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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Ryan Smith - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
Yes, using the LateGameView benchmark. Like any other benchmark it's not a perfect representation of all scenarios, but generally speaking it's a reasonable recreation of a game many turns in with a large number of units.jabber - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
All cards at this level are niche. Very few of us have that much to splash on one component.I find it amusing that most of the folks here going "oh wow thats too noisy/power hungry/slow etc. so I wont be buying!", will just then load up Crysis on their 5770/GTX460 equipped PCs.
Note to 95% of you reading this article...this card isnt/wasnt designed for you.
araczynski - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
nice, but it sounds like the 6950CF owns the bang/$ award, this thing is too little for too much $/headache.araczynski - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
then again my 4850CF/E8500 system just played dragon age 2 demo at 1920x1200 with absolutely no problems, so have no reason to upgrade just yet, still.Gainward - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
I also just wanted to touch on that comment. Whilst these cards seem excessive to some you have to remember that @ this moment in time they are as I dub it the veyron moment like others in the past the concorde moment. They might not be for most people practical but to its like me saying to my team, look lets see what we can do. Not only that but having the crown of fastest single card (agreed single card but multi gpu) goes a long way to brand loyalty and advertising.An example I like to use is the GTX 560. Its a fantastic card and in many ways better… hang with me a second. In terms of actual raw power you get for sub £200 is incredible also factor in its quiet and wont eat through your electricity like a moth through primark. But…. to not produce these high end cards would be criminal. We need people to keep pushing as hard and fast (that sounds so wrong) at the the boundaries(agreed quite crudely in the 6990 case but hey I dont sit in either camp just wait a few days for the 590 for brute but crude).
with the reduction in nm to 28 the power consumption and heat will be brought down further (dont need pointing out here that a lot of factors at play here it was just a generalisation) but sure we could see just as big and hot cards within practical reason.
I would not say out of hand I would say its progress and with progress we can lear
Figaro56 - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
Roger that.JimmiG - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
"Water cooled 6990s will be worth their weight in gold."They'll probably cost about that too...
smigs22 - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
The r6990 stands out as a massive single card leader. The 6950CF offers far better price/perfomance with potential for 6970CF performance through BIOS flashing.Maybe you should break up some of the charts to show only single cards configurations (for those with motherboards lacking full/partial SLI/CF support).
It will be interesting to see how enabled & what clocks the gf590 will arrive at, in order to keep its power-draw & temps down to reasonable levels??
I wonder if someone would place a carbon tax on these bad boys....lol
Figaro56 - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
The would have done this, but there is a cryo cooled case interior on the market yet.IceDread - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 - link
If the card would have come with water cooling option or something like that, then it would have been a great product.