AMD's Radeon HD 6990: The New Single Card King
by Ryan Smith on March 8, 2011 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- AMD
- Radeon HD 6990
- GPUs
Crysis: Warhead
Kicking things off as always is Crysis: Warhead, still one of the toughest game in our benchmark suite. Even 3 years since the release of the original Crysis, “but can it run Crysis?” is still an important question, and for 3 years the answer was “no.” However as we’ll see the 6990 changes that: full Enthusiast settings at a playable framerate is finally in the grasp of a single card.
It should come as no surprise that with the 6990, AMD has hit a few different important marks on Crysis for a single card thanks to the card’s near-6970CF performance. As far as our traditional 2560 benchmark goes, the 6990 cracks 60fps, meaning we can finally play Crysis at a perfectly smooth framerate at 2560 with our tweaked settings on what is more or less a single video card. Perhaps more importantly however, performance is to the point where Crysis in full enthusiast mode is now a practical benchmark. Thanks in big part to the extra VRAM here, the tops the 5970 by nearly 30%, coming in at 42.8fps. This is still a bit low for a completely smooth framerate, but it is in fact playable, which is more than we can say for the 5970.
Overall Crysis does a good job setting the stage here for most of our benchmark suite: the performance of the card is consistently between the 6950CF and 6970CF, hovering much closer to the former. Compared to NVIDIA’s offerings the 6990 is solidly between the GTX 580 and GTX 580SLI, owing to the fact that NVIDIA doesn’t have a comparable card. The GTX 580SLI is faster, but the 580 is also still the fastest single-GPU card on the market, meaning it commands a significant price premium.
Overclocked to uber mode however only shows minimal gains, as the theoretical maximum gain is only 6% while the real world benefit is less; uber mode alone will never have a big payoff.
As far as minimum framerates are concerned the story is similar. For some reason the 6990 underperforms the 6950CF here by a frame or two per second, which given the 6990’s mostly superior specs leads us to believe that it’s a limitation of PCIe bus bandwidth. Meanwhile we can clearly see the benefits of more than 1GB of VRAM per GPU here: the 6990 walks all over the 5970.
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HangFire - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
As usual no reply after the first few pages... or on the topic of Linux.If they only had any clue how many Linux workstations get ordered with "are you sure this has the top processor, top video card and most RAM available?" on a post-it note stuck on the Req.
Azfar - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
Crysis Killer that is.....Finally !!Euchrestalin - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
Why is this card named after Wedge Antilles? Why not Vader, Skywalker or my personal favorite Mitth'raw'nuruodo?gorgid - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
I'm big RADEON fan. I had many ATI cards ( 3870 x 2 , 4870x 2, 5970 etc). Most of them water cooled. So i don't care about noise. My temperatures always at 40C ( for the chips) overclocked. I was planning to sell 5970 and get 6990, but after first reviews i decided to wait to see what NVIDIA will bring in form of GTX 590.The AMD made great first step with DirectX 11, cards came 6 month earlier then Nvidia.
First time ( may be not) ATI cards were on the top charts for long time.
But this time almost 1 1/2 years past since 5970 came to the market. 6990 shows about 20% gain of performance comparing to 5970. Why somebody would pay $700 for that kind of performance?
In my opinion NVidia will beat 6990 pretty easy, will take a crown and will keep it for a while.
Thank you all.
slickr - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
I've read the review on most of the other English sites and there seems to be a big fluke in anand's battlefield benchmark.Seems like yet another shady bench.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
We of course strive to make the best benchmark possible. So if you believe there is a problem, I'd like to hear what you think is amiss with our benchmarks. We can't fix things unless you guys chime in and let us know what you think is wrong.HangFire - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
So, you do read past page 5 of the comments... but you still can't bring yourself to even mention Linux.We are working our contacts with AMD but can't get much out of them. I guess no news is bad news.
andy5174 - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
Is this performance based on AMD's image quality cheat?http://www.guru3d.com/article/exploring-ati-image-...
Ryan Smith - Friday, March 11, 2011 - link
That article is out of date as of Catalyst 11.1a.noxyucT(RUS) - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
куда стока мощностей это же пздец,295 жифорс в несколько раз рвет.Интересно какой процессор участвовал в тесте, и7 ито не потянет такова монстра.Жесть кароче.