AMD's Radeon HD 6970 & Radeon HD 6950: Paving The Future For AMD
by Ryan Smith on December 15, 2010 12:01 AM ESTCivilization V
The other new game in our benchmark suite is Civilization 5, the latest incarnation in Firaxis Games’ series of turn-based strategy games. Civ 5 gives us an interesting look at things that not even RTSes can match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world, and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.
Once more Civilization V throws us a curveball, with some interesting results. At 2560 we’re GPU limited to the point where the 6900 series pulls ahead of the 5870, while at 1920 there’s something going on that doesn’t sit well with Civ V, leading to sub-5870 performance. In any case this is another game where NVIDIA traditionally does well, leading to even the fast 6900 series coming in well below the GTX 570 and even the GTX 470. AMD’s CrossFire scaling reigns supreme however, giving all the CF configurations an edge over their NVIDIA counterparts.
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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.