Introducing AMD’s HD 6790
Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.
Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. is an air combat video game developed published by Ubisoft. It was released in United States on March 6, 2009. You have the opportunity to fly 54 aircraft over real world locations and cities in somewhat realistic environments that are created with satellite data. This game is a more of a take on flying than a real simulation and it has received mixed reviews.
The game story takes place during the time of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. H.A.W.X. is set in the year 2014 where private military companies have replaced government-run military in many countries. The player is placed into the cockpit as an elite ex-military pilot who is recruited by one of these corporations to work for them as a mercenary. You later return to the US Air Force with a team as you try to prevent a full scale terrorist attack on the United States which was started by your former employer.
H.A.W.X. runs on DX10.1 faster and with more detail than on the DX10 pathway. All of our video cards can take advantage of DX10.1. Let’s check out H.A.W.X. with our top cards at 2560×1600 with fully maxed out in-game settings and 8xAA:
The GTX 550 Ti flies away from the HD 6790 and the HD 5770 at this resolution although it is too demanding for any of the lower-end cards. Here are our results at 1920×1200 resolution:
Now the HD 6790 edges the GTX 550 Ti. Let’s drop the resolution further to 1680×1050.
This time the stock GTX 550 Ti sits well ahead of the HD 5770 and between the stock and the overclocked HD 6790s. It’s an interesting formation.
I still think that 6790 is the 5830 of its generation. Too many cuts leads to a crippled chip that exists only because AMD marketing wanted to sell you a chip that would otherwise be thrown in the trash bin because it had too many defects to pass as a 68xx/69xx. That might be good marketing but it’s not a good deal for the buyer.
Beating the GTX 550 is an accomplishment, sure, but not much of one, since the 550 is such a garbage card to begin with.
If you’ve got $150 to spend on a video card, just save up and buy a 6950 for $250. That extra $100 has a great deal of marginal value. As opposed to, say the $150 delta between a GTX 570 and 580, which is just like throwing money away.
This generation of GPUs at 40 nm has been rather underwhelming on the whole. No true spiritual successor to the 8800 GT from either the red or green team. And with DX 11 adoption at a virtual trickle, thanks to the negative effects of consolization, it would appear that progress will be slow until the next-generation of consoles appears.
Bring on 28 nm.
On the bright side, another great review by ABT.
100% agreed with above comment!
Well, I’d say that GTX 460 1GB is almost like the 8800GT of its time, but only if you could find one for $150 with rebates.
Both companies are desperately trying to keep the prices up. Now, a $500 GTX 580 is starting to look a bit “mediocre” with some recent games like Metro 2033, Mafia 2, etc.. The price to pay for eye candy on the PC is rather high, and many games are console ports from consoles that are “several” years old, or a few PC generations behind.
I find it to be really misleading when AMD claims that the 6790 has 256-bit memory when the sawed-off ROPs limit access to only half of the available bandwidth, as the card behaves exactly like as if it has 128-bit bus. For more on this, if you want to discuss on the forums here, I started a thread: http://alienbabeltech.com/abt/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=22733
I also believe that all Barts GPU’s are VLIW4-based like the rest of Northern Islands. It’s something else that appears to be in a dimly-lit area.. when one shines a candle in that area, something just doesn’t look right.