Radeon HD 6970 And 6950 Review: Is Cayman A Gator Or A Crock?

[mdsiu]

[citation][nom]microterf[/nom]Why drop the 580 when it comes to the multi-gpu scaling??[/citation]

They cost $500+ and SLI is overkill

 

[17seconds]

The moral of the story, hype sets unrealistic expectations (AMD) and ultimately creates disappointment; while quietly releasing a great product (Nvidia) makes people pleasantly surprised.

 

[robwright]

[citation][nom]matto17secs[/nom]The moral of the story, hype sets unrealistic expectations (AMD) and ultimately creates disappointment; while quietly releasing a great product (Nvidia) makes people pleasantly surprised.[/citation]

Wow, I never thought I'd read "quietly releasing a great product" and Nvidia in the same sentence, especially after the hot mess that was the GTX 480...

 

[megamanx00]

This is pretty much what I was expecting except that I expected a little more out of the 6970. It's clear to me that AMD wasn't ready for the 580 when they were making the 6900 series cards as it seems it was aimed to dethrone the 480. Thanks to its simpler design I think AMD can sell the 6900 series cards for less than nVidias 500 series cards and still make money. I'm not about to ditch my two 5870s though ^_^. It's going to be at least a year before I replace my GPUs.

 

[Guest]

erm nVidia was only able to maintain the performance by scaling the die size to make up for the lack of die shrink, AMD took a more creative route and optimized, sacrificing silicone count to maintain original planned die size yet still came close to comparable nVidia products performance wise

this would explain the fluffed naming convention, had the 32nm happened, then chances are the 6xxxx would have comparable performance to their respective 5xxxx counter parts

personally i think this could well mean AMD has significantly more performance headroom when the die shrink does happen, there is only so much silicone real estate nVidia can add before it becomes unpractical, simply put, if AMD became desperate for the performance crown they can easily just fill out the difference in silicone real estate and probably trump nVidia, maybe AMD is leaving the ball in nVidia's court to see what their next move is

 

[coldmast]

"and the Radeon HD 6950 traces very close to the Radeon HD 5780."
typo on the "Power Consumption And Noise" page

Great article

 

[Lutfij]

yeah, the only good thing i see from the 6xxx coming out is the price drop of the 58xx...so here's hoping!

stilll not impressed by the 6xxx...to feel that way i'm not going to look towards the 6990...unless its cheaper than what the 6970 costs now.

 

[buzznut]

Doesn't change much, except now the GTX 460 1GB and HD 6850 are still the best values available now especially if one wants to crossfire/sli down the road.

 

[evga_fan]

Just ran down a couple of numbers from this article and found somewhat interesting results. So, here's what I did:

The graphiccards are benchmarked in six game-titles in this article (let's disregard the numbers from SLI/CF sections). I took the AVERAGE FPS SCORE in all three resolutions in all titles for the 480, 580 and 6970 and added them together. I then took the average of the total sum for each card.

I found that:
580 avg score: 72.75 fps
480 avg score: 62.01 fps
6970avg score: 58.83 fps

Now, while these results only represents just a few gaming titles, the numbers suggest that the 580 is ~10 fps faster than the 480 while 480 is ~3 fps faster than the 6970! I'm not debating price-to-performance ratios here. Just the fact that in these titles on these resolutions, these are the outcomes. Take the numbers how you want...

 

[Guest]

I dont know about you guys,but i paid over 400 bucks last year for my 5870. In all honesty a cpu upgrade will benefit my system more this round.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]youssef 2010[/nom]This is an obvious mistake since the 6970s are priced at $369.99 and the 6950s are priced at $299.99 according to newegg.Also 2 6850 can be bought for as low as $3606950s: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] eo%20Cards6970s: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 70&x=0&y=0ATI's new cards show impressive scaling(Crossfire is better than SLI at laong last)but we are, as usual, waiting for the dual-GPU board to trump the 580 before the cycle starts all over again. Man, they never run out of new ideas, do they?BTW, this is a great launch article, thank you, toms[/citation]

Fixed--it was the number that was off.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]Zark Strife[/nom]Does anyone know what version of the GTX460 they are using? I know its a zotac 1gb. Are the clocks at ref? A 460 @ ref clocks is almost pointless. I know the 6850's CF slightly edges out the gtx460's in SLI but the 460 is a superb OC card. So what im really asking is that once OC is applied will the 2x 460's eat the 2x 6850's alive?[/citation]

These are reference clocked boards, and we're using the lowest price available. Buying higher-clocked cards will also increase cost

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]coldmast[/nom]"and the Radeon HD 6950 traces very close to the Radeon HD 5780."typo on the "Power Consumption And Noise" pageGreat article[/citation]

Thank you, fixed!!

 

[rafalw]

I was hoping for something more convincing from AMD.
Coming from 5850 and some ATI (AMD) drivers and stability problems I am a bit torn between 570 and 580 at this moment and these two cards did not make me rethink this choice. If only 570 had a bit more RAM on board like these two 6900 do.
I game in 1920x1200 so a bit over 1GB should be enough but if I'd get a 3D setup I guess it could be not enough.

 

[buzznut]

Hey Chris-
We are used to using FPS (and benchmarks) as a means to compare how powerful or fast a graphics card is. But I rarely hear about image quality, or how the games look or feel. You touched on that regarding the tesselation.

What do you think of these less quantitative but still important qualities? Do you ever run some bluray tests, and do you use multimonitors for testing?

 

[f-14]

good article Chris, pretty much everything we asked for! i'd say if you put a price tag on that great system component choice minus the video card(s)i'd have nothing left to wonder about {because i'm too lazy to jump to newegg and search it out }
the 460's SLI'd makes me wish Nvidia would surprise the he..ck out of us with another continuation of 3DFX's dual gpu cards!

 

[rohitbaran]

[citation][nom]evga_fan[/nom]Just ran down a couple of numbers from this article and found somewhat interesting results. So, here's what I did:The graphiccards are benchmarked in six game-titles in this article (let's disregard the numbers from SLI/CF sections). I took the AVERAGE FPS SCORE in all three resolutions in all titles for the 480, 580 and 6970 and added them together. I then took the average of the total sum for each card.I found that:580 avg score: 72.75 fps480 avg score: 62.01 fps6970avg score: 58.83 fpsNow, while these results only represents just a few gaming titles, the numbers suggest that the 580 is ~10 fps faster than the 480 while 480 is ~3 fps faster than the 6970! I'm not debating price-to-performance ratios here. Just the fact that in these titles on these resolutions, these are the outcomes. Take the numbers how you want...[/citation]
That is crap. It includes some games that just too much faster on Nvidia GPUs, I mean they are what the skew is all about. Include games in your calculation that don't give any brand of card any skewed performance gain and then see. The result will be much different.

 

[rohitbaran]

[citation][nom]Lutfij[/nom]to feel that way i'm not going to look towards the 6990...unless its cheaper than what the 6970 costs now.[/citation]
Not gonna happen.

 

[Anik8]

I just can't realize why many people here blaming unavailability of 32nm process over the 6970's low performance,few days ago we heard the GTX 580 may come out with 32nm with substantial improvements but the same disappointment occurred with nvidia too...!

 

[orgatyrant]

I'm actually a bit disappointed that there weren't any heat comparisons. It's one of the things I specifically look at seeing as it gets quite warm in summer down under

 

[marraco]

The count of stream processors is missleading. Nvidia cards coung by group of 4, meanwhile AMD cards are counted individually. So for comparisons purposes, the GTX 580 should have 2048 processors.

Nonetheless, one on each 5 processors on the AMD 5870 is not a fully programmable processor, so his count should be 4/5 (1280 processors).

That makes more understandable the comparison table against performance.

 

[badaxe2]

That's too bad. Looks like Nvidia takes the crown for a while. I thought after the very power efficient 6870 (which I plan on getting) that AMD would release a powerhouse. Back to the drawing board I guess.

 

[badaxe2]

On another note, I was surprised to see how unoptimized Metro 2033 is. Its minimum fps remind me of the Crysis CPU benchmark's min, and its average is around the minimum of most other games.

 

[robochump]

AMD should have at least warned consumers about the naming changes. Many consumers will assume the 6970 is a dual GPU since it appears to be a step up from the 5970. Very weird but now it is the 6990 to be the dual GPU and the one I am waiting for =) Also the 6800 series will become what Vista is to MS, forgotten quickly! I am all for improving efficiency but not at the expense of performance, in this case 6800s under performing to 5800s.

 

[CSA_Myth]

The saddest part of this is everyone wants to point to reasons why the 6970 is not what anyone expected. It is what AMD felt was needed and they made it. It's not a 580 destroyer, well when AMD spun this turkey up there was no GTX 580. So give props to Nvidia for finally fixing the 480 and getting a better card out there.

Competition is a good thing for consumers (not necessarily fanboi's), both the 6970 and 6950 sit in a good price range for their performance and with the competition it may look even better once the prices settle.

But honestly AMD planned all along to release the 6990 to grab the fastest title with that. As far as the lack of this generation (NV and AMD) not blowing out the previous ones, points to this was a tock in the tick tock process. With out the die shrink there is only so much performance that can be made with improvements vs redesign.

Got a last gen card double up for better performance, got an older card upgrade to your price range, going to cry about what might have been well Nvidia and AMD will hit you up next round.