D
Deleted member 174368
Guest
Recently got my XFX 6950 and decided to post a mini-review against a modestly overclocked 5850 (775/1050).
Other system specs:
-AMD Phenom II X3 720 @ 3.4 GHz
-4GB DDR3 Ram
Picked four games which I felt best represented modern games. F1 2010, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit, Metro 2033 and Amnesia.
All tests were done at 1920x1080 and max settings unless stated otherwise. Gameplay runs were done multiple times for consistency between results.
F1 2010
To start off, the 6950 disappointed me slightly in F1 2010, but here you can see a discrepancy between a canned benchmark and real gameplay:
While not a huge difference, in gameplay it did feel smoother than the 5850. If I were to go by the canned benchmark however, I’d say there was no difference.
Need for Speed Hot Pursuit
This game has some very pretty visuals, but unfortunately has no AA setting anywhere in the options. Forcing AA from the driver panel works, however.
Barely any improvement with 0xAA. Switching it up to 4xAA and it was much better. In fact, the 6950 did not lose any performance at all, compared to the 5850 which rendered 20% slower.
Metro 2033
I used the canned benchmark because this game uses a checkpoint system which makes benchmarking real gameplay quite tedious. Even so, it did paint the 6950 in an excellent fashion:
With Advanced Depth of Field enabled the game isn’t as playable as I’d like, but it still doubled the 5850’s framerate. With ADoF off, the results are the same, and an average of 40 is more than satisfactory.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Setting SSAO to 128 samples, while extremely good looking, is incredibly taxing on hardware. I expected some improvement, but the results below are shocking to say the least:
Echoing the Metro results, the 6950 literally doubled the 5850's FPS in this game and made this setting playable. It seems like in addition to Tessellation, SSAO was greatly improved with the 6900 series. I'm hoping we see more of Amnesia in hardware benchmarks.
I included the unlocked 6950 results (at 6950 clocks) to show that there is virtually zero performance improvement. I’m wondering if most of this performance increase people are reporting is due to higher overclocking limits, rather than unlocked shaders.
Going by the Metro 2033 and Amnesia results, it’s quite obvious that AMD did design the 6900 with the more taxing features in mind. On the other hand, it seems like buying AMD or Nvidia “based on the games you play” really does matter this time around. Regardless, next year (Crysis 2 and Witcher 2) will be quite interesting for the 6950 and the 6970.
Other system specs:
-AMD Phenom II X3 720 @ 3.4 GHz
-4GB DDR3 Ram
Picked four games which I felt best represented modern games. F1 2010, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit, Metro 2033 and Amnesia.
All tests were done at 1920x1080 and max settings unless stated otherwise. Gameplay runs were done multiple times for consistency between results.
F1 2010
To start off, the 6950 disappointed me slightly in F1 2010, but here you can see a discrepancy between a canned benchmark and real gameplay:
While not a huge difference, in gameplay it did feel smoother than the 5850. If I were to go by the canned benchmark however, I’d say there was no difference.
Need for Speed Hot Pursuit
This game has some very pretty visuals, but unfortunately has no AA setting anywhere in the options. Forcing AA from the driver panel works, however.
Barely any improvement with 0xAA. Switching it up to 4xAA and it was much better. In fact, the 6950 did not lose any performance at all, compared to the 5850 which rendered 20% slower.
Metro 2033
I used the canned benchmark because this game uses a checkpoint system which makes benchmarking real gameplay quite tedious. Even so, it did paint the 6950 in an excellent fashion:
With Advanced Depth of Field enabled the game isn’t as playable as I’d like, but it still doubled the 5850’s framerate. With ADoF off, the results are the same, and an average of 40 is more than satisfactory.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Setting SSAO to 128 samples, while extremely good looking, is incredibly taxing on hardware. I expected some improvement, but the results below are shocking to say the least:
Echoing the Metro results, the 6950 literally doubled the 5850's FPS in this game and made this setting playable. It seems like in addition to Tessellation, SSAO was greatly improved with the 6900 series. I'm hoping we see more of Amnesia in hardware benchmarks.
I included the unlocked 6950 results (at 6950 clocks) to show that there is virtually zero performance improvement. I’m wondering if most of this performance increase people are reporting is due to higher overclocking limits, rather than unlocked shaders.
Going by the Metro 2033 and Amnesia results, it’s quite obvious that AMD did design the 6900 with the more taxing features in mind. On the other hand, it seems like buying AMD or Nvidia “based on the games you play” really does matter this time around. Regardless, next year (Crysis 2 and Witcher 2) will be quite interesting for the 6950 and the 6970.