Introducing AMD’s HD 6970 and HD 6950
CRYSIS
Next we move on to Crysis, a science fiction first person shooter by Crytek. It remains one of the most demanding games for any PC and it is also still one of the most beautiful games released to date. Crysis is based in a fictional near-future where an alien spacecraft is discovered buried on an island near the coast of Korea. The single-player campaign has you assume the role of USA Delta Force, ‘Nomad’ who is armed with futuristic weapons and equipment.
Crysis uses DirectX10 for graphics rendering. A standalone but related game, Crysis Warhead was released last year. CryEngine2 is the game engine used to power Crysis and Warhead and it is an extended version of the CryEngine that also powers Far Cry. As well as supporting Shader Model 2.0, 3.0, and DirectX10’s 4.0, CryEngine2 is also multi-threaded to take advantage of dual core SMP-aware systems and Crytek has developed their own proprietary physics system, called CryPhysics. However, it is noted that actually playing this game is a bit slower than the demo implies.
All of our settings are set to the in-game maximum’s “very high” including 2xAA for 2560×1600 and for 1920×1200 and we force 16xAF in the control panels.
Here is Crysis’ Island Demo benchmark, now at 1680×1050 resolution:
Here we see the GTX 580 and the HD 6970 trade blows at 1680×1050. The HD 6950 is next-fastest and we see that the GTX 570 is a bit faster than our GTX 480. All of our top cards are now playable with Crysis at 1920×1200 if you are willing to compromise with anti-aliasing and/or lower a couple of detail settings. However, the experience is similar on all 4 cards although the GTX 580 is very slightly faster if you are keeping score. GTX 280 again brings up the rear edged out by the HD 4870 and the lesser GTX 460s.
Thanks for such an extensive and thorough review, great job! Really enjoyed it. Personally, I feel a little disappointed with 6970 performance, I guess I was expecting a match to GTX580, or better. I have a feeling a lot of people had similar expectations. Oh, well… can’t blame 580 for being a stronger card. But considering the super-competitive pricing point of the new AMD flagship (which also came as a big surprise) it’s safe to say that HD6970 is also a winner in it’s own weight category and will make a lot of gamers very happy.
I’m a bit disappointed, too. The GTX 570 currently has the better performance/price ratio but the 6900 series still offers great ratio…just not as good as GTX 570.
Many people will be pleased nonetheless
The settings pic on the GTA 4 page is missing.
Thank-you. There are still a few images that are still going to be uploaded.
The settings for GTA-IV are all at “high” and 100%.
Apologies for the delay; we had issues with our under-NDA images that stopped us from uploading any further images after the evaluation was published; the permissions were just fixed yesterday.
FIXED.
u should turn on the a.i catalyst to quality as its the default graphic settings for ati graphic cards.
No PC gamer should buy an expensive graphics card to run its IQ settings at less than High Quality.
We test Nvidia vs AMD *both* at High Quality settings. You can always lower the settings yourself and gain a bit more performance if you like.
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