AMD's Radeon HD 6970 & Radeon HD 6950: Paving The Future For AMD
by Ryan Smith on December 15, 2010 12:01 AM ESTCivilization V
The other new game in our benchmark suite is Civilization 5, the latest incarnation in Firaxis Games’ series of turn-based strategy games. Civ 5 gives us an interesting look at things that not even RTSes can match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world, and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.
Once more Civilization V throws us a curveball, with some interesting results. At 2560 we’re GPU limited to the point where the 6900 series pulls ahead of the 5870, while at 1920 there’s something going on that doesn’t sit well with Civ V, leading to sub-5870 performance. In any case this is another game where NVIDIA traditionally does well, leading to even the fast 6900 series coming in well below the GTX 570 and even the GTX 470. AMD’s CrossFire scaling reigns supreme however, giving all the CF configurations an edge over their NVIDIA counterparts.
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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.