Introducing “the World’s Fastest Graphics card”, AMD’s flagship HD 6990
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 580 jets away from the Radeons and cleanly beats the GTX 570 and the GTX 480. The GTX 560 Ti edges the HD 6870 and is beaten by the HD 6950. SLI allows GTS 450 to play with the faster cards and GTX 460 SLI beats the single fastest cards while GTX 560 Ti is faster and sits in between the CrossFired HD 6870 and HD 5870s. However, HD 69×0 TriFire-X3 comes very close to the GTX 580 SLI performance results. Here are our results at 1920×1200 resolution:
The two GTX 580s in SLI are clearly the fastest. Although all of our four top cards give a similar playing experience in this game with maxed out settings and 8xAA, the new GTX 580 is clearly the top gun followed by the GTX 570 and the GTX 480 while the GTX 560 Ti beats the HD 6950. We see much the same thing with our multi-GPU set up, however, this time the GTX 560 Ti SLI is top gun, with HD 5870 CF, HD 6870 CF and GTX 460 SLI having no difficult beating the single flagship video cards.
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!