New Radeon HD6970

[TonyD]

I have just replaced my HD5850 with a shiny new MSI HD6970 (fugly bloody sticker on it!), since my daughter needed an upgrade for her ageing HD3870. The 3870 still works surprisingly well (it’ll go into the wife’s pc next), but the 512MB of VRAM is a little short for running some games at 1080p on her new LED monitor.

Anyway, I was keen to see what improvement I might get from this new card, and was initially a bit disappointed. With the same settings as previous, the Black Death benchmark ran slightly slower (!), while in-game play was faster. After some fairly lengthy testing, I have turned all the settings up to ‘High’ and turned Grass ‘On’, and get about 10% higher frame rate generally, except in BD where it’s roughly the same as previous. This is about what I was expecting, and the performance is very smooth.

One thing I noticed when testing over London, was the influence of the ‘Buildings Amount’ setting. At about 1500 feet the LOD circle is quite obvious due to the number of buildings being rendered. With this setting on ‘Unlimited’, the buildings become textured immediately they are rendered; when set to ‘High’, the brown boxes appear first, and are textured later (I assumed this setting altered the number displayed, not whether they were textured). The frame rate is around 22 in the first instance and 35 in the second, a massive difference. This is only noticeable over London though, as everywhere else the buildings are textured as they appear on the 'High' setting.

The card also runs very hot by default (85⁰ C), but a bit of tinkering with the fan profile in AfterBurner, I have it running at around 75⁰ C without too much noise (attached image). I haven’t had to alter any driver settings or anything to get it to run correctly, but I do get the Radeon 69XX bonus of the blue stripes on the horizon (Meh!) – hope this is fixed soon.

To anyone who is currently considering upgrading to a HD69XX from a HD58XX (or equivalent) for additional performance, I would say don’t bother. If you want to be able to run higher detail (like ‘Grass’) at about the same frame rate as you can currently, then go ahead. Otherwise wait for the blue stripes to be fixed – they’re extremely annoying.

My benchmark results, with default CCC settings and clocks at 880/1375 (default, non-reference board), Black Death (avg, max, min) using in-game display:

Settings as per attached image (HD5850 settings):

HD5850 (775/1100 MHz): 39, 84, 15
HD6970 (880/1375 MHz): 37, 79, 15

Settings with everything ‘High’, Grass ‘On’,

HD6970 with cpu @ 3.40 GHz: 37, 83, 11
HD6970 with cpu @ 3.80 GHz: 39, 87, 13

With VSYNC 'On':
Dover at 500 feet: 49 fps avg.
London at 500 feet: 35 fps avg.