Introducing “the World’s Fastest Graphics card”, AMD’s flagship HD 6990
Left 4 Dead
Left 4 Dead (L4D) is a 2008 co-op first-person shooter that was developed by Turtle Rock Studios and purchased by Valve Corporation during its development. Left 4 Dead uses Valve’s proprietary Source engine . L4D is set in the aftermath of a worldwide pandemic which pits its four protagonists against hordes of the infected zombies. There are four game modes: a single-player mode in which your allies are controlled by AI; a four-player, co-op campaign mode; an eight-player online versus mode; and a four-player survival mode. In all modes, an artificial intelligence (AI), dubbed the “Director”, controls pacing and spawns, to create a more dynamic experience with increased replay value. It is best as a multiplayer game with humans.
There is no built-in benchmark, so we created our own custom time demo which is very repeatable. The game is updated regularly by Steam and we chose the highest detail settings and 8xAA. We will save our comments until after we present both charts. First we test at 2560×1600 resolution:
On to our next chart at 1920×1200:
All of our video cards can play this game fully maxed out plus 8xAA. The GTX 580 stands out as a single-GPU card although the HD 6870 comes pretty close at 2560×1600 and yet they are still beaten by every flavor of each tested SLI and CrossFire combination except for GTS 450 SLI. TriFire’d HD 6990+HD 6970 beats GTX 580 SLI at the highest resolution and scales decently, this time.
This is soooo intense, the scaling is near perfect and the price is somewhat reasonable. I’m still not sure about overclocking that thing, it’s already damn powerful 😛
I wonder how Nvidia will respond with their 590.
Good Job Poppin! *claps*
This is the holy grail of hd 6990 reviews!!!! All hail the king!!!!
Dang…that’s one IMBAH review right there.
Thanks for the epic review 😀 .
Thank-you all!
Let me make a big clarification. At the AMD presentation we were told that simply flipping the switch doesn’t violate the warranty.
That is technically correct. However *operating* the card in the 2nd OD position voids your warranty and makes what they told us at the meeting double-speak. If I had known this, I would have only tested it in the stock (warrantied) position.
WARNING: If you break the yellow sticker that covers the switch, you are NOT warrantied. However, each AMD Graphic Partner may have a different policy and I’d highly recommend that you get it in writing from them before you touch the switch if you are considering buying a HD 6990 (and care about overclocking and retaining your warranty).
I will update my article to make this very clear and to add another negative to the conclusion. All of my future testing will be done with this card in the non-overclocked (under warranty) position.
Hey apoppin, will there be a 11.4 driver review? I noticed that all other Radeon cards were tested with 11.2s and according to AMD there have been some improvements for the HD 6000 series with the new drivers.
Of course. As soon as WHQL 11.4 is released. 11.4 is a beta driver.
However, we did use 11.4 beta for the HD 6990 as it is the only release driver. And for comparison’s sake, we used our HD 6970 with 11.4 beta also – and also because we used it together with HD 6990 for TriFire-X3.
If you’d like to see the performance increase for HD 6970 with the new beta drivers, check out our 11.2 vs 11.1a Performance Analysis – we used the same settings as for the HD 6990 launch article:
http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?p=24120
You can see significant increases for HD 6970 with the new beta driver over the latest WHQL driver, 11.2. Probably there are also increases with the 6800 series.
We tested the rest of the AMD Graphics cards – except as noted above for HD 6990 and HD 6970 – with the latest WHQL driver as we usually do.
Thanks! Looking forward to it!
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