Introducing “the World’s Fastest Graphics card”, AMD’s flagship HD 6990
Resident Evil 5
Resident Evil 5 is a survival horror third-person shooter developed and published by Capcom that has become the best selling single title in the series. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil series and it was released for Windows in September 2009. Resident Evil 5 revolves around two investigators pulled into a bio-terrorist threat in a fictional town in Africa. Resident Evil 5 features online co-op play over the internet and also takes advantage of NVIDIA’s new GeForce 3D Vision technology. The PC version comes with exclusive content the consoles do not have.
The developer’s emphasis is in optimizing high frame rates but they have implemented HDR, tone mapping, depth of field and motion blur into the game. Re5’s custom game engine, ‘MT Framework’, already supports DX10 to benefit from less memory usage and faster loading. Resident Evil 5 gives you choice as to DX10 or Dx 9 and we naturally ran the DX10 pathway.
There are two benchmarks built-into Resident Evil 5. We chose the variable benchmark as it is best suited for testing video cards. Here it is at 2560×1600 resolution with maxed out in-game setting plus 8xAA:
TriFire is the fastest while the HD 6990 is slower than HD 6970 CrossFire. Here are the results at 1920×1200 resolution:
This time the GTX 580 SLI is cleanly and clearly fastest at the lower resolution and the HD 6990 falls behind the HD 6970s further..
Although the HD 5870 comes close to the stock GTX 480 at the highest resolution, the GTX 580 simply powers past all of its competition. However, all of our video cards turn in respectable performances and their overall playability is similar at 1920×1200. The GTX 480 is a bit faster than the GTX 570 at our highest resolution and then the situation reverses at 1920×1200. The GTX 560 Ti is edged out by the HD 6870 at 2560×1600 but rebounds strongly to beat the HD 6950 at 1920×1200. The GTX 560 Ti is challenged by the highest resolutions and is clearly intended for 1920×1200.
CrossFired HD 5870s take the performance crown over the CrossFired pair of HD 6870s which in turn beat our GTX 5600 Ti SLI pair; and our GTX 460 SLI’s pair trade blows with GTX 580. Scaling is overall good but somewhat mixed.
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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