Introducing AMD’s HD 6790
Heaven 2.0 Unigine
Finally we come to our last benchmark, Heaven 2.5, 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 this 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 590 at the highest settings and resolution so we do not run it at 2560×1600.
Even the GTS 450 had no trouble beating the HD 5770 with extreme tessellation and 2xAA at 1920×1200. The real surprise is the HD 6790 beating the GTX 550 Ti while the overclocked HD 6790 even edges the HD 5870. Now let’s look at 1680×1050:
The HD 6790 beats the GTX 550 Ti is faster than the HD 5770 and even the older architecture HD 5870 at the extreme tessellation setting of this benchmark. However, this is a synthetic benchmark and we will withhold judgment until we play PC games using the Unigine engine.
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.