Introducing “the World’s Fastest Graphics card”, AMD’s flagship HD 6990
BattleForge
BattleForge is an online PC game developed by EA Phenomic and published by Electronic Arts. The full game was released in March 2009. BattleForge is a card-based RTS that revolves around acquiring and winning by means of micro-transactions for buying new cards. By May, 2009, BattleForge became a Play 4 Free game with fewer cards than the retail version.
BattleForge supports Directx 11 with full support for hardware tesselation. It is very impressive visually and quite demanding on any system. First we test with our cards at 1920×1200 using the BattleForge built-in benchmark with all of its settings completely maxed out and with 4xAA:
Now we test at 1680×1050 and with 4xAA.
However, we haven’t really strained our top configurations. Let’s try 2560×1600 with 8xAA.
The HD 6990 beat the HD 6870 CrossFired pair but our HD 6970 CrossFire’d pair simply refused to start the game although surprisingly TriFire-X3 scaled well enough to beat GTX 580 SLI!
The GTX 580 is again the fastest single-GPU video card in BattleForge followed by the GTX 570 and then by the GTX 480; and then more distantly by the HD 5870. The GTX 560 Ti is faster than AMD’s HD 6970 in this benchmark at our tested resolutions. The Radeons both crashed in CrossFire attempting to play this game although it is a better situation than with the previous 10.12 Catalyst drivers when even our HD 5870 refused to start this game. Again we see the GTS 450, unplayable as a single video card, take on this game in SLI. Our GTX 460 SLI sits just below a single GTX 580 in performance while GTX 560 Ti SLI is the fastest configuration that we tested here.
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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