| PowerColor PCS+ HD6950 Vortex II |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Video Cards | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Written by David Ramsey | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sunday, 22 May 2011 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Page 9 of 17
DX11: 3DMark 11FutureMark 3DMark11 is the latest addition the 3DMark benchmark series built by FutureMark Corporation. 3DMark11 is a PC benchmark suite designed to test the DirectX-11 graphics card performance without vendor preference. Although 3DMark11 includes the unbiased Bullet Open Source Physics Library instead of NVIDIA PhysX for the CPU/Physics tests, Benchmark Reviews concentrates on the four graphics-only tests in 3DMark11 and uses them with medium-level 'Performance' presets. The 'Performance' level setting applies 1x multi-sample anti-aliasing and trilinear texture filtering to a 1280x720p resolution. The tessellation detail, when called upon by a test, is preset to level 5, with a maximum tessellation factor of 10. The shadow map size is limited to 5 and the shadow cascade count is set to 4, while the surface shadow sample count is at the maximum value of 16. Ambient occlusion is enabled, and preset to a quality level of 5. 3DMark 11's four graphics tests take the user through two underwater and two jungle scenarios. The underwater scenes (GT1 and GT2) do not use tessellation, but the jungle scenes (GT3 and GT4) do.
The AMD Radeons jump back into the lead on this test, and the overall ranking of these cards is similar to what we saw in the 3DMark Vantage tests. The Radeon HD6850 comes very close to the scores of the GTX 560, while the HD6590 dominates even when not overclocked. 
The card rankings remain the same as in the first two tests, with the PowerColor Radeon PCS+ HD6950 continuing to dominate.
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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.