| PowerColor PCS+ HD6950 Vortex II |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Video Cards | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Written by David Ramsey | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sunday, 22 May 2011 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Page 11 of 17
DX11: Unigine Heaven 2.5The Unigine Heaven 2.5 benchmark is a free publicly available tool that beautifully demonstrates the DirectX 11 graphics capabilities in Windows 7 or updated Vista Operating Systems. Set among an enchanting village built on floating islands connected by swaying rope bridges, Heaven uses advanced lighting, tessellation, smoke and particle effects, distance blur, and a host of other graphical techniques to render a photo-realistic experience. An interactive mode allows for manual exploration of the village. Of course, all of this requires considerable graphics muscle, and I've found Heaven to be an excellent tool for testing the stability of graphics card overclocks. The distinguishing feature in the Unigine Heaven benchmark is a hardware tessellation that is a scalable technology aimed for automatic subdivision of polygons into smaller and finer pieces, so that developers can gain a more detailed look of their games almost free of charge in terms of performance. Thanks to this procedure, the elaboration of the rendered image finally approaches the boundary of veridical visual perception: the virtual reality looks real. The "Heaven" benchmark excels at providing the following key features:
NVIDIA pulls back into the lead here, with the GTX560 just matching the stock-clocked HD6950, and the GTX570 posting scores about 12-13% better than the overclocked HD6950.
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Comments
Are there still new Radeon HD6950 cards out there that will unlock? I recall reading somewhere that a newer upcoming design would prevent that.
We see a lot of reviews of these aftermarket OC editions on BMR.com (like the powercolor Vortex range and MSi with their Hawk and Lightning variants etc) But they are always pitted against the stock standard cards - or at best older and inferior cards in a crossfire/sli config.
This is useful of course, but the enthusiast in me would love to see a battle royale pitting the best OC variants from Powercolor, MSi, Gigabyte and co. 'Head to Head' to see who makes the best variant of the HD6950 &/or the GTX560ti
Just a thought :)
Also, as you perform your tests, have you experience any hangs or crash?
A friend of mine is serious about buying this PC6850 2gig Vortex 2 card
although he's not into researching much about it on the internet for its real potential, perhaps this might be a good time to ask you so
i could tell him about the settings you used so he could used it on his
when he bought the card. And, if possible if you have tested the card
set to a much higher settings than the one you posted (930mhz and 1370mhz on memory) could you post it here including the voltage settings
and the performance it gained in percentage based from the stock. Thanks and God bless!
I did not have any hangs or crashes with the overclocked settings I used as long as I kept the fans running full blast. If I left the fans on "Auto", the card would not complete most of the benchmarks when overclocked.
The overclock I achieved was exceptionally high for a 6950. I would not expect most examples to be able to overclock this well. Luck of the draw and all that.
The performance improvement using the overclocked settings is not only noted in each benchmark test, but summarized in a table at the end of the benchmarking section.