by Rob Williams on December 20, 2010 in Graphics & Displays
Not wanting to end 2010 without the last word, AMD unveiled its Radeon HD 6900 cards last week. These cards bring a couple of interesting features, including a revamped architecture, improved power handling, dual BIOS support, EQAA anti-aliasing and more. With NVIDIA’s GTX 570 just launched, let’s see where AMD stands with its new cards.
While Futuremark is a well-established name where PC benchmarking is concerned, Unigine is just beginning to become exposed to people. The company’s main focus isn’t benchmarks, but rather its cross-platform game engine which it licenses out to other developers, and also its own games, such as a gorgeous post-apocalytic oil strategy game. The company’s benchmarks are simply a by-product of its game engine.
The biggest reason that the company’s “Heaven” benchmark grew in popularity rather quickly is that both AMD and NVIDIA promoted it for its heavy use of tessellation, a key DirectX 11 feature. Like 3DMark Vantage, the benchmark here is overkill by design, so results here aren’t going to directly correlate with real gameplay. Rather, they showcase which card models can better handle both DX11 and its GPU-bogging features.
In comparing the HD 6900 series to the HD 6800 series, it’s clear that there’s been some major improvements made where geometry performance is concerned. Comparing just the GTX 570 and HD 6970, which are priced almost the same, the performance is near-identical.