AMD’s GTX 560 Ti Counter-Offensive: Radeon HD 6950 1GB & XFX’s Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition
by Ryan Smith on January 25, 2011 12:20 PM ESTWhen One Counter Isn’t Enough
Early on the week of January 17th, AMD sent out the customary email letting the press know of some recent changes to AMD’s product lineup. AMD’s partners were launching their factory overclocked cards, and AMD like a proud papa had to let the world know and was happily mailing out cigars (sample cards) in the process. Meanwhile on the horizon AMD would be working with their partners to launch the Radeon HD 6950 1GB in mid-February for around $269-279. The final piece of news was that AMD was posting their Catalyst 11.1a Hotfix drivers for the press to preview ahead of a January 26th launch.
The fact of the matter is that these kinds of announcements are routine, and also very transparent. Given the timing of the arrival of AMD’s sample hardware and the launch date of the new Catalyst driver it was clear this was meant to garner attention at the same time as NVIDIA’s launch of the GTX 560 Ti. This isn’t meant to be damning for any party – this is just the way the GPU industry operates. NVIDIA did something very similar for the Radeon HD 6800 series launch, shipping the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 1GB FTW to us unannounced while we were returning from AMD's press confernece.
If this is how things actually happened however, we wouldn’t be telling this story. For competitive reasons AMD and NVIDIA like to withhold performance and pricing information from everyone as long as possible so that the other party doesn’t get it. Meanwhile the other party is doing everything they can to get that information as soon as possible, so that they have as much time as possible for any counters of their own.
AMD's First GTX 560 Ti Competitor: The XFX Raden HD 6870 Black Edition
On the morning of Thursday the 20th I was awoken by FedEx, who was delivering a priority overnight package from AMD. At the same time I received an email from AMD announcing that the 6950 1GB was sampling to the press immediately, and that we were under NDA until January 25th.
Something had changed at AMD.
I don’t believe we’ll ever know the full details about what AMD was doing that week – some stories are simply never meant to be told – but it quickly became clear that AMD had to make a very sudden change of plans. On Monday the message from AMD was that the 6870OC was their immediate GTX 560 Ti competitor, and here 3 days later the message had suddenly changed to the 6950 1GB being their GTX 560 Ti competitor.
There are a million different reasons why this could be, but I believe it’s because in that intervening period AMD got access to reliable GTX 560 Ti performance data - if not the price too. If they did have that data then they would quickly see that the GTX 560 Ti was 10-15% faster than the 6870OC, reducing the 6870OC from a competitor to a price spoiler at best. The 6870OC could not and would not work as AMD’s GTX 560 Ti challenger.
The final piece of the puzzle only came together yesterday afternoon, when AMD announced that the 6950 1GB’s retail launch was getting pushed up from mid-February to January 24th, or in other words yesterday. The 6950 1GB was to be available immediately for $259 – over half a month sooner than expected, and for roughly $20 less than AMD first said it would be.
Based on the performance of the GTX 560 Ti, the 6870OC, and the 6950 1GB, the only reasonable explanation we have at this time is that early last week AMD did an about-face and put everything in to launching the 6950 1GB ahead of schedule. Whatever motivated this about-face and however they managed to do it, all indications are that they managed to get Sapphire and XFX to manufacture a steady supply of 1GB cards in order for Newegg to have them up for sale Monday afternoon.
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Ryan Smith - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
Indeed CPU bottlenecking is a concern, and we always try to remove it as much as possible. Replacing the CPU means throwing out our entire body of work, so as important as it is to avoid being CPU bottlenecked, we can't do it frequently.The issue for us right now is that SNB-E isn't due until late this year, and that's the obvious upgrade path for our GPU testbed since SNB has a limited amount of PCIe bandwidth.
7upMan - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
RYAN: Hi Ryan, while I usually find AnandTech articles quite entertaining and informative, I always wonder why the f*ck professional editors won't get it into their head to test 2GB cards in areas where they belong to. Meaning: a 2GB vs. 1 GB card test should be about graphically overly intensive games and game mods, like the Half-Life 2 Fake Factory mod, or the STALKER Complete mod (Oblivion too has such mods). There are a number of other mods that put massive numbers of huge textures into the graphics RAM, and I think they should be the ones you need to test the cards with. After all, you can't expect games that were written with 1GB VRAM in mind to utilize the full power of double VRAM.So please, please run some tests with the above mentioned mods. Thanks in advance.
IceDread - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
Good reviewAs a sidenote, sort of fun to see my one year old card 5970 is still the best when looking at single cards.
IceDread - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
There was not much talk about SLI and crossfire btw, there the value in AMD is higher today day with a fair bit than with SLi solutions comparing AMD 6xxx series with new nvidia cards.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
We had to leave our SLI & CF for this article because of all the driver changes from both parties - as it stands I need to rerun most of those numbers.You'll be seeing a lot more on SLI and CF in a week or two; we have a trio of 580s and 6970s in house for some tri-SLI/CF testing.
Scootiep7 - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
Not going to add much to the discourse at this point. I just want to say that I really liked this article and thank you for your time and due diligence in writing it.blackshard - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
Why they are so different from previous articles? NVIDIA numbers have grown about three times and some AMD numbers are grown too.Previous article about HD6950 and HD6970 showed this:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4061/amds-radeon-hd-...
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
In the GTX 560 Ti article I explained what was going on.http://www.anandtech.com/show/4135/nvidias-geforce...
"Small Lux GPU is the other test in our suite where NVIDIA’s drivers significantly revised our numbers. Where this test previously favored raw theoretical performance, giving the vector-based Radeons an advantage, NVIDIA has now shot well ahead. Given the rough state of both AMD and NVIDIA’s OpenCL drivers, we’re attributing this to bug fixes or possibly enhancements in NVIDIA’s OpenCL driver, with the former seeming particularly likely. However NVIDIA is not alone when it comes to driver fixes, and AMD has seem a similar uptick against the newly released 6900 series. It’s not nearly the leap NVIDIA saw, but it’s good for around 25%-30% more rays/second under SLG. This appears to be accountable to further refinement of AMD’s VLIW4 shader compiler, which as we have previously mentioned stands to gain a good deal of performance as AMD works on optimizing it."
blackshard - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
Ok, got it. I have not read the gtx560 review. Thanks ;)ibudic1 - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
Don't forget that you can unlock 6950 to 6970, at which point Nvidia is just NOT competitive.http://www.techpowerup.com/137140/AMD-Radeon-HD-69...