Introducing “the World’s Fastest Graphics card”, AMD’s flagship HD 6990
Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (CoD4) is a first person shooter running on a custom engine. It has nice graphics but the engine is somewhat dated compared to others and it runs well on modern PCs. It is the first CoD installment to take place in a modern setting instead of in World War II. It differs from the previous Call of Duty games by having a more film-like plot that uses intermixed story lines from two perspectives; that of a USMC sergeant and a British SAS sergeant. There is also a variety of short missions where players control other characters in flashback sequences to advance the story. Call of Duty 4’s move to modern warfare introduced a variety of modern conventional weapons and technologies including plastic explosives.
There are currently about 20 multiplayer maps in CoD4. It is very popular and there is a new expansion for it. CoD Modern Warfare 2 was also released with updated visuals but it is also not very demanding on graphics cards. For multiplayer, CoD4 includes five preset classes and introduces the Perks system. Perks are special abilities which allow users to further customize their character to suit their personal style.
Our timedemo benchmark was created by ABT’s own Senior Editor and lead reviewer, BFG10K. It is very accurate and totally repeatable.
Here is CoD4, first at 2560×1600 resolution with all in-game settings completely maxed out plus 4xAA:
We see some pretty good scaling that approaches 100% in some cases with two cards although TriFire is a waste. The HD 6990 hangs with the fastest CrossFired Radeons and beats the GTX 580 and GTX 580 SLI. Scaling greater than 100% can be attributed to benchmark “noise”, the way averages are rounded off. or the nature of Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) and we will expand on this in our conclusion. Here we see the HD 5870 – although not the strongest single-GPU performer – leads when it is in CrossFire. However, even GTX 460 SLI is enough to beat the GTX 580. Let’s next test at 1920×1200.
We see that a popular multiplayer game is very playable even on midrange graphics cards and it plays very smoothly with this generation’s top video cards. SLI and CrosFire are overkill for this game.
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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