Introducing “the World’s Fastest Graphics card”, AMD’s flagship HD 6990

Just Cause 2

Just Cause 2 is a 2010 sandbox-style action video game by Swedish developer Avalanche Studios and Eidos Interactive and is the sequel to the 2006 video game, Just Cause. Just Cause 2 employs the Avalanche Engine 2.0 which an updated version of the engine used in the original and there are impressive visuals as it is made just for DX10. It is set on the fictional tropical island of Panau in Southeast Asia. Rico Rodriguez returns as the protagonist who aims to overthrow the evil dictator “Baby” Panay and also to confront his former boss, rogue agent Tom Sheldon.

The game play is similar to that of its predecessor in that the player is free to roam the huge open world without a need to focus on the storyline. The Just Cause 2 AI has been rewritten to use a planning system which enables the in-game enemies to do more and there is also more vertical game play as well as a manual aiming system that allows the player to target enemy NPC’s specific limbs. Just Cause 2 also includes an adaptive difficulty system which scales as the player progresses. There are also new weapons in Just Cause 2 which include launching laser-controlled rockets as well as several new vehicles including a Boeing 737. Just Cause 2 even includes dual-grappling hooks which give players the ability to tether unlimited objects to each other including the tethering of enemies to vehicles and to each other which works very well as one of your goals is to cause maximum chaos. It is a lot of fun!

Here are the maximum settings available to a GeForce card; the bottom two, the Bokeh Filter and GPU water simulation, are unavailable to Radeons and they are left off on all runs to give solid apples-to-apples comparisons for all of our tested video cards and we used the Dark Tower benchmark built into the retail game. First the benches at 2560×1600 with 2xAA:

Our HD 6990 falls just a few frames short of the HD 6970s in CrossFire which almost match GTX 580 SLI at the highest resolution.  TriFire scales well enough to ad a few frames.  The HD 5870 beats the GTX 480 which in turn edges out the GTX 570 but the GTX 580 is solidly faster than any of them. Here the HD 6870 beats the GTX 560 Ti just as HD 6870 Crossfire beats the SLI’s 560s. Even GTX 460 SLI is faster than the GTX 580.

Now let’s look at the performance at 1920×1200 but now with 8xAA:

The HD 6990 falls further behind HD 6970s in CrossFire.  The GTX 580 scores an impressive win over the reference GTX 480 with the GTX 570 close behind and the GTX 560 Ti sits in between the HD 6950 and HD 6970. This time CrossFired HD 5870s score nearly perfect scaling to pass HD 6870 CrossFire which in turn is faster than GTX 560 Ti SLI. Both GTX 460 and GTX 560 TI also score some good scaling in SLI and each setup has no trouble surpassing the fastest single video cards.