http://images.anandtech.com/doci/4061/MidLevelView...
I don't have the register file size readily available.
DanNeely - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
How likely is the decrease from 2 to 1 operations per clock likely to affect real world applications?yeraldin37 - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
My current cards are running at 870Mhz(GPU) and 1100Mhz(clock), faster than stock 5870, those benchmarks for new 6970 are really disappointing, I was seriously expecting to get a single 6970 for Christmas to replace my 5850OC CF cards and make room for additional cards or even have a free pcie to plug my gtx460 for physx capability. I was going to be happy to get at least 80% of my current 5850CF setup from new 6970. what a joke! I will not make any move and wait for upcoming next generation 28nm amd GPU's. We have to be fair and mention all great efforts from AMD team to bring new technology to newest radeon cards, however not enough performance for die hard gamers. If gtx 580 were 20% cheaper I might consider to buy one, I personally never ever pay more than $400 for one(1) video card.Nfarce - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
Reading Tom's Hardware they essentially slam AMD's marketing these cards as a 570-580 beater. Guru3D is also less than friendly. Interstingly, *both* sites have benches showing the 570 an d580 beating the 6950 and 6970 commandingly. What's up with that exactly?fausto412 - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
it's called AMD didn't deliver on the hype...they deserve to get slammed.medi01 - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
AMD delivers cards with better performance/price ratio that also consume less power. How come there is a reason to "slam", eh?zst3250 - Friday, December 31, 2010 - link
Off yourself cretin, prefearbly by getting your cranium kicked in.Mr Perfect - Thursday, December 16, 2010 - link
Wait, is Tom's reputable again? Haven't read that site since the Athlon XP was new....AnnonymousCoward - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
As a 30" owner and gamer, I would never run at 2560x1600 with AA enabled if that causes <60fps. I'd disable AA. Who wouldn't value framerate over AA? So when the fps is <60, please compare cards at 2560x1600 without AA, so that I'm able to apply the results to a purchase decision.SimpJee - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
Greetings, also a 30'' gamer. If you see the FPS above 30 with AA enabled, you can assume it will be (much) higher without it enabled so what's the point in actually having the author bench it without AA? Plus, anything above 30 FPS is just icing on the cake as far as I'm concerned.