Introducing “the World’s Fastest Graphics card”, AMD’s flagship HD 6990
CRYSIS
Next we move on to Crysis, a science fiction first person shooter by Crytek. It remains one of the most demanding games for any PC and it is also still one of the most beautiful games released to date. Crysis is based in a fictional near-future where an alien spacecraft is discovered buried on an island near the coast of Korea. The single-player campaign has you assume the role of USA Delta Force, ‘Nomad’ who is armed with futuristic weapons and equipment.
Crysis uses DirectX10 for graphics rendering. A standalone but related game, Crysis Warhead was released the following year. CryEngine2 is the game engine used to power Crysis and Warhead and it is an extended version of the CryEngine that also powers Far Cry. As well as supporting Shader Model 2.0, 3.0, and DirectX10’s 4.0, CryEngine2 is also multi-threaded to take advantage of dual core SMP-aware systems and Crytek has developed their own proprietary physics system, called CryPhysics. However, it is noted that actually playing this game is a bit slower than the demo implies. All of our settings are set to the in-game maximum’s “very high” including 2xAA for 1920×1200 and for 1680×1050 and we force 16xAF in the control panels.
Here is Crysis’ Island Demo benchmark, first at 1920×1200 resolution:
Tri-Fire doesn’t scale and the HD 6990 matches CrossFired HD 6970 performance even though GTX 580 is the quickest. Although the HD 5870 passes the GTX 480, the GTX 580 moves right past it. The GTX 570 is a bit faster than our GTX 480 and the GTX 560 is just edged by the HD 6870. All of our cards scale well in CrossFire or SLI beating the single flagship cards except for our GTX 450 which, although it scales OK, is just too weak to play. Next we test at 1680×1050.
SLI’s GTX 580s are fastest at our tested resolutions although the HD 6990 matches HD 6970 CrossFire. The GTX 480 is edged out by the GTX 570 although the HD 5870 is faster. However the GTX 580 is even faster still and the GTX 560 Ti is a bit faster than the HD 6870. The GTS 450 simply cannot manage Crysis at these settings and adding a second one for SLI is barely sufficient for smooth game play. On the other hand, GTX 460 is too weak to play Crysis until we add a second one for SLI. The CrossFired HD 5870s run close in performance to the pair of HD 6870s but the GTX 560 Ti pair is the fastest, easily topping the GTX 580’s performance.
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!
My spouse and i have been so thankful that Emmanuel managed to complete his studies through the entire precious recommendations he grabbed using your web page. It’s not at all simplistic to simply always be giving out tips which people today have been making money from. And now we fully understand we have the writer to appreciate for that. Those explanations you’ve made, the easy website navigation, the friendships you can make it easier to instill – it’s all impressive, and it’s really helping our son in addition to us consider that that situation is excellent, and that’s extraordinarily mandatory. Thank you for all the pieces!