MSI Radeon HD 6950 Twin Frozr III 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.

The strengths of the HD 6970 proved itself as the resolution went higher here. At 1680, MSI’s card ruled, while at 1080p, both MSI’s card and the HD 6970 were equaled. At 2560, the HD 6970 pulled ahead, but just barely. Considering that MSI’s card here performs so close to NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 580, I’d consider it a win overall.