AMD's Radeon HD 6970 & Radeon HD 6950: Paving The Future For AMD
by Ryan Smith on December 15, 2010 12:01 AM ESTCrysis: Warhead
Kicking things off as always is Crysis: Warhead, still one of the toughest game in our benchmark suite. Even 2 years since the release of the original Crysis, “but can it run Crysis?” is still an important question, and the answer continues to be “no.” While we’re closer than ever, full Enthusiast settings at a playable framerate is still beyond the grasp of a single card.
Crysis starts things off well for AMD. Keeping an eye on 2560 and 1920, not only does the 6970 start things off with a slight lead over NVIDIA’s GTX 570, but even the cheaper 6950 holds parity. In the case of the 6900 series it also hits a special milestone at 2560, being the first AMD single-GPU cards to surpass 30fps. This also gives us our first inkling of 6950 performance relative to 5870 performance – as expected the 6950 is faster, but at 5-10% not fantastically so. Crysis does push in excess of 2mil polygons/frame, but the 6900 series’ improvements are best suited for when tessellation is in use.
Meanwhile our CrossFire setups are unusually close, with barely 2fps separating the 6970CF and 6950CF. It’s unlikely we’re CPU limited at 2560, so we may be looking at being ROP-limited, as the ROPs are the only constant between the two cards.
With 2GB of RAM our AMD cards finally break out of the minimum framerate crash Crysis experiences with 1GB AMD cards. Our rankings are similar to our averages, with the 6970 taking a small lead while the 6950 holds close to the 570.
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anactoraaron - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
I would like to thank Ryan for the article that makes me forget the "OC card in the review" debacle. Fantastic in depth review with no real slant to team green or red. Critics go elsewhere please.Hrel - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
When are you guys gonna put all these cards in bench? Some of them have been out for a relatively long time now and they're still not in bench. Please put them in there.ajlueke - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
I agree with most of the conclusions I have read here. If you already own a 5800 series card, there isn't really enough here to warrant an upgrade. Some improved features and slightly improved FPS in games doesn't quite give the same upgrade incentive as the 5870 did compared a 4870.There are some cool things with the 6900 and 6800 series. Looking at the performance in games, the 6970 and even the 6870 seemed to get much closer to 2X performance when placed in crossfire as compared to 5800 series cards. That is a pretty interesting development. All in all, a good upgrade if you didn't buy a card last generation. If you did, it seems the wait is on for the 28 nm version of the GPU.
Belard - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
NO!The 800 cards were the HIGH end models since the 3000 series and worked well through to the 5000 series with the 5970 being the "odd one" since the "X2" made more sense like the 4850X2.
It also allows for a "x900" series if needed.
AMD needs to NOT COPY Nvidia's naming games... did they hire someone from Nvidia? Even the GeForce 580/570 still belong to the 400 series since its the same tech. SHould have been named 490 and the 475... But hey, in 12 months, Nvidia will be up to the 700 series. Hey, Google Chrome is version 8.0 and its been on the market for about 2 years! WTF?!
What was their excuse again? Oh, to not create confusion with the 5700 series? So they frack up the whole model names for a mid-range card? The 6800's should have been 6700s, simple as that. Yes, there will be some people who will accidentally downgrade.
What the new 6000 series has going for AMD is that they are somewhat cheaper and easily cost less to make than the 5000s and what Nvidia makes.
In the end, the 6000 series is the first dumb-thing AMD has done since the 2000 series, but nowhere near as bad.
MS - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
In terms of effienct usage of space though AMD is doing quite well; ... should be efficientNice article so far,
Regards,
Michael
nitrousoxide - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
The power connector on the left (8-pin of 6970 and 6-pin of 6950) has a corner (bottom left corner) cut down, that's because the cooler doesn't fit with the PCB design, if you install it with force the power connector would get stuck. So the delay of 6900 Series could be due to this issue, AMD needs one month to 'manually polish' all power connectors of the stock-cards in order to go with the cooler. Well, just a joke, but this surely reflects how poorly AMD organizes the whole design and manufacture process :)nitrousoxide - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
you can find this out here :)hiphotos. baidu. com/coreavc/pic/item/70f48d81ffe07cf26d811957. jpg
nitrousoxide - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
AMD promises that every one will get a unique 6970 or 6950, different from any other card on the planet :)GummiRaccoon - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
The performance of these cards is much better with 10.12, why didn't you test it with that?Ryan Smith - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
10.12 does not support the 6900 series.8.79.6.2RC2, dated December 7th, were the absolute latest drivers for the 6900 series at the time of publication.