AMD Radeon HD 6970 & 6950 Debut: Enter Cayman
Test Setup & Unigine Heaven v2.1
How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the graphics cards in this article on a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 motherboard powered by a Core i7 980X six-core processor and 6GB of OCZ DDR3-1333 RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the system BIOS and set all values to their "optimized" or "high performance" default settings. Then we manually configured the memory timings (DDR3-1333, CAS 7) and disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The hard drive was then formatted and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the installation was complete we fully updated the OS and installed the latest DirectX redist, along with the necessary drivers, games, and benchmark applications.
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Hardware Used: |
Relevant Software: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 DirectX Nov. 2010 Redist ATI Catalyst v10.11b NVIDIA GeForce Drivers 263.09 Benchmarks Used: Unigine Heaven v2.1 Futuremark 3DMark11 FarCry 2 Just Cause 2 Alien vs. Predator Metro 2033 Lost Planet 2 F1 2010* * - Custom benchmark |
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The Unigine Heaven Benchmark v2.0 is built around the Unigine game engine. Unigine is a cross-platform real-time 3D engine, with support for DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11 and OpenGL. The Heaven benchmark--when run in DX11 mode--also makes comprehensive use of tessellation technology and advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion), and it also features volumetric cumulonimbus clouds generated by a physically accurate algorithm and a dynamic sky with light scattering. |
The new Radeon HD 6970 and 6950 are a huge step up over the Radeon HD 5870 in terms of performance according to the Unigine benchmark; the 6970 even manages to outpace the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970 here. NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 500 series cards have an advantage, however, at the extreme settings we used to test. Geometry processing was a big focus for NVIDIA with Fermi and it shows in this test.
