[Rangers]

Originally Posted by Harison

General picture: GTX580 clearly faster on low resolutions (but who would buy high-end cards for that?), 6970 at 1920x1200 catches up, and going neck to neck at 2560x1600 with 8x AA. Its fair to say 6970 is about 5% slower than 580, yet costs 25% less and is actually available for xmas sales.

Nvidia will have to lower prices, but then again they sell whatever not-so-high stock they have, it will be interesting how they respond.

Except for about 2 of 6 game tests, or 1/3, 6970 is totally crushed (well, at lower resolutions?) even by 480. Dirt 2 and LP2. AMD really needs to optimize those. OTOH those games that get over 80 FPS, so it's debatable to me how much the numbers even matter, but then again I guess you could say that about most PC benchmarks.

I wonder how much the 2GB helps the 2560X 6970 benches? Is that the main factor?

[mczak]

Originally Posted by gongo

I just saw this .... so the memory chips are different in 6950....guess that makes overclocking to 6970 speeds just that harder.
http://vr-zone.com/articles/amd-rade...w/10474-3.html

They actually overclock to the same level there however.
If I'd have to guess I'd say it's because the 5Gbps chips are specced at 1.5V and the 6Gbps chips are specced at 1.6V (hence at the same voltage they'd probably reach similar frequencies), and both HD 6950 and HD 6970 using same (1.6V) voltage for both cards (as older cards also already use 1.6V for 1.5V parts). Though some reviews should measure memory voltage hopefully...

[Harison]

Originally Posted by Rangers

Except for about 2 of 6 game tests, or 1/3, 6970 is totally crushed. Dirt 2 and LP2. AMD really needs to optimize those. OTOH those games that get over 80 FPS, so it's debatable to me how much the numbers even matter, but then again I guess you could say that about most PC benchmarks.

As you said, if FPS that high, it doesnt matter that much for the end-user, but still since its a new architecture, we can expect 6900 series performance with drivers will improve more than GTX570/580. Six months from now maybe 6970 wont be ~5% slower at 2560x1600 with 8x AA, but as fast or even slightly faster. I'm not saying this will happen, just that there is always more headroom for the new arch.

[jaredpace]

review summary:



...has some relative performance. Overall, judging from the ixbt, vrzone, chinese & polish reviews - the 6970 isn't as fast as I was hoping for.

[DavidGraham]

techpowerup and didn't like em , while benchmarkreviews and bit-tech are demanding a cheaper price , guru3d is wondering about performance increase over HD 5870 in some games , hexus is recommending 6950 over 6970 , HOCP liked em very much , while anand isn't very enthusiastic ..

AMD's new Radeon HD 6900 series is a disappointment to users who expected HD 5970 or GTX 580 performance levels from the new series. The new VLIW4 shader design can not make a huge performance impact as some have guessed, but it opens up a lot of room for die size and transistor optimization which effectively makes the GPU cheaper to produce, the cards cheaper to buy - more performance for your hard earned Dollar. Unfortunately AMD's Radeon HD 6970 can not meet that price target. With performance comparable to GeForce GTX 570, but a price that is $50 higher it is difficult to justify the investment. While I applaud AMD for making the bold move to 2 GB video memory, I have my doubts if the price/performance gain is worth it. Some people may see benefits from this when using Eyefinity, but the majority of users will game at 1920x1200, even 2560x1600 is just a niche resolution. I do have my hopes high for the future though, when AIBs will take a good look at the card and strip it down to achieve more competitive price levels - competitive being $329 in my opinion.

techpowerup

In summary, the Radeon HD 6970 matches performance, temperatures, and power consumption very closely with the GeForce GTX 570. Based on the $370 MSRP. it would be great to see the price come down $20-30 to more closely compete against the GeForce GTX 570, especially considering that HD3D and Fusion technology are yet to tip the scales in AMD's favor. Still, products like the PowerColor Radeon HD 6970 introduces more flexibility for display devices, especially where multi-monitor Eyefinity is used. Stereoscopic 3D gaming is possible with the right equipment, as are 3D Blu-ray and 3D DVD playback. The 40nm Cayman GPU may not have been built on the 32nm die it was originally designed for, but the Radeon HD 6970 still offers stellar gaming performance that rivals the older Radeon HD 5870, as well as the recently introduced Radeon HD 6870. Overall I consider the PowerColor Radeon HD 6970 to be a good video card intended for the top-end gamers, but I'm not convinced that improved Eyefinity support or added stereoscopic 3D functionality is going to impress consumers until these technologies become more mature. Thankfully the Radeon HD 6970 shines as a solid gaming product, and gives the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 a fierce run for the money.

benchmarkreviews

As a result, whether or not to buy the HD 6970 2GB or the GTX 570 1.3GB comes down to price and features. At time of writing our sources indicate that the HD 6970 2GB will sell for around £310. This price is obviously a problem for ATI, as a GTX 570 1.3GB can currently be had for as little as £280 (though this was the cheapest card we could find - most retail for £300), undercutting the HD 5970 2GB by a not insignificant £30.

bit-tech

MD came to this party to win. The recent NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 and GeForce GTX 570 launches impressed us. We were impressed with the performance delivered for the price. That however seems much deflated when compared to what AMD has just done. AMD has delivered two new video cards at prices that we think are incredibly forgiving. The AMD Radeon HD 6970 with an MSRP of $369 takes on the $140 more expensive GeForce GTX 580 in performance. The AMD Radeon HD 6950 takes on the GeForce GTX 570 while costing $50 less at $299.
Usually in our GPU reviews we match products up by price when we compare. Things are a bit different this time. In a price/performance comparison, we should really be comparing the 6970/570 matchup since the price difference is heavy on the 6970 by about $20. Looking at it this way, the HD 6970 blows the GTX 570 out of the water for a few bucks. Still the HD 6970 is AMD's flagship single-GPU video card, and we wanted to see how it compares to the GTX 580 no matter the price. The GTX 580 is a better performing card, but at a terrific out of pocket expense.

Both of these new AMD GPUs look to be incredible values. Never before has any GPU delivered so much gaming performance at such a low cost. If you have been waiting for the time to upgrade and are more than a generation back, that upgrade time has now come. The AMD Radeon HD 6950 and AMD Radeon HD 6970 are both tremendous values.

HOCP

The reality is that the GTX 580 stays on top of the charts everywhere and that the R6970 is competing mostly with the 350 EUR GeForce GTX 570. Positioning the R6950 is even more difficult as that card is a hovering at many performance levels. That's exactly the essence of today's two tested product, one game is very fast while the other is below expected performance.



This all certainly can be considered a Petri dish for discussion, was that move to VLIW4 a proper one or is it just a matter of a erroneous choice in accumulated shader processor estimation and implementation? We're fairly sure that AMD tried hard to squeeze out every bit of performance and compensate in any way they can. The product core frequencies are high and when you look at memory, well 2 GB of framebuffer is nearly making my eye browses frown. Then the R6970 with its 1375/5500 MHz memory clock, these are baffling numbers really.


My main concern is that half the games perform extraordinary well, and the other half seems to be grouping up tightly towards say a Radeon HD 5870.
Some examples, let's take Battlefield Bad Company 2 at 19x12 / 8xAA. The Radeon HD 5870 produces an average of 51 FPS. The all new architecture redesigned R6950 pushes 50 FPS and the R6970 56 FPS. That to me does not make any sense as that "older" R5870 can be purchased at 240 EUR already.


If we move on towards DX11 Colin McRae DIRT at 19x12/8xAA and we again pick that R5870 then we see that card push 76 FPS in this title. The R6950 produces 70 FPS and the 6970 77 FPS, yep... that's one FPS difference.

guru3d

Ultimately, the Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 are good GPUs that come to market a little too late. A September 2010 launch would have been ideal, along with a little more perf, but the re-emergence of NVIDIA as a high-end GPU force and the benchmark level set by the year-old Cypress GPU makes them, in December 2010, more average than special. Cayman, then, is more of a transitional architecture than epoch-making graphics card.

If it was our money at stake, dear reader, we'd look past the HD 6970 and go for the HD 6950, especially if you can grab one at around £220.

hexus

Our concern was that AMD would shoot themselves in the foot by pricing the Radeon HD 6970 in particular at too high a price. If we take a straight average at 1920x1200 and 2560x1600, its performance is more or less equal to the GeForce GTX 570. In practice this means that NVIDIA wins a third of our games, AMD wins a third of our games, and they effectively tie on the rest, so the position of the 6970 relative to the GTX 570 is heavily dependent on just what games out of our benchmark suite you favor. All we can say for sure is that on average the two cards are comparable.


So with that in mind a $370 launch price is neither aggressive nor overpriced. Launching at $20 over the GTX 570 isn’t going to start a price war, but it’s also not so expensive to rule the card out. Of the two the 6970 is going to take the edge on power efficiency, but it’s interesting to see just how much NVIDIA and AMD’s power consumption and performance under gaming has converged. It used to be much more lopsided in AMD’s favor.


Meanwhile the Radeon HD 6950 occupies an interesting spot. Above it is the 570/6970, below is are the soon to be discontinued GTX 470 and Radeon HD 5870. These cards were a bit of a spoiler for the GTX 570, and this is once more the case for the 6950. The 6950 is on average 7-10% faster than the 5870 for around 20% more. I am becoming increasingly convinced that more than 1GB of VRAM is necessary for any new cards over $200, but we’re not quite there yet. When the 5870 is done and gone the 6950 will be a reasonable successor, but for the time being the 5870 at $250 currently is a steal of a deal if you don’t need the extra performance or new features like DP1.2. Just keep in mind that the 6950 is in a much better position for future games due to AMD’s new architecture.

anand

[gamervivek]

another:

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1569214

par on gtx570 at dx10

beating gtx570 and besting gtx580 at dx9

losing at dx11 to both

[hoom]

Cayman Slide Deck - PDF

Well they updated that capabilities slide so yeah does do 4* 32bit INT ADDs

Dropped 2* 64bit FP MUL per clock to 1* though

[hoom]

GTX580 clearly faster on low resolutions (but who would buy high-end cards for that?)

Disturbingly many people I know actually still run 22" or smaller LCDs even though they have otherwise high spec PCs including a bunch with 5870s

[DavidGraham]

Overall , not very positive reviews , power consumption is worse , performance sometimes slightly higher than HD 5870 , sometimes trouncing GTX 570 and approaching GTX 580 , sometimes GTX 570 is the winner .

The price of HD 6970 is somewhat not justified , most reviews like HD 6950 more .

I am sure drivers will improve the situation quite well though .

[trinibwoy]

Originally Posted by Rangers

Err, not exactly GTX 580 performance unless you know something I dont.

When watching pretty benchmark graphs 5-10% might actually mean something. When actually playing games? Not so much.

[eastmen]

apparently that overclock site is saying that amd is going to raise the prices in january. Makes little sense to me ,but meh , looks like i'm sitting this out cause i wouldn't be able to order till after the holiday

[AlphaWolf]

Originally Posted by eastmen

apparently that overclock site is saying that amd is going to raise the prices in january. Makes little sense to me ,but meh , looks like i'm sitting this out cause i wouldn't be able to order till after the holiday

Didn't that have something to do with their taxes increasing? I don't really remember, but if supply is good I wouldn't expect prices to rise.

[eastmen]

Originally Posted by AlphaWolf

Didn't that have something to do with their taxes increasing? I don't really remember, but if supply is good I wouldn't expect prices to rise.

I dunno , the way it was told to me is that AMD was raising the prices , not that the taxes would increase.

I dunno , i'm hoping a pride drop from nvidia will spur one from amd !

[fellix]

Originally Posted by Anand

The limit of NVIDIA’s design is that while Fermi can execute multiple kernels at once, each one must come from the same CPU thread. Independent threads/applications for example cannot issue their own kernels and have them execute in parallel, rather the GPU must context switch between them. With asynchronous dispatch AMD is going to allow independent threads/applications to issue kernels that execute in parallel. On paper at least, this would give AMD’s hardware a significant advantage in this scenario (context switching is expensive), one that would likely eclipse any overall performance advantages NVIDIA had.

Context parallel execution?!

[RobertR1]

A very inconsistent card. Honestly, nvidia has nothing to worry about. An entire year after the 5870 this is a disappointing launch.

I posted a while back that Ati had a great chance to really drive it home with the 6900 series when nvidia were struggling with fermi. This is their answer and from my viewpoint, they blew it.

What's worse for me as a consumer is that we won't see a 580 price drop now. Before anyone chimes in, Antilles has no appeal to me. Crossfire might scale well but it tends to have issues in games and needs patches/hacks/tweaks often. I like plug n play.

[eastmen]

Originally Posted by RobertR1

A very inconsistent card. Honestly, nvidia has nothing to worry about. An entire year after the 5870 this is a disappointing launch.

I posted a while back that Ati had a great chance to really drive it home with the 6900 series when nvidia were struggling with fermi. This is their answer and from my viewpoint, they blew it.

What's worse for me as a consumer is that we won't see a 580 price drop now. Before anyone chimes in, Antilles has no appeal to me. Crossfire might scale well but it tends to have issues in games and needs patches/hacks/tweaks often. I like plug n play.

I don't know. If drivers even out the performance , nvidia might have to drop its prices. Reviews are mixed but some of them paint it being very close to the gtx 580. If drivers can give them another 5-10% across the board nvidia will have to drop.

[GZ007]

Originally Posted by RobertR1

A very inconsistent card. Honestly, nvidia has nothing to worry about. An entire year after the 5870 this is a disappointing launch.

I posted a while back that Ati had a great chance to really drive it home with the 6900 series when nvidia were struggling with fermi. This is their answer and from my viewpoint, they blew it.

What's worse for me as a consumer is that we won't see a 580 price drop now. Before anyone chimes in, Antilles has no appeal to me. Crossfire might scale well but it tends to have issues in games and needs patches/hacks/tweaks often. I like plug n play.

The thing is that the 6970 costs almost same as 570 and not 580. And i think if someone realy buys 580gtx than he dont need price drops to afford it.

[GZ007]

The difference betwen 6950 and 6970 is not much. Anyone tried to increase the powertune by 20% on 6950 without OC what hapens (and not like oc it by 80 MHz would be so dificult) ?
It seems to me that 80 MHz and 2 simds doesnt make up for the 140W vs 190W TDP and they limit the 6950 by the powertune tdp seting. In anands review the 6970 250W limit of the povertune kicks in only in one game (metro2033).

[Eolirin]

Seems like the loss of the 32nm node really hurt ATI here. Not that the cards are bad for where they're priced, but with the shrink I think we'd really be looking at a repeat of the 58x0 series launch. I'd be interested in knowing just what their feature and performance targets were before they had to shift back to 40nm.

That being said, both companies' products are hardly amazing relative to the previous gen. Though some of the 6900 refinements are certainly interesting. I doubt much more can be done at 40nm for either party, so I guess it's down to the long wait for 28nm now?

[Alexko]

I've just read Damien's review… either the drivers are really immature or Cayman is a clear failure. I mean you might as well just overclock an HD 5870 and you'd get similar performance and power.

[Kaotik]

Is there a chance on EQAA for HD6800-series, or does it require the hardware changes from Cayman?

[RobertR1]

Originally Posted by GZ007

The thing is that the 6970 costs almost same as 570 and not 580. And i think if someone realy buys 580gtx than he dont need price drops to afford it.

It costs that much because that is the price the performance justifies. Strong competition at the flagshig level is a good thing, always. Not only for price wars but it forces each company to keep pushing the limits and delivering bigger jumps with each version.

[GZ007]

It also seems that the double geometry output doesnt seems to help to much with tesselation. The botleneck is still elswhere.
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/373...rd/index7.html
It shows just same gains as 6800 cards.

[CarstenS]

Originally Posted by Kaotik

Is there a chance on EQAA for HD6800-series, or does it require the hardware changes from Cayman?

While you can do probably all of it via shader programs (very expensive ones), you'd want to keep the ROPs doing that kind of stuff, so no, EQAA comes with the hardware changes in Cayman's ROPs.


On another note, my personal take on Cayman, apart from silly performance numbers:

I think, AMD took a necessary architectural sidestep and layed grounds for architectural fine-tuning and scaling in generations to come. But they also experienced a painful lesson, which I am sure they'd knew would come. Whereas the last few generations were optimized to the last transistor for performance from a less than thrilling foundation (R600), Cayman seems to be a way better starting point, albeit they'd have to pay the price now that Nvidia payed with Fermi in Q3/09-Q2/10. But AMD planned wisely and had very compelling parts to bridge this gap, whereas Nvidia stood there pants down for the better part of a year.

Originally Posted by GZ007

It also seems that the double geometry output doesnt seems to help to much with tesselation. The botleneck is still elswhere.
http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/373...rd/index7.html
It shows just same gains as 6800 cards.

Mostly, drivers, I was being told. Here's more:
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,80.../Test/?page=12

[fellix]

Any word on AF quality for Cayman?