AMD Radeon HD 6970 & 6950 Debut: Enter Cayman

Name: AMD Radeon HD 6970 & 6950 Debut: Enter Cayman - Page 6
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, December 15, 2010, 12:00 AM EDT

Futuremark 3DMark11

Synthetic DirectX Gaming

Futuremark 3DMark11

The latest version of Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark11, is specifically bound to Windows Vista and 7-based systems because it uses the advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 11, which isn't available on previous versions of Windows. 3DMark11 isn't simply a port of 3DMark Vantage to DirectX 11, though. With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated four new graphics tests, a physics tests, and a new combined test. We tested the graphics cards here with 3DMark11's Extreme preset option, which uses a resolution of 1920x1080 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.

3DMark11, which absolutely crushes all of the cards when tested using its Extreme settings option, tells an interesting story. Here, the Radeon HD 6970 pulls ahead of the GeForce GTX 570, but the 6950 trail's the 570 by a hair. When compared to the Radeon HD 5870 / 6870, the new Cayman based 6900 series offerings have a clear edge. That edge is gone when compared to the GeForce GTX 580, though. NVIDIA's current flagship is clearly the fastest single-GPU based card here. Nothing can touch the dual-GPU powered Radeon HD 5970, however.

Tags: AMD, Radeon, Gaming, graphics, GPU, dx11, 6900 Series, 6970, 6950

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com