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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fausto412 - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
6970 just 4 to 6 fps faster in Bad Company 2 than my 5870? WTF!not worth the upgrade. what a lame ass successor.
Kibbles - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
It's 7% faster at 1920 and 9% faster at 2560. BC2 obviously doesn't need the extra GPU power at 1680.I wouldn't call it weak, but this card certainly isn't the clear winner that the 5870 was.
fausto412 - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
its weak if i was expecting a response to the gtx580 to upgrade to.may as well stay with my 5870.
ClownPuncher - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
For now... But who really bases their purchase on one game anymore? It looks like 10.12 or 11.1 drivers will help performance a good amount.fausto412 - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
I base my performance on 1 game...because it is a very taxing game and my #1 game right now.MeanBruce - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
Yup, dude I heard the AMD 7000 series might make an early appearance next July, with the die shrink @28nm you might want to wait and pick up a 7970!fausto412 - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
that's what i'm considering now. need to upgrade for 30% more performance than 5870 for it to make sense.Stuka87 - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
The game is CPU limited at lower resolutions. BC2 is known for being more CPU bound than GPU bound.But I was hoping for a larger jump over the previous cards :/
fausto412 - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
I understand BFBC2 is more cpu bound. But in this testing Anandtech did they use a TOP TOP TOP of the line cpu so that rules that out as a bottleneck.Belard - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
Yeah... at least the model numbers didn't make things confusing!In some benchmarks, the 6950 is faster than your 5870... but it would have made far more sense to call these 6850/6870 or even 6830/6850..
AMD screwed up with the new names...