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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529th - Sunday, December 19, 2010 - link
Great job on this review. Excellent writing and easy to read.Thanks
marc1000 - Sunday, December 19, 2010 - link
yes, that's for sure. we will have to wait a little to see improvements from VLIW4. but my point is the "VLIW processors" count, they went up by 20%. with all other improvements, I was expecting a little more performance, just that.but in the other hand, I was reading the graphs, and decided that 6950 will be my next card. it has double the performance of 5770 in almost all cases. that's good enough for me.
Iketh - Friday, December 24, 2010 - link
This is how they've always reviewed new products? And perhaps the biggest reason AT stands apart from the rest? You must be new to AT??WhatsTheDifference - Sunday, December 26, 2010 - link
the 4890? I see every nvidia config, never a card overlooked there, ever, but the ATI's (then) top card is conspicuously absent. long as you include the 285, there's really no excuse for the omission. honestly, what's the problem?PeteRoy - Friday, December 31, 2010 - link
All games released today are in the graphic level of the year 2006, how many games do you know that can bring the most out of this card? Crysis from 2007?Hrel - Tuesday, January 11, 2011 - link
So when are all these tests going to be re-run at 1920x1080 cause quite frankly that's what I'm waiting for. I don't care about any resolution that doesn't work on my HDTV. I want 1920x1080, 1600x900 and 1280x720. If you must include uber resolutions for people with uber money then whatever; but those people know to just buy the fastest card out there anyway so they don't really need performance numbers to make up their mind. Money is no object so just buy nvidia's most expensive card and ur off.AKP1973 - Thursday, October 13, 2011 - link
Have you guys noticed the "load GPU temp" of the 6870 in XFIRE?... It produced so very low heat than any enthusiast card in a multi-GPU setup. That's one of the best XFIRE card in our time today if you value price, performance, cool temp, and silence.!Travisryno - Wednesday, April 26, 2017 - link
It's dishonest referring to enhanced 8x as 32x. There are industry standards for this, which AMD, NEC, 3DFX, SGI, SEGA AM2, etc..(everybody) always follow(ed), then nVidia just makes their own...Just look how convoluted it is..