AMD Radeon HD 6990 Dual-GPU Graphics Card Review

One of the more popular Internet memes for the past couple of years has been, “Can it run Crysis?”, but as soon as Metro 2033 launched, that’s a meme that should have died. Metro 2033 is without question one of the beefiest games on the market, and though it supports DirectX 11, it’s almost a feature worth ignoring, because the extent you’ll need to go to in order to see playable framerates isn’t likely going to be worth it.

Manual Run-through: The level we use for testing is part of chapter 4, called “Child”, where we must follow a linear path through multiple corridors until we reach our end point, which takes a total of about 90 seconds. Please note that due to the reason mentioned above, we test this game in DX10 mode, as DX11 simply isn’t that realistic from a performance standpoint.

Metro 2033 becomes the fourth game in our test suite to tell us that in most cases, dual HD 6970s in CrossFireX mode will outperform the single HD 6990. This isn’t a great surprise given the HD 6970’s slightly increased memory clock speeds, but it’s still interesting point to note.

Aside from that little factoid, the HD 6990 once again kicks the digital butt off of every single one of our other single graphics card configurations, with second place again going to AMD’s last-gen HD 5970.