AMD's Radeon HD 6970 & Radeon HD 6950: Paving The Future For AMD
by Ryan Smith on December 15, 2010 12:01 AM ESTFinal Thoughts
Often it’s not until the last moment that we have all the information in hand to completely analyze a new video card. The Radeon HD 6970 and Radeon HD 6950 were no different. With AMD not releasing the pricing information to the press until Monday afternoon, we had already finished our performance benchmarks before we even knew the price, so much time was spent speculating and agonizing over what route AMD would go. So let’s jump straight in to our recommendations.
Our concern was that AMD would shoot themselves in the foot by pricing the Radeon HD 6970 in particular at too high a price. If we take a straight average at 1920x1200 and 2560x1600, its performance is more or less equal to the GeForce GTX 570. In practice this means that NVIDIA wins a third of our games, AMD wins a third of our games, and they effectively tie on the rest, so the position of the 6970 relative to the GTX 570 is heavily dependent on just what games out of our benchmark suite you favor. All we can say for sure is that on average the two cards are comparable.
So with that in mind a $370 launch price is neither aggressive nor overpriced. Launching at $20 over the GTX 570 isn’t going to start a price war, but it’s also not so expensive to rule the card out. Of the two the 6970 is going to take the edge on power efficiency, but it’s interesting to see just how much NVIDIA and AMD’s power consumption and performance under gaming has converged. It used to be much more lopsided in AMD’s favor.
Meanwhile the Radeon HD 6950 occupies an interesting spot. Above it is the 570/6970, below it are the soon to be discontinued GTX 470 and Radeon HD 5870. These cards were a bit of a spoiler for the GTX 570, and this is once more the case for the 6950. The 6950 is on average 7-10% faster than the 5870 for around 20% more. I am becoming increasingly convinced that more than 1GB of VRAM is necessary for any new cards over $200, but we’re not quite there yet. When the 5870 is done and gone the 6950 will be a reasonable successor, but for the time being the 5870 at $250 currently is a steal of a deal if you don’t need the extra performance or new features like DP1.2. Conversely the 6950 is itself a bit of a spoiler; the 6970 is only 10-15% faster for $70 more. If you had to have a 6900 card, the 6950 is certainly the better deal. Whether you go with the 5870, the 6950, or the 6970, just keep in mind that the 6900 series is in a much better position for future games due to AMD’s new architecture.
And that brings us to the final matter for today, that new architecture. Compared to the launch of Cypress in 2009 the feature set isn’t radically different like it was when AMD first added DirectX 11 support, but Cayman is radically different in its own way. After being carried by their current VLIW5 architecture for nearly four years, AMD is set to hand off their future to their new VLIW4 architecture. It won’t turn the world upside down for AMD or its customers, but it’s a reasonable step forward for the company by reducing their reliance on ILP in favor of more narrow TLP-heavy loads. For gaming this specifically means their hardware should be a better match for future DX10/DX11 games, and the second graphics engine should give them enough tessellation and rasterizing power for the time being.
Longer term we will have to see how AMD’s computing gamble plays out. Though we’ve largely framed Cayman in terms of gaming, to AMD Cayman is first and foremost a compute GPU, in a manner very similar to another company whose compute GPU is also the fastest gaming GPU on the market. Teething issues aside this worked out rather well for NVIDIA, but will lightning strike twice for AMD? The first Cayman-based video cards are launching today, but the Cayman story is just getting started.
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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.