Introducing AMD’s “Turks” – HD 6670 and HD 6570

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is an objective-driven, class-based first person shooter set in the Quake universe. Quake Wars pits the combined human armies of the Global Defense Force against the technologically superior Strogg, an alien race who has come to earth to use humans for spare parts and food. It allows you to play a part, probably best as an online multi-player experience, in the battles waged around the world in mankind’s desperate war to survive.

Quake Wars is an OpenGL game based on id’s Doom3 game engine with the addition of their MegaTexture technology. It also supports some of the latest 3D effects seen in today’s games, including soft particles, although it is somewhat dated and less demanding on video cards than many DX10 games. id’s MegaTexture technology is designed to provide very large maps without having to reuse the same textures over and over again.

For our benchmark we chose the flyby, Salvage Demo. It is one of the most graphically demanding of all of the flybys and it is very repeatable and reliable in its results. It is fairly close to what you will experience in-game. All of our settings are set to ‘maximum’ and we also apply 4xAA or 8xAA plus 16xAF in game. We used to test at 2560×1600 and 1920×1200 resolutions, but they are far too demanding for our target new cards so we will explore 1680×1050 – all details are maxed and we first start with 8xAA:

This game was not playable at 1680×1050 resolution with this level of AA on our HD 6670 nor GTS 450 although the GeForce is faster even when the Radeon is overclocked. So let’s drop the anti-aliasing from 8x to 2x while we continue to test at 1680×1050 resolution.

All the cards run this benchmark satisfactorily except for the GT 230.  The GTS 450 is still a stronger performer than the overclocked HD 6670.  There are definite issues with the HD 5770 and this driver with some of the OpenGL games that we tested. Fortunately this does not seem to affect the 6000 series which we tested later on just before this review was published nor does our HD 5770 have issues with Catalyst 11-2 WHQL driver.

At the higher levels of AA, the HD 6790 edges the GTX 550 Ti which are in turn way faster than the GTS 450 and we could get very playable framerates at the target 1680×1050 with maxed-out AA or at 1920×1200 with less AA.  Not so with the new Radeons which must content themselves with modest levels of AA.