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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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...