AMD 6970/6950 CFX and NVIDIA 580/570 SLI Review @ [H]

I understand that high resolutions will be important to some users, but certainly not all. Some of us may be interested to see what is the highest resolution obtainable with all the eye candy on. DoF was not even tried on Metro 2033 on any configuration. With this much power, it would have seemed to have been a great time to see how large an impact that setting is having. Maybe it is only 1680 x 1050, but then we would know. Since I game with one monitor, these reviews have very limited use for me. Thanks for reading.
 
any comparison between an older 5970 cfx setup vs 580 sli setup? is it even worth upgrading to either 6970 cfx or 580 sli from 5970 cfx?

thanks,
m

ps I do game on 3 monitors
 
Great article.

Essentially this is a flat out draw in terms of performance in three monitor gaming.

BUT........and this pains me a little, because I'm one of those people who has 580s in SLi.......when you throw down the money, AMD sure has the edge, and the 2GB of memory is just a good idea, period.

I was really gun-shy this time around due to my prior CF experience with the 5870 E6 cards.

My gripe with CF has always been scale and funky driver issues, looks like this time the AMD has it right.:D
 
These results are interesting but here is what I would like to see. Nvidia GTX 460's with 2GB of RAM compared to these guys. In most of the situations, it appears RAM problems effected performance in certain games. So what happens if you take 2 460's with 2GB of ram each ($219 last time I looked) and ran thos in SLI.
 
Rizen said:
SC2 will never support Eyefinity because it's a competitive game, I fear. Although they could just set it to disable that resolution in multiplayer, but I don't foresee that happening.
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I get that, and it doesn't bother me, but having a cursor that is corrupted after playing the game on one screen is annoying as all get out.
 
Thanks Kyle for this much needed review !

I'm currently running 3x24" on Q6600 @ 3.3 with 5870 1GB.
My 2600k upgrade rig is ordered and in the post, and I'm starting to think about that GPU upgrade.

I don't care that much for AA, I dont get to use it on many games at the moment with my single 1GB 5870.

I would have liked to see some no AA results as this is what most of us triple monitor players will eventually have to resort to to extend the life of their gaming rig's GPUs. I could see those F1 2010 results turn around in nvidia's favor if AA were to be disabled.
Could we have some 570 SLI results with no AA? I feel this setup could actually be more future proof than AMD's offering for players that wouldn't mind playing without AA.

I'd really like this to be the case as I'm growing extremely tired of the AMD drivers
 
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hasoos said:
So what happens if you take 2 460's with 2GB of ram each ($219 last time I looked) and ran thos in SLI.
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My guess is you have the ram to deal with the AA levels, however you lack the raw horsepower in the GPU to shove around that many pixels at playable framerates at those resolutions. If you scale down the resolutions, of course you will have something much more appealing.
 
orthetic said:
My guess is you have the ram to deal with the AA levels, however you lack the raw horsepower in the GPU to shove around that many pixels at playable framerates at those resolutions. If you scale down the resolutions, of course you will have something much more appealing.
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I wouldn't be so sure, my single 1GB 5870 is quite capable of pushing 5760 resolutions without AA. A pair of 460s leaves a 5870 in the dust so I think that would give pretty interesting results.
 
One of the reasons Civ 5 is not that limited by memory size is that the game used DX11 direct-compute to realtime compress textures in a way no other game I have heard of can.

It makes video ram less of a deciding factor in this game, but at the same time makes the game much more dependent upon having a fully DX11 capable system.
 
Perhaps this is a bit off topic, but the excellent review primed the question.

Personally I have a 5870 system in which I sometimes run Eyefinity (depending on the game, since I have had inconsistent results) but I am considering building a new system. I had a 3d (polarized) monitor for a couple of months this year before returning it (dead pixels center mass!), and really enjoyed the effect in games like Dragon Age and Torchlight. I am thinking that all of the games used for this evaluation would look great in full-on stereoscopic 3D.

Now, with AMD recently being 3d capable from the HDMI side (1.4 with 3rd party drivers), I feel that the next system I build will be focussed on 3d and utilize a 3d TV as a monitor. I am very interested to see how the cards from AMD and NVIDIA (3d vision) scale for 3d. I know it is a fledgeling market, and cutting edge, but this is the HARD OCP after all!!!

I am pretty sure that I am not the only gamer here who thinks that 46" of 3D goodness would be fantastic for the most recent games. Thanks Kyle - hope you give it some thought.
 
The unique paradox of the Nvidia cards is that they are more expensive while performing worse with more expensive configurations. That is the key.

Above 1200p, and using more than one card, their performance advantage diminishes over the comparable ATI products. That is just something that makes no sense when you're paying a premium; Nvidia cheaped out by using the same vRAM amount they did with their previous cards and by doing nothing to improve SLI scaling (which was already very good, but is now inferior to CF scaling because it remained the same while AMD's improved).

That's the reason I went ATI/AMD for the first time since the 9500 Pro (excluding laptops). The value of 6950 CF is simply unrivaled in high-end configs, with or without unlocked shaders.
 
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AMD 3D is not as good as nvidia 3D. I'll make that pretty plain. If you're a big 3D fan, you currently still need a geforce.
 
C0Y0TE said:
Perhaps this is a bit off topic, but the excellent review primed the question.

Personally I have a 5870 system in which I sometimes run Eyefinity (depending on the game, since I have had inconsistent results) but I am considering building a new system. I had a 3d (polarized) monitor for a couple of months this year before returning it (dead pixels center mass!), and really enjoyed the effect in games like Dragon Age and Torchlight. I am thinking that all of the games used for this evaluation would look great in full-on stereoscopic 3D.

Now, with AMD recently being 3d capable from the HDMI side (1.4 with 3rd party drivers), I feel that the next system I build will be focussed on 3d and utilize a 3d TV as a monitor. I am very interested to see how the cards from AMD and NVIDIA (3d vision) scale for 3d. I know it is a fledgeling market, and cutting edge, but this is the HARD OCP after all!!!

I am pretty sure that I am not the only gamer here who thinks that 46" of 3D goodness would be fantastic for the most recent games. Thanks Kyle - hope you give it some thought.
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What 3rd party drivers? I have a 3D TV (Samsung 58" Plasma) and was planning on trying a bit of 3d gaming with my 460 SLI setup before upgrading to 6950s. What do I need to do to make that happen? :)

Any info would be awesome.
 
The Bottom Line

It all comes down to pricing, and a pair of GeForce GTX 580 cards is going to cost you over $1000 right now. That is a lot of money.
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Comparatively speaking, no it is not. April 02, I paid $500 for a GF4 Ti 4800.

With that in mind, today' pricing is a bargain. As is the case w/all things PC, price/performance-wise, the further back in time you look, the more that is the case.

(my bad - make that a ti4800 - had to check the box, which I still have)
 
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jstnomega said:
Comparatively speaking, no it is not. April 02, I paid $500 for a GF4 Ti 4200.

With that in mind, today' pricing is a bargain. As is the case w/all things PC, price/performance-wise, the further back in time you look, the more that is the case.
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Wow, 500$ for the ti4200? How much was the ti4600 then?
 
tlbig10 said:
It'd be great to see what kind of settings you'd need in BC2 to show a minimum of 60fps for each setup.

Kyle - My suggestion for you is to just keep turning the eye candy down until you get the frame rate you need since image quality is not a priority.
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Perhaps you could satisfy those of us looking for more frames w/ a "this is what you need for 60FPS as a minimum when playing online" graph?

Jaggy lines drive me nuts as much as the next guy. And I do notice HBAO even in an online firefight. But low framerate will affect my aim and jostle my head a little.

It'd also be nice to see another CPU article...especially in Bad Company 2. Of course, that's a little selfish of me. Maybe I should do one for you guys. :D

I recently got a chance to play this game on a variety of systems @ a LAN party. What I found was that a Q9550/5870 overclocked plays this game the same as an i5 760/470 overclocked. That is, they were both able to keep minimum framerates pretty close to 60 w/ 4x AA, 2x TSAA, High Detail, and HBAO on @ 1680 x 1050.

In an i5 760/460, 2x TSAA and HBAO must be turned off in order to hit those frames. Pair that same 460 into a Phenom 3 or Q9550 and you've got a slideshow due to the GPU usage problem w/ Fermi's and older chips.

A CPU article showcasing these flaws or in the case of Cypress pairing wonderfully w/ a C2Q would save a lot of us some cash.

Anyway, thanks for the article! I bet it's amazing to see that much going on!
 
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jstnomega said:
Comparatively speaking, no it is not. April 02, I paid $500 for a GF4 Ti 4200.

With that in mind, today' pricing is a bargain. As is the case w/all things PC, price/performance-wise, the further back in time you look, the more that is the case.
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Think considering the times and the also the competition you would have to be slightly silly not to think $1000 is a lot of money.
 
Great review. Best in the bizz IMO.
How about one more level to the apples to apples: Match price!
I know that it isn't as simple as all that to throw a third GFX card in the mix, but I would have love to see a 3x6970(which is just over the cost of 2x580's) or 3x6950's which are under :D
 
So, what I take from this is, the 580 SLI great architecture compromised by lack of memory, and the 6970 Xfire great ram compromised by poor architecture, and neither solution has enough grunt to power stereoscopic 3D in surround resolutions with all the eye candy. Mind you, I'm not interested in wearing glasses or looking through a Victorian leaded glass window to game. So why weren't there any big announcements for bezelless or thin bezel monitors at CES?
 
Redsnake77 said:
So, what I take from this is, the 580 SLI great architecture compromised by lack of memory, and the 6970 Xfire great ram compromised by poor architecture, and neither solution has enough grunt to power stereoscopic 3D in surround resolutions with all the eye candy. Mind you, I'm not interested in wearing glasses or looking through a Victorian leaded glass window to game. So why weren't there any big announcements for bezelless or thin bezel monitors at CES?
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How do you figure the 6900 series has a poor architecture? The 6970 in CrossFire costs a quite a bit less and performs comparable, that's a win in my book. It'd only be a poor architecture if the cards couldn't take advantage of that 2GB VRAM. Obviously that's not the case.
 
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Thanks for the excellent review Brent.

Is there any chance of you doing a review of triple monitors on 1 video card?

I would be really interested which cards you think are playable with the quality turned down a bit.
I think the 6900s are fine with AA turned off but wonder if the 5700s would even be playable, with the the quality settings turned way down.
Would you prefer to game on a single monitor with the graphics maxed, or triple monitors with reduced visual settings?
 
Heh, now that the forums are back up I can chime in.

Another great review guys. I can't imagine the amount of work that was spent getting this review ready on a total of 4 combinations of video cards. I am glad to see that CFX scaling has seen such a significant performance boost, that makes it so competitive when factoring the bargain these 6900 series video cards are.

I am also glad to see that having 2gigs of VRAM is not a waste after all as you guys demondstrated. I originally thought that 2 gigs was overkill and wondered why ATI never offered an intermediate solution with something between 1 and 2. Now if only I can find a way to set up an Eyefinity 3 setup, as I don't have enough desk space to get 3 monitors on it.............
 
If you get in quickly with the 6950s as well, you can do a simple (and unworrying) bios mod to unlock the extra shaders with a modified 6950 bios or flash to a 6970, which has the same effect and overclocks.

I personally chose to just unlock the extra shaders, as the memory overclock by flashing to a 6970 wasn't stable, but it's a pleasant improvement. It's sort of like a 6960 now lol!
 
anthrex said:
Man you got screwed over lol. I remember cause i was always checking pricewatch in those days. Don't think i ever saw them over $250. The TI 4600 retailed for like $370-400
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previous post corrected - that was for a ti4800
 
Excellent review. AMD does have an amazing value in surround gaming with their new 6900 cards. It was a major mistake for nviidia to release the GTX 570 with such little ram and I said this before it launched. Anyhow It seems like the only choices for surround gaming with high levels of IQ are 6950 crossfire, (unlocked FTW) 6970 Crossfire, or GTX 580 SLi. I couldn't imagine even considering GTX 570SLi for surround gaming. Between these results and those done by Vega in his thread it looks like 580 SLi is a win due to performance at times but a loss due to price, and 6970 Crossfire X is a win due to performance because of vram and price, and a loss because of driver issues and annoyances.

What to do..
 
Great review.

And everywhere I go, I still read the same ''580 SLI is the king'', and that the 6970 Crossfire scaling is ''not good'', and blah blah blah. And in almost every thread from people asking ''6970 Crossfire or 580SLI'', people are always pushing the 580 SLI.

Why? People can't count? People can't read? 300-400$ MORE for LESS video memory? And people are still telling those people to go with 580 SLI over 6970 Crossfire if they want ''the best''?

I really don't understand...



Unbelievable.
 
Jodiuh said:
Yes, a major mistake for the 1% of gamers using 3 monitors.
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Not just about 3 monitors (though definitely more than 1% of gamers *who would buy 580* are interested in 3 monitors). [H] probably doesn't have the time or resources to run these tests, but the vRAM advantage also helps out when you're dealing with older games and console ports and applying supersample AA and possibly the adaptive AA.

I bet you can ramp up with the SSAA with much better framerates on the AMD cards. I am getting almost twice the framerates of my 470s using the unlocked 6950s at 1600p when I enable supersampling.
 
Id like to point out with a 3007 on display port and a 3007 on DVI I am not having any screen tearing issues at all.
 
Looks like I will be forking out money hand over fist for a Nvidia... given all these AAF stuff I keep reading about on this forum.

Lulz.
 
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A great write up but it still doesn't budge me from wanting to get two GTX 580's. If you have the money, it's well worth the huge performance advantage it has in some titles. The AMD cards are no slackers in there own right but I rather have the superior part rather than the value one. Just waiting for the MSI lightning models to drop.
 
You forgot a review ... 6950 crossfire that are bios upgraded to 6970 crossfire.
 
Rizen said:
According to the most recent poll on this forum, more people here play on 3 screens than at 2560x1600 OR 1680x1050.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1573202
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To be fair, a poll taken on [H] is not an accurate statistical measuring stick for the entire game-o-sphere. Too many "Hard" folks around these parts.

I would love to jump into multi-monitor setup myself but I cannot justify the cost of getting into it just yet. Plus I want the tech to mature so we're not seeing some of the issues with drivers and game settings.
 
hdnut said:
To be fair, a poll taken on [H] is not an accurate statistical measuring stick for the entire game-o-sphere. Too many "Hard" folks around these parts.

I would love to jump into multi-monitor setup myself but I cannot justify the cost of getting into it just yet. Plus I want the tech to mature so we're not seeing some of the issues with drivers and game settings.
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To be fair, the average gamer isn't going to buy a 570 at $300+ either. The majority of gamers aren't represented by this forum in general. The point was made that the 570 is a bit vRAM limited at multi-monitor gaming - trying to refute that by saying that "1% of gamers play on multi-monitors" is silly - what % of gamers are even going to own a 570 anyways? I would expect to see NVIDIA launch both of their top end GPUs with 2GB next round, honestly.
 
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