AMD's Radeon HD 6970 & Radeon HD 6950: Paving The Future For AMD
by Ryan Smith on December 15, 2010 12:01 AM ESTThe Test
For the launch of the Radeon HD 6900 series, AMD supplied us with a 6900-enabled version of the Catalyst 10.11 driver, version 8.79.6.2RC2. This is older than the Catalyst 10.12 preview released Monday, which was 8.8xx.
Otherwise our test setup has not significantly changed from the GTX 570 launch last week. For our existing AMD cards we’re still using the Catalyst 10.10e, while for NVIDIA it’s a mix of 262.99 and 263.09. Note that we do not have a 2nd GTX 570 yet for GTX 570 SLI comparisons; given the equality between the 570 and 480, the GTX 480 in SLI is a reasonable stand-in.
Finally, all tests were done with the default driver settings unless otherwise noted.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Asus Rampage II Extreme |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | OCZ Summit (120GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 6970 AMD Radeon HD 6950 AMD Radeon HD 6870 AMD Radeon HD 6850 AMD Radeon HD 5970 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 5850 AMD Radeon HD 5770 AMD Radeon HD 4870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 262.99 NVIDIA ForceWare 263.09 AMD Catalyst 10.10e AMD Catalyst 8.79.6.2RC2 |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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DoktorSleepless - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
Is it just me or are all the graphs missing?Ryan Smith - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
They're not missing. They're fashionably late.In all seriousness though, they're going up now. We had less than a week to cover all of this, so it's very much down to the wire here.
DoktorSleepless - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
They're still missing in some of the non-benchmark pages including the "Enhanced Quality AA".AnnihilatorX - Thursday, December 16, 2010 - link
They are all here.You should clean your browser cache.
AstroGuardian - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
It's you. The graphs are drawn in infrared. Your fault you can't see them :)mmatis - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
They all look fine to me. Surely you aren't trying to use an NVidia card to read a favorable article about AMD?Stuka87 - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
Err, did you even read the article?!opticalmace - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
also missing the conclusion right now. :)tipoo - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
In their defense, you can't have read the whole article that fast :-PHOOfan 1 - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
Doesn't look to me like the HD6970 is worth $70 more than the HD6950 at this time.Hopefully for AMD/ATI's sake, drivers updates will catapult it ahead.