Introducing AMD’s HD 6970 and HD 6950

Heaven 2.0 Unigine

Finally we come to our last benchmark, Heaven 2.1, on the Unigine engine. It uses DX11 and heavy tessellation which will strain any graphics card. At least two DX11 games based on Unigine are expected to be released next year. We use the setting for “extreme tessellation” and high shaders and we also set AF to 16x. We will tell you right now that this test chokes the GTX 580 at the highest settings and resolution so we do not run it at 2560×1600.

Here is Heaven 2.1 benchmark with maxed settings, extreme tessellation and 2xAA at 1920×1200:

The extreme tessellation and 2xAA completely choke the Barts and Cypress-based Radeons. In this case again, we see that the Cayman architecture is less bottlenecked by its tessellator as the lower-performing HD 6870 with a tweaked tessellator is much faster than the otherwise generally faster HD 5870.  The GTX 580 is clearly the fastest at this extreme tessellation benchmark and the GTX 570 is a frame faster than the GTX 480.

And now we test at 1920×1200:

This is a synthetic benchmark and we will withhold judgment until we play PC games using the Unigine engine. However, the GTX 580 again scores highest with the GTX 570 faster than the GTX 480.