Introducing “the World’s Fastest Graphics card”, AMD’s flagship HD 6990
Heaven 2.0 Unigine
Finally we come to our last benchmark, Heaven 2.1, on the Unigine engine. It uses DX11 and heavy tessellation which will strain any graphics card. At least two DX11 games based on Unigine are expected to be released next year. We use the setting for “extreme tessellation” and high shaders and we also set AF to 16x. We will tell you right now that this test chokes the GTX 580 at the highest settings and resolution so we do not run it at 2560×1600.
Here is Heaven 2.1 benchmark with maxed settings, extreme tessellation and 2xAA at 1680×1050:
In this case, we see that the Cypress architecture is bottlenecked by its tessellator as the lower-performing HD 6870 with a tweaked tessellator is faster than the generally faster HD 5870. In a similar manner, the HD 6870 CrossFire is also faster than HD 5870 CrossFire. The GTX 580 is clearly the fastest single video card at the extreme tessellation setting of this benchmark and the GTX 570 is a bit faster than the GTX 480. The GTX 560 Ti is faster than the HD 6950 and slower than the HD 6970.
All of our multi-GPU configurations scale well and GTX 460 SLI is only a little slower than the GTX 580 which in turn is solidly beaten by GTX 560 Ti SLI. However, this is a synthetic benchmark and we will withhold judgment until we play PC games using the Unigine engine.
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!