Introducing “the World’s Fastest Graphics card”, AMD’s flagship HD 6990
Lost Planet 2
Lost Planet 2 is the sequel to Lost Planet: Extreme Condition and is also made by Capcom. The events take place ten years after the first game and on the same, now thawed, EDN III. The PC version was released on October 12, 2010 and it runs on the MT-Framework 2.0 engine; an updated version of the engine used in several Capcom games. Campaign mode can have up to 4 players working together over the Internet. Lost Planet 2 allows players to create and customize their own characters which will allow them to unlock more things after leveling up and downloading content.
We are using the retail game’s built-in benchmark in DX11 with maximum settings. As the game is quite demanding, we first test at 2560×1600 resolution with no AA.
We see the effect of AA on the HD 6990.
Just as in the original game, none of our cards can play easily play Lost Planet 2 at 2560×1600 at the highest settings although the GTX 580 comes closest. However, we do see the GTX 570 again passing the GTX 480 while the GTX 560 Ti gets very close to the HD 6970’s performance. Our GTX 560 Ti SLI setup gets the highest frame rates followed by the HD 6970 then HD 6870 in CrossFire and finally by the GTX 460 SLI which sits in-between the GTX 480 and the GTX 570 in performance. Let’s lower the resolution to 1920×1200, add 4xAA, and test again with all of our DX11 cards.
The GTX 580 SLI pair is the fastest. The HD 6990 does well to nearly catch HD 6970 CrossFire. In this more tessellation-heavy DX11 game, the HD 6870 catches the HD 5870 as a single video card although it is slightly edged by HD 5870 CrossFire. The GTX 580 is impressive and the GTX 570 again beats the GTX 480 and at 1920×1200, the GTX 560 Ti beats the HD 6970. SLI cannot save the GTS 450 although the SLI’d GTX 460 is a much better solution and GTX 560 Ti SLI is the fastest of them all.
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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