Last week AMD officially unveiled its latest generation of high-end graphics cards; the HD 6900 series. The HD 6970 replaces the HD 5870 as the fastest single-GPU graphics card in the AMD stable for now, but most gamers will be reluctant to part with R4000 for a single piece of hardware. The HD 6950 is a more likely contender for the budget wary enthusiast looking for something capable of delivering high-end gaming performance.
The HD 6950 looks very similar to the HD 5870, and is roughly the same size. However, AMD has done some serious tinkering underneath the hood. A new dual front-end design provides the card with two eighth generation tesselators, as well as two geometry engines and two setup engines. On paper, this component of the card should be able to send twice as much information per clock cycle than previous generation AMD cards. This makes for a more flexible graphics card in terms of general purpose functionality, and vastly improves the card’s multitasking abilities. However, this is not an improvement which will have any notable effect on gaming performance for the most part.
The Stream Processor layout has also been overhauled, and the backend ROPs have been upgraded. A new AA technique has also been implemented, which AMD claims will improve the visual quality of Anti-Aliasing without taking too much of a performance hit.
AMD has also introduced Power Tune, which basically sets a limit on how much power the card can draw at any given time. This allows AMD to run the cards at higher frequencies. Previously, the graphics card’s frequency would have to be set more conservatively due to certain games being very demanding. For instance, a given card might comfortably run at 880MHz most of the time, but under certain conditions (Crysis etc.) it would only be stable at 800MHz. Therefore, to be safe, AMD would set the cards to 800MHz by default to guarantee stability. Power Tune makes it possible for a card to be set at 880MHz, but also recognise conditions where it cannot run at this speed, and throttle it accordingly. However, it does mean that when you need those extra MHz most, they won’t be there, which seems a bit self defeating.
| GTX 580 | GTX 570 | HD 6970 | HD 6950 | HD 6870 | HD 6850 | HD 5870 | |
| Stream Processors | 512 | 480 | 1536 | 1408 | 1120 | 960 | 1600 |
| Texture Units | 64 | 60 | 96 | 88 | 56 | 48 | 80 |
| ROPs | 48 | 40 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 |
| Core Clock | 772MHz | 732MHz | 880MHz | 800MHz | 900MHz | 775MHz | 850MHz |
| Memory Clock | 1002MHz (4.08GHz effective GDDR5) |
950MHz (3.8GHz effective GDDR5) | 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective) GDDR5 | 1.25GHz (5.0GHz effective) GDDR5 | 1.05GHz (4.2GHz effective) GDDR5 | 1GHz (4GHz effective) GDDR5 | 1.2GHz (4.8GHz effective) GDDR5 |
| Memory Bus Width | 384-bit | 320-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Frame Buffer | 1.5GB | 1.28GB | 2GB | 2GB | 1GB | 1GB | 1GB |
| Transistor Count | 3B | 3B | 2.64B | 2.64B | 1.7B | 1.7B | 2.15B |
| Manufacturing Process | 40nm | 40nm | 40nm | 40nm | 40nm | 40nm | 40nm |
| Price Point | ~R5300 | ~R3700 | ~R3900 | ~R3200 | ~R2700 | ~R2000 | ~R3500 |
AMD has also introduced dual BIOSes. This is for enthusiasts who like to flash their graphic card’s BIOS. It was previously possible to ‘brick’ a graphics card when messing with the BIOS. The dual BIOS means that if something goes wrong, you can easily revert back to the default BIOS setting. This is an excellent feature that will give many tinkerers peace of mind when poking around in the HD 6950’s brain.
So there have been some neat changes made with the HD 6950. A new power management system, Stream Processor layout, as well as upgraded ROPs, dual BIOSes, and a dual front-end design make for a fairly unique product. It features two DVI outputs, two mini-DisplayPort 1.2 outputs, and of course an HDMI 1.4a output. It also ships with 2GBs of high speed GDDR5 RAM as standard.
But the most important thing anyone will consider when looking at a high-end graphics card, is performance.
HD 6950 benchmarks
| HD 5770 | HD 5870 | HD 6850 | HD 6870 | HD 6950 | HD 6950 overclocked | |
| Dirt 2 (DX11) | 43.6 | 61.7 | 55.9 | 60.9 | 61.6 | 61.7 |
| StarCraft II | 63 | 68 | 60 | 65 | 70 | 74 |
| STALKER: Call of Pripyat (“Day” benchmark, DX11) | 32 | 56 | 45 | 53 | 71.2 | 74.6 |
| Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising | 47 | 56.9 | 56.1 | 56.2 | 56.9 | 57 |
| Battlefield: Bad Company 2 | 33 | 61.5 | 47 | 53 | 60 | 64 |
| HAWX 2 | 88 | 126 | 110 | 121 | 122 | 122 |
| Batman: Arkham Asylum | 90 | 151 | 124 | 143 | 162 | 166 |
AMD Phenom II [email protected], 8GB DDR3 1333MHz RAM, Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P motherboard
All scores are an average.
All benchmarks were conducted at 1920×1200 with maximum details and anti-aliasing.
During the testing process the card would heat up, and the fan would become audible, if not invasive. The noise created was comparable to that produced by the HD 5870 under load, and is not likely to be a problem for many people.
There is no arguing that the HD 6950 is a very capable graphics card. It comfortably ran everything we threw at it on max detail settings, and will in all likelihood continue to perform very well in games released over the next two years.
It is usually slightly faster than the outgoing HD 5870, as well as the HD 6870, although the difference is fairly negligible. Unfortunately, we did not have any Nvidia cards on hand to compare performance, but suffice to say that the GTX 570 and GTX 580 are both quite a bit more powerful than the HD 6850. In fact, Nvidia has no current generation offering which competes at this price point.
You can find the HD 6950 for around R3200 locally, and if this is roughly what you are looking to spend on a graphics card right now, then it is an excellent choice as it undercuts the outgoing HD 5870 on price, while offering superior performance. If you want to spend a bit less, then the HD 6870 is an excellent choice for around R2500, as it offers very similar performance to the HD 6950 in many cases.
The HD 6950’s big brother, the HD 6970 seems less easy to recommend at around R3900. This is simply because for around the same price you can pick up an Nvidia GTX 570 which beats it in almost all instances.
Pros
– The best performing graphics card in its price range.
– Dual bios.
– Will run most current games on high settings at high resolutions at 60fps+.
Cons
– The GTX 570 offers significantly better performance for an extra R700.
Overall score 4.5/5
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