Introducing AMD’s HD 6970 and HD 6950

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2 is an air combat video game developed by Ubisoft for PC. It was released last month. We are using the built-in benchmark from the full retail game. The way tessellation is implemented showed AMD graphics cards were perhaps unnaturally slow compared to other DX11 titles until the latest Catalyst 10-12 when all of the Radeons gained a very significant boost over the previous driver set.

H.A.W.X. 2 runs on DX11 faster and with more detail than on the DX10 pathway. Here the emphasis is on terrain tessellation which looks outstanding in DX11 and “flat” in DX10. Let’s check out H.A.W.X. 2 with our video cards at 2560×1600 with fully maxed out in-game settings and with 8xAA:

Now we test at 1920×1200:

We see the GTX 580 flying away from all the competition with the GTX 480 ahead of the GTX 570. However, the four Radeons that we tested can also play this game fully maxed out at 1920×1200. We also see that the HD 6870, although generally slower than the HD 5870, is much faster in this tessellation-heavy game and it even edges out the HD 6950.  We suspect there are still driver improvements to be made for Cayman and Barts; HD 5870 is weak in comparison.