Introducing “the World’s Fastest Graphics card”, AMD’s flagship HD 6990
DiRT 2
Colin McRae: DiRT 2 is a racing game that was released in September 2009, and is the sequel to Colin McRae: Dirt. It includes many new race-events, including stadium events as your RV travels from one event to another in many real-world environments across four continents. Dirt 2 includes five different event types even allowing you to compete at new locations. It also includes a new multiplayer mode.
Dirt 2 is powered by an updated version of the EGO engine which was featured in Race Driver: Grid. This updated EGO engine also features an updated physics engine. We are using the Dirt 2 full retail game built-in benchmark at the highest “ultra” DX11 setting with 8xAA applied. First we test at 2560×1600:
Tri-Fire-X3 easily pulls ahead of the GTX 580 pair which in turn passed HD 6970 CrossFire then HD 6990.
The GTX 580 pulls ahead and passes the second place GTX 570 and third place GTX 480 in a not so tight race. The GTX 560 Ti is just edged by the HD 6950. We see HD 6870 CrossFire scale a bit better than HD 5870 CrossFire but not enough to catch it in ultimate performance although they both beat GTX 460 SLI which moves past the GTX 580. What about 1920×1200?
SLI’s GTX 580s take the lower resolution and the HD 6970s in Crossfire pull further ahead of the HD 6990.
Considering single-GPU cards, the GTX 580 gets the DiRT 2 checkered flag on the DX11 pathway as the GTXes pull further away from the Radeons at 1920×1200. However, even the lowest priced HD 6870 can play this game satisfactorily at the highest resolutions and we see the GTX 570 pull ahead of the GTX 480. The GTX 560 Ti again sits in between the performance level of the HD 6970 and the HD 6950 in this game. GTS 450 SLI makes this game playable for our lowest performing pair of cards and our GTX 460 SLI scales very well but not enough to catch the GTX 580 this time although GTX 560 Ti is much faster.
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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