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 ESTFinal Words
AMD’s GTX 560 Ti counter-offensive leaves us with a few different thoughts, none of which have much to do with the GTX 560 Ti.
First and foremost we have the newly launched Radeon HD 6950 1GB. Having 2GB of VRAM does have its advantages, but at this point in time there aren’t any games that can exploit this advantage at the common resolutions of 1920x1200, 1920x1080, or 1680x1050. It’s only once we get to 2560x1600 or similarly large Eyefinity resolutions that we see the 1GB 6950 fall behind its 2GB counterpart.
In the long run (e.g. a year or longer) I believe having that extra 1GB of VRAM is going to make a difference at resolutions like 1920x1200, but amidst my prognostics we’re effectively making an argument on the futureproofness of a product, which is a difficult argument to make even in the best of times. Perhaps the best argument is one of price: the 6950 1GB starts at $259, while the 6950 2GB can be found for as little as $269, putting a $10 premium on the extra 1GB. For $10 I would suggest taking the plunge, however if your budget is absolutely critical then it’s clear under most games right now you will never notice the difference between a 1GB 6950 and a 2GB 6950.
Our second card presents a more interesting scenario. The factory overclock on the XFX Radon 6870 Black Edition is not very high, but then neither is the effective price of the overclock. Instead this is a story about a custom cooler, and whether at about $10 over the average price of a reference Radeon HD 6870 it’s worth the price. While I would not call the reference 6870 loud, I also would not call it quiet by any stretch of the word; if anything I would call it cheaply built. If you don’t care about noise then the Black Edition brings little to the table, but in a suitable case those of you with sensitive ears will be in for quite a surprise. Thus while the XFX 6870 comes up short as a true GTX 560 Ti competitor as AMD would seem to be hoping for, it clearly has other redeeming values.
With AMD’s latest cards squared away, our final thought is on today’s launch in general. If nothing else, hopefully today’s write-up has entertained you, and with any luck we’ve imparted upon you a bit of practical wisdom about how the GPU industry operates. As far as we can gather AMD went through quite a bit of effort to launch a viable GTX 560 Ti competitor today – a feat they appear to have succeeded at. The GPU industry is competitive from top to bottom, but there’s something special about the $200-$300 price range that brings out the insanity on all sides. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.
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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...