AMD Radeon HD 6970 and 6950 Video Card Review @ [H]

The winners of the graphics card war are clearly you, me, and every other consumer.

You just can't go wrong at any price point with AMD or Nvidia right now.
 
After reading more reviews I canceled my order. Might just sit this GPU gen out, nothing is extremely compelling from the 5970, except tri fire or 3 way SLI.
 
Thanks for the review. Makes me kind of wish I had waited on the 6870 purchase, but such is the way the game works.
 
Well I guess im sending my 580 GTX back for a couple of 6970's.

ALOT cheaper to crossfire these 2 then 2 580 gtx's
 
DASHlT said:
Well I guess im sending my 580 GTX back for a couple of 6970's.

ALOT cheaper to crossfire these 2 then 2 580 gtx's
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Screw that, CrossFire the 6950s and you still kill the 580.

Edit: Would you really get SLI 580s for 1080p?
 
Very nice review, gentlemen. In the Mafia 2 comparison, it's mentioned that APEX physics is not supported by AMD. Is this limitation noticeable and does it provide a less-immersive gaming experience? I'm considering a major gaming rig refresh and am now torn between the 6950 and 570, mainly due to the APEX consideration. I'm only going to run a single GPU at 1920x1200 resolution, at least for the foreseeable future.
 
Well, I guess I'm either going HD6950 or GTX570, now. The GTX580 is a bit out of reach, and the HD6970 is a bit out of reach, too :(
 
Terry Olaes said:
Very nice review, gentlemen. In the Mafia 2 comparison, it's mentioned that APEX physics is not supported by AMD. Is this limitation noticeable and does it provide a less-immersive gaming experience? I'm considering a major gaming rig refresh and am now torn between the 6950 and 570, mainly due to the APEX consideration. I'm only going to run a single GPU at 1920x1200 resolution, at least for the foreseeable future.
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For the $100 price diff. between 6950 CF and 570 SLI you could pick up a GTX 460 768MB, or a GTS 450 and still spend around the same.
 
Lord_Exodia said:
Great review [H] my take aways after reading this and 2 others so far is the 6950 is a real winner. Especially at higher resolutions, even a pair seem enticing. The 6970 on the other hand is a bit of a disappointment to me. It loses to GTX 580 and falls in this odd spot.
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This is a strange community.
I'm reading other forums, and it seems like a total exodus from ATI. People cancelling 6970's, it's pretty much a trophy being handed to the 570.

But...
Here on [H] it's like the exact opposite. People praising the 6950 and 6970, etc. I feel like I have no idea what's going on.

I'm literally seeing two COMPLETELY opposite reactions on different websites.
 
For 260 Euros that's a bit rich for my blood. I think I'll settle for a 6870 instead for 200 and buy a CPU cooler with the cash I saved.

Besides, at that price point I'd like to get 10K PPD in F@H.
 
UtopiA said:
This is a strange community.
I'm reading other forums, and it seems like a total exodus from ATI. People cancelling 6970's, it's pretty much a trophy being handed to the 570.

But...
Here on [H] it's like the exact opposite. People praising the 6950 and 6970, etc. I feel like I have no idea what's going on.

I'm literally seeing two COMPLETELY opposite reactions on different websites.
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++++1

Results are all over the place from site to site. The yo-yo performance of the cards is weird.
Drivers, drivers, drivers. Need to see consistency. X% ahead then X% behind.
 
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Caught something very interesting if your planning on going multi card with the 6900 series

Where we were a little disappointed was the cooler design. In single card mode the cooler works well, even if the 6970 does get a little hot and runs louder than the GTX 570. Add a second or third card in CrossFire mode on the average board and things dont go so well though. The box shape design of the 6900s means that on motherboards where there is no extra space between PCIe slots (most boards) the two/three cards sit so close that airflow is affected and on the 6900 series this significantly impacts thermal and acoustic performance. A GeForce style slant on the end of the card would have resolved this issue and revised models with alternate cannot come fast enough for us, at least for multi-GPU configurations. Check out the noise videos on the previous page to see what we mean.
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Source

http://www.hardwareheaven.com/revie...eon-6950-graphics-card-review-conclusion.html

From that same review eyefinity vs surround is where these cards truly shine. Matching and mostly beating GTX 500 series for Less money :eek:

Overclocking seems disappointing so far, although limited by the max ccc can offer the clocks go up quite a bit, but performance barely improves. That's after a few reviews. I'll be reading more. brb :)
 
Either these will go up in price in the coming weeks, or (better) I'm hoping Nvidia's offerings will come down. As it stands today, looks to me like one can grab a 6970 for 570 money, so it's a no brainer.

Also, I imagine some companies coming out with "enhanced" bios on the second bios flash... now that would be cool, flick a switch and instant performance boost/voltages/etc. Nice way for the manufacturers to be creative and still be "legal"... hopefully we'll see this.
 
UtopiA said:
This is a strange community.
I'm reading other forums, and it seems like a total exodus from ATI. People cancelling 6970's, it's pretty much a trophy being handed to the 570.

But...
Here on [H] it's like the exact opposite. People praising the 6950 and 6970, etc. I feel like I have no idea what's going on.

I'm literally seeing two COMPLETELY opposite reactions on different websites.
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I think the big reason for the reaction in the other forums, is basically related with the tiny performance increase Cayman has over Cypress. It has better tessellation performance (finally), but overall it's barely faster and for a new architecture, that's quite disappointing.

Someone in this forum called the performance increase from GTX 480 to GTX 580 "pathetic". I wonder what's the word used for the performance jump from Cypress to Cayman...

Also, good review [H]
 
"Someone in this forum called the performance increase from GTX 480 to GTX 580 "pathetic". I wonder what's the word used for the performance jump from Cypress to Cayman..."

Pathetic is a good word.
 
eastmen said:
your on hardocp . If you look at hardocp it trades blows with the 580 in the games tested. Sometiems it looses and sometimes it wins.

It costs $150 less and uses 238w vs 326w and will most likely close the performance gap with new drivers.

I don't see whats not to like. It may not be a huge upgrade for those who bought 58x0 parts last year or those who bought gtx 4x0 parts. But it is a good performance upgrade for those who want it .

Remember there was no process shrink. We wont get that till at least the end of 2011 and so this is how the performance picture will stand for the rest of next year.
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I'm on hardocp. Yes. In some of the [H] reviews, it is capable of trading blows with the 580, in a couple of games, at extreme resolutions. Go and read 5 or 10 reviews elsewhere as well. The 6970 ranges from marginal increase over a 5870 to keeping up with the GTX 580, but it also suffers from drastic performance discrepancies that make it get shat all over by nvidia offerings. And the nvidia offerings currently have no such discrepancies.
 
You seem to glance over the fact that it costs $140 LESS then a 580, which is almost 40%.
 
UtopiA said:
This is a strange community.
I'm reading other forums, and it seems like a total exodus from ATI. People cancelling 6970's, it's pretty much a trophy being handed to the 570.

But...
Here on [H] it's like the exact opposite. People praising the 6950 and 6970, etc. I feel like I have no idea what's going on.

I'm literally seeing two COMPLETELY opposite reactions on different websites.
Click to expand...

Some of it might be that HardOCP focuses more on the truly hardcore gamer and focuses on 2560x res while there are still many people using 1920x1200 (or even less in some cases) and it seems like the AMD chips tend to get a bit of a boost compared to the 570 once you get above 1920x1200, they do have a lot more bandwidth. Some might be choice of games since the results do bounce all over radical in a few cases.

I have a feeling the AMD are a better buy if you do 26"+ monitor or tri-screen gaming. And if you are willing to go dual-card the 6950 CF seems like it may give exceptional results for the price no matter what res you game at.

OTOH, I'm doing single 1920x1200 and I can effectively get a 570 for $331 shipped (since it comes with a $20 thing I was gonna get anyway) plus I really want to get into doing some CUDA coding and I also run a lot of Premiere Pro CS5 (which at the moment uses CUDA only for effects accel) so I'm almost certain I will stick with the 570 order (and i could swear dark skin tones looked different and weirder on the one AMD card I tried with blu-ray, not sure why either maker should mess with the default video output colors but it seems like there were some differences).

The 6970 really doesn't seem to give anything too much on average at 1920x1200 (if you believe other sites and temper HardOCP results a bit knowing the AMD scale much better at really hires), wins some games, loses some, wins some effects computations and loses others at my resolution and even if it ends up doing a bit better in comparison to the 570 than I think and matches a bit closer to HardOCP's 2560x results it would still be tough to give up CUDA (and it is $40 more, for me) I'd need a rather definitive win from it which I don't think it will deliver in my situation.
 
legionhardware

Given that the Radeon HD 6970 is a better match for the GeForce GTX 570 rather than the mighty GTX 580, the pricing has been set accordingly.
 
Good review but it seems like I'll be sticking with the GTX 580 if I decide to buy them this month. May wait a little longer for some more optimized drivers from AMD. Should see some decent boost over time.
 
alienate said:
Why don't you just spit it out already and say Kyle's review is inaccurate? The card is not getting "shat" on at any resolution that matters. Unless your eye can distinguish between 60 and 70 frames, that is.
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Well people are ignoring the fact that the [H] review is using Physx where applicable in there test which everyone knows delivers a performance hit on the Nvidia parts. So the numbers look a lot closer for some of the test than it would really be if the Physx was disabled. For a more apples to apples comparison to the AMD parts that can't use Physx. There could be some confusion there.
 
SonicTron said:
I'm on hardocp. Yes. In some of the [H] reviews, it is capable of trading blows with the 580, in a couple of games, at extreme resolutions. Go and read 5 or 10 reviews elsewhere as well. The 6970 ranges from marginal increase over a 5870 to keeping up with the GTX 580, but it also suffers from drastic performance discrepancies that make it get shat all over by nvidia offerings. And the nvidia offerings currently have no such discrepancies.
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TechPowerup does not assert your claim.

Given that the 6970 has 768MB more RAM, dominates as the number of pixels go up, and has MGPU scaling that kicks SLI in the face, you're throwing a fit over nothing. If you are going to spend > $300 on a GPU, you had better have a display or three capable of harnessing it. People running 1920 x 1200 or less don't even need a GPU this fast for you to complain about low res.

Anand also shows that CrossFire scaling is amazing. and that there is no irregularity in performance.

SonicTron said:
His review isn't inaccurate, but it does cater mostly to the super-highend and the depth of the reviews limits the number of titles they do per review.

I would consider 1080p/1200p resolutions that matter, by the way.

6970 is comparatively performing very poorly at that resolution in a number of DX11 titles.
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These are high-end GPUs. You shouldn't be using a >= $300 GPU to play on a $150 monitor.

SonicTron said:
20-30% lower performance than a 580 in many. I would say that is getting shat on.
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TPU shows that at 1920 x 1200 the overall performance difference is 15%. Please go and pay 40% more for a GPU that performs 15% better and has 25% less RAM. One more thing, the superiority of the 580 over the 6970 @ 1920 x 1200 doesn't matter. LOL @ using a $500 GPU with a $250 monitor.
 
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Hard's review is Teh Awesome, however after reading several reviews some even using real world performance the 6950 vs GTX 570 results are different. Most other sites show the GTX 570 beating the 6950 most of the time even with the Cat 10.12 which does little to nothing for performance on Cayman. It is what it is though, sometimes real world results vary. Different systems, reviewers, run throughs etc..

What I would like to see is [H] mention in the review what setting for the filtering quality is used. It's known they use High Quality and the gang has even told me in the past via PM that they use High quality but new readers to the site may want to know too.
 
Not bad AMD, not bad at all. (Coming from an nVidia fanboy)
Performance will no doubt increase when they release another 20 rev of drivers/profiles for them as well.
 
Shocked on the performance increase being much less than expected, but the pricing is fantastic.

I'd be seriously considering a 6950 if I didnt have this nagging fear about AMD drivers.

Maybe we'll see a reactionary drop in 570 pricing, I'd be mighty tempted to get one at $300.
 
I would consider 1080p/1200p resolutions that matter, by the way.
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I've been using monitors with higher resolutions than that since 1998. I fail to see why resolutions that weren't cutting edge 12 years ago are all that "matter".
 
exlink said:
Can't decide if I should upgrade from my 5870 1GB to a 6970 2GB for 4320x900 eyefinity...
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Sounds like a no-brainer if Eyefinity is your thing. 20% speed improvement and 2GB? Eyefinity always needs more memory, especially if you're bumping up some AA levels.
 
SonicTron said:
His review isn't inaccurate, but it does cater mostly to the super-highend and the depth of the reviews limits the number of titles they do per review.

I would consider 1080p/1200p resolutions that matter, by the way.

6970 is comparatively performing very poorly at that resolution in a number of DX11 titles. 20-30% lower performance than a 580 in many. I would say that is getting shat on.
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although oddly at techpowerup the 6970 looks really good at 1920x1200 compared to 570 even with dirt 2 which is surprising and their results match hardocp's more, i think they used 16AA and the other sites 4-8x so maybe that's it??
EDIT: it's way late and I read that all wrong, they actually had DX11 turned off for Dirt2 and only 4x AA hah
 
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XacTactX said:
TechPowerup does not assert your claim.

Given that the 6970 has 768MB more RAM, dominates as the number of pixels go up, and has MGPU scaling that kicks SLI in the face, you're throwing a fit over nothing. If you are going to spend > $300 on a GPU, you had better have a display or three capable of harnessing it. People running 1920 x 1200 or less don't even need a GPU this fast for you to complain about low res.

Anand also shows that CrossFire scaling is amazing. and that there is no irregularity in performance.



These are high-end GPUs. You shouldn't be using a >= $300 GPU to play on a $150 monitor.



TPU shows that at 1920 x 1200 the overall performance difference is 15%. Please go and pay 40% more for a GPU that performs 15% better and has 25% less RAM.
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There are a number of games that struggle for smooth frame rates with lesser cards than say a HD6850 in 1080P with Max detail. Just Cause 2, Crysis, Metro just to name a few off the top of my head. These cards are certainly not "just" for Multi displays and very high res.

Most reviews are putting the 6970 in line with the GTX570 only and that's beyond just canned chart scores. [H] seems to be standing out on there own on this one.
 
Ultima99 said:
Shocked on the performance increase being much less than expected, but the pricing is fantastic.

I'd be seriously considering a 6950 if I didnt have this nagging fear about AMD drivers.

Maybe we'll see a reactionary drop in 570 pricing, I'd be mighty tempted to get one at $300.
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thats because we were basing our opinion on fud that there was going to be 19xx SP's. when in fact thats exactly what it was, a bunch of useless fud. so for what it ended up being the performance is about right. we just had way to high of expectations for something AMD didnt even produce.

monitorrat said:
just for the record my 1920x1200 monitor cost $940 ;)
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really? im looking at a 500 dollar 1920x1200 monitor right now and this was bought 4 years ago.

wonder where the hell your shopping.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
really? im looking at a 500 dollar 1920x1200 monitor right now and this was bought 4 years ago.

wonder where the hell your shopping.
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B&H :D

I'm not a pure a gamer. I even more into photography.
NEC PA241W 1920x1200 wide gamut, 14bit 3D LUT, perfect sRGB emulation along with generally wider than AdobeRGB mative gamut, instant switching between tonal response curves, etc.

Anyway as I said I am not a hardcore gamers but a jack of all trades really: games, gfx demos, high-bitrate HD video editing, photography, scientific computing, 3D rendering.
 
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sirmonkey1985 said:
really? im looking at a 500 dollar 1920x1200 monitor right now and this was bought 4 years ago.

wonder where the hell your shopping.
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There are different panel types.

Your typical gaming/consumer monitor is going to have a TFT panel (bad color range but very fast refresh, good for gaming).

People who need to do photography (or need high-quality color reproduction for other reasons) use IPS and PVA panels. These are expensive. Very much so. :p

EDIT: Here is one example (NEC MultiSync LCD2190UXp-BK).

It's a 20" monitor that costs $850. A gamer simply doesn't need something like this, but other users do. The price doesn't mean that you are getting "ripped off."
 
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I wonder how Nvidia is feeling right now? AMD has been really killing on the price and performance since the 4xxx series. I want the 6970 so bad but just got the 5870 3 months ago...
 
Heh so it looks like biggest improvement in new AMD architecture actually comes from 2 GB of RAM.

Anyway 6950 seems like great card for 30" owners
 
Battleneter2 said:
There are a number of games that struggle for smooth frame rates with lesser cards than say a HD6850 in 1080P with Max detail. Just Cause 2, Crysis, Metro just to name a few off the top of my head. These cards are certainly not "just" for Multi displays and very high res.
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I agree. Playing 1080P with a monitor that can be had for $150-200 using a midrange GPU around $180 like the 6850 or 460 makes great sense.

It makes no sense to spend almost twice as much on the GPU(6970), keep the same $150-200 monitor, then complain that another GPU that is $140 more expensive is faster, when you have spent three times as much on graphics(GTX 580) as on the 1080P display.

That is something like buying an expensive luxury car and then going to McDonald's and buying from the dollar menu.

EDIT: Just to clarify, I don't have a bone to pick, I just want to put it in perspective, that's why I replied with this post after I already cleared this up.
 
I must say I am getting excited by the CF 5970 in EF results that are about. If [H] can confirm them and say that the stutteryness is at an end then I am off to blow 1500$

$NZ that is ;)
 
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