AMD Radeon HD 6990 Dual-GPU Graphics Card Review

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.

Across all of the games and benchmarks we’ve tested up to this point, the Radeon HD 6970 in a CrossFireX configuration consistently beat out the Radeon HD 6990, but we came close to seeing the opposite happen here in all three tests. Alas… the CrossFireX configuration proved its ultimate worth at 2560×1600, managing an extra 1.5 FPS on average. Tough noogies, HD 6990.