| AMD Radeon HD 6970 Video Card |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Video Cards | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Written by Olin Coles | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Wednesday, 15 December 2010 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Page 9 of 16
DX11: BattleForgeBattleForge is free Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) developed by EA Phenomic with DirectX-11 graphics capability. Combining strategic cooperative battles, the community of MMO games, and trading card gameplay, BattleForge players are free to put their creatures, spells and buildings into combination's they see fit. These units are represented in the form of digital cards from which you build your own unique army. With minimal resources and a custom tech tree to manage, the gameplay is unbelievably accessible and action-packed. Benchmark Reviews uses the built-in graphics benchmark to measure performance in BattleForge, using Very High quality settings (detail) and 8x anti-aliasing with auto multi-threading enabled. BattleForge is one of the first titles to take advantage of DirectX-11 in Windows 7, and offers a very robust color range throughout the busy battleground landscape. The charted results illustrate how performance measures-up between video cards when Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) is enabled.
BattleForge Extreme Quality SettingsEDITOR'S NOTE: Several days prior to launch Benchmark Reviews alerted AMD to performance concerns with BattleForge. After launch AMD responded: "We are aware that there are some abnormal performance results in BattleForge with our new AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series graphics card. Keep in mind this is a new VLIW4 shader architecture and we are still fine tuning the shader compilation. We will be able to post a hotfix for Battleforge shortly that will provide a noticeable increase in performance."
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Comments
Nevertheless, competition in this industry is great for everyone as it always results in aggressive pricing so a big welcome thanks goes out to both AMD and Nvidia in this round for giving all of us such powerful cards at more affordable prices...... In the end, isn't that what we all want?
Put it on enthusiast and watch nvidia burn.
Cayman is faster with actual decent settings in games.
Catalyst 10.11 seems to be an unoptimized driver for HD 6970. Would you agree, or do you believe that it is working at "full capacity"? If it is working at "full capacity", then why does the HD 6970 lose so badly to HD 5870 in Battleforge? It doesn't seem to make sense. Perhaps when AMD releases Catalyst 10.13 (fully supporting HD 6900 series) we'll see an appreciable improvement? Let's hope!
"We are aware that there are some abnormal performance results in BattleForge with our new AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series graphics card. Keep in mind this is a new VLIW4 shader architecture and we are still fine tuning the shader compilation. We will be able to post a hotfix for Battleforge shortly that will provide a noticeable increase in performance."
Besides, I think you're a little glossy-eyed to think the 6970 is "marginally faster" than the GTX 570 simply because of "driver issues". Even more so when you consider how Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and BattleForge are both AMD-sponsored game titles. Even 3dMark Vantage was co-developed with AMD/ATI.
Once drivers are more mature, you can expect to get some performance back. But will it be 20-30%? That might be asking a bit much.
-Performs slightly better than the GTX570 (save for obvious beta driver-related performance problems, such as in Battleforge)
-Draws less power than its competitor, the GTX570
-Is as quiet as the GTX580 (according to TPU)
-Is priced slightly (~$20) higher than the GTX570 (Going by egg prices)
I'm not sure what there is to be disappointed about. The card does what it's supposed to.
#hothardware.com/Reviews/AMD-Radeon-HD-6970--6950-GPU-Reviews-Enter-Cayman/?page=7
3dmk 11 results are close and for once look at that dam xfire scaling awesome
I thought 6970 was gonna be only 5% behind GTX 580 - turns out to be 20% behind, with even GTX 570 beating it. No wonder AMD has been FORCED (by their own FAILURE) to slash prices at launch.
Add to that the fact 6970 is hotter than 5870, much hotter than GTX 580 and only slightly cooler than GTX 480; then add much higher power consumption and higher noise level than 5870 -
All of this adds up to one thing - if you own AMD shares, sell now as Nvidia is set stomp on AMD at least until we see 28nm. AMD's fortunes are headed south for the rest of 40nm, especially given that Nvidia has dual card GTX 595 waiting in the wings to hand 6990 its hat in January.
Great review as always, but I think there's a typo on the Closer Look page, fourth paragraph: "This video card measures slightly shorter than the 11" long Radeon HD 5870, but longer than the 9.75" Radeon HD 6970."
Slightly shorter than itself, eh? Haha. I'm glad I'm not the only one typo'ing AMD's new model numbers every now and then.
1080p also
So, yes. A wider data path is sometimes a cheaper and more reliable way to get bandwidth. particularly when you are on the hairy edge...