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.

[White Owl]

With my HD6950, I turned off catalyst AI and immediately gained 15 fps with no loss of visual quality. You might give it a try.

[=XIII=Shea]

Originally Posted by White Owl

With my HD6950, I turned off catalyst AI and immediately gained 15 fps with no loss of visual quality. You might give it a try.

How do you do that?

[Doc_uk]

Originally Posted by White Owl

With my HD6950, I turned off catalyst AI and immediately gained 15 fps with no loss of visual quality. You might give it a try.

Huh?

[brando]

Originally Posted by Doc_uk

Huh?

Maybe White Owl is using an older Catalyst Control Centre where switching Cat AI Off is possible. Or Ati Tray Tool or the newer Radeon Pro app.

I'm very happy with the 5870 I bought just before the 6xxx series came out. Luckily for me the blue lines aren't showing up. I can't tell if it's a driver problem or something from CloD that's wrong - but my best guess is that Ati has the answer.

Some of us may recall the problems back in 2008; where using nav lights or guns caused a purplish glow to surround a plane. It took 3 or 4 months of complaints to the 'Catalyst Crew' before they a) took notice, and b) released a fix. Expect the same, and remember to send your 'feedback' to the Crew after the release of every driver if the problem persists.

[Rattlehead]

Congrats on the new hardware Tony, and thanks for the feedback.

Have you noticed any performance difference with the extra memory that the 6970 has? (In terms of stutter.)

[TonyD]

Rattlehead: thanks, and there are no stutters, even over London with the 'Buildings Unlimited' setting. I only noticed stutter on my last card when I changed some setting that (I assume) resulted in requiring more VRAM than available. Unfortunately there appears to be no way to measure VRAM usage on this card, or my last one for that matter.

[Flanker35M]

S!

Try the latest Catalyst 11.5a HotFix drivers. Smooth for me. I do not take the Black Death as ultimate game performance gauge. I get far more fluid graphics in game than in the track. Also the track is filled with console errors, in game none.

My 6970HD runs at around 70'C on default settings in games, never exceeding 80'C. Anyways, enjoy the card TonyD, it is a good one!

[RE77ACTION]

Don't worry too much about the temps with this card. It's normal that it operates >90C under full load.

The reason you didn't initially get better performance in the Black Death track is probably not because of your card. The bottleneck here could very well be your CPU which leaves the card almost idleling because a lack of data to process. At least that was the case with my old CPU (Atlon II X4 640 @ 3,42 GHz). With this CPU, my video cards GPU was only utilized about 50% on average on the Black Death track.

[TonyD]

Thanks, Flanker

Originally Posted by RE77ACTION

... The bottleneck here could very well be your CPU which leaves the card almost idleling because a lack of data to process. ...

Yeah, I thought so too which is why I tested it again with the cpu at 3.80 Ghz. The marginal increase I got seems to indicate otherwise. And yes, in FurMark the gpu got to 90⁰ C with the default fan profile, and around 80-85⁰ C in CoD. I know it’s most likely OK to run this high, but 75⁰ C just seems a bit more sane

It's running very well if you ignore the horizon ...