AMD Radeon HD6950/6970(Cayman) Reviews

[hurrdurr]

Awww. DilTech <3 Nvidia. How cute.

I haven't seen a single post by you which talked about GPUs and didn't either praise AMD or bury Nvidia to some degree.

Unless you really think there is nothing positive Nvidia has ever done, or there is nothing negative AMD has ever done (you don't really seem to be retarded, so I assume you don't think that way), you shouldn't be calling people "fans" of a company.

[Calmatory]

I haven't seen a single post by you which talked about GPUs and didn't either praise AMD or bury Nvidia to some degree.

I loathe AMD just as much as Nvidia; with the exception that thus far they've been less restrictive and more open with their technologies which means that everyone benefits. Oh, and their µArch has been superior to Nvidia's, kudos for that. Every single company is there to screw it's customers, yet some people seem to think that "Nvidia/AMD/Intel are the GOOD guys". Wtf?

Unless you really think there is nothing positive Nvidia has ever done, or there is nothing negative AMD has ever done (you don't really seem to be retarded, so I assume you don't think that way), you shouldn't be calling people "fans" of a company.

There is nothing positive about Nvidia except G80. Dare to disagree? They're hurting the consumer, yet some people have guts to praise them. But hey, at least we've got TWIMTBP, PHYSX and CUDA!!

Though, I'm somewhat interested in their future advancements in GPGPU; not from graphics point of view at all. Gaming is for the weak after all. Once we get +100 GP(GPU) cores which have open(Yeah right, it's Nvidia after all. ) ISA and this under 1 W power consumption, I'll get genuinely interested about Nvidia again. Until then I really see them more as a joke than anything.

[BababooeyHTJ]

There is nothing positive about Nvidia except G80. Dare to disagree? They're hurting the consumer, yet some people have guts to praise them. But hey, at least we've got TWIMTBP, PHYSX and CUDA!!

Though, I'm somewhat interested in their future advancements in GPGPU; not from graphics point of view at all. Gaming is for the weak after all. Once we get +100 GP(GPU) cores which have open(Yeah right, it's Nvidia after all. ) ISA and this under 1 W power consumption, I'll get genuinely interested about Nvidia again. Until then I really see them more as a joke than anything.

So it must be Nvidia's fault that transparency AA doesn't work in DX10/11 on AMD cards? Even in DX9 the Nvidia implementation is better. Of all of the IQ arguments between the two this is the only one that I have noticed and I'm surprised that it doesn't get mentioned more.

To say that Nvidia cards have no advantages over AMD is just blind fanboyism.

[Shadov]

So it must be Nvidia's fault that transparency AA doesn't work in DX10/11 on AMD cards? Even in DX9 the Nvidia implementation is better. Of all of the IQ arguments between the two this is the only one that I have noticed and I'm surprised that it doesn't get mentioned more.

To say that Nvidia cards have no advantages over AMD is just blind fanboyism.

Have you heard of AMD Radeons Morphological AA, works in every game that I have tried so far...

Now you should go back to reading reviews!

[BababooeyHTJ]

Have you heard of AMD Radeons Morphological AA, works in every game that I have tried so far...

Now you should go back to reading reviews!

Yep, I own a 6870. It works well and is great for certain games but doesn't look as good as 4xMSAA with MSTSAA and comes at a massive performance hit which makes it unusable for GTA4 as well as some other games sadly.

There really is no excuse for the lack of TSAA support and I wouldn't call MLAA a replacement. It's a nice feature and all but I'm pretty sure that much like physix it won't factor into my next purchase.


While were on testing games it would be great to see games like Darkplaces and Serious Sam HD that are probably more popular than Lost Planet 2 and happen to stress my hardware.

[omega1alpha]

I loathe AMD just as much as Nvidia; with the exception that thus far they've been less restrictive and more open with their technologies which means that everyone benefits. Oh, and their µArch has been superior to Nvidia's, kudos for that. Every single company is there to screw it's customers, yet some people seem to think that "Nvidia/AMD/Intel are the GOOD guys". Wtf?

Good post. I couldn't agree more.

[tajoh111]

Good post. I couldn't agree more.

I too can agree with this short statement.

[DilTech]

I loathe AMD just as much as Nvidia; with the exception that thus far they've been less restrictive and more open with their technologies which means that everyone benefits. Oh, and their µArch has been superior to Nvidia's, kudos for that. Every single company is there to screw it's customers, yet some people seem to think that "Nvidia/AMD/Intel are the GOOD guys". Wtf?

I don't think anyone are the good guys. I completely ignore the politics when making my purchase, as whoever has the best hardware for the cash I feel like spending at that point in time gets my money. I've owned AMD/ATi hardware, and I've owned NVidia hardware. I've owned AMD processors, and I've owned intel processors. I let my wallet do the talking for my end, and I let the product's performance do the talking for the companies; between the two they generally can come up to an agreement that suits my needs.

At the same time, I also tend to prefer to make sure that information on this site is correct when possible. The most annoying thing you can have happen is to have lots of people give you bad information(I've had it happen myself, got an ATi card back when they pretty much COULDN'T run openGL, not fun), which sways your decision in a way that it may not have gone had it not of been for that bad bit of info. As staff on this site, it's partially my responsibility to correct that information so that others who read this site looking for said information can find what it is they're looking for. Make sense?

There is nothing positive about Nvidia except G80. Dare to disagree? They're hurting the consumer, yet some people have guts to praise them. But hey, at least we've got TWIMTBP, PHYSX and CUDA!!

Though, I'm somewhat interested in their future advancements in GPGPU; not from graphics point of view at all. Gaming is for the weak after all. Once we get +100 GP(GPU) cores which have open(Yeah right, it's Nvidia after all. ) ISA and this under 1 W power consumption, I'll get genuinely interested about Nvidia again. Until then I really see them more as a joke than anything.

Nothing positive, eh? I guess you thought the GTX 460 wasn't a GREAT card for the money? I guess you think the GTX570 is over-priced for it's performance level?

I mean, I guess you might think they're hurting customers by having closed standards, but NVidia did pay the costs to create/obtain those things. Ask developers what they think about TWIMTBP; which helps bring the cost of developing a title down and seriously helps out with the burden of testing a title(try buying all those configurations of systems and see how much just that part costs you). You may see it as them "buying out" games, but the fact is they do assist the developer in doing what WE want them to do, and that is continue to make games for the PC. Considering it's a much higher development cost to do that, it's likely we'd see less titles than we already do without programs like this in place.

Physx, well, I still don't know how I feel about that one. At the same time, there's NOTHING stopping AMD from attempting to make their own standard. We could then see if all their "we don't believe in closed standards" hype is true or not.

As for the final part... So you're pretty much saying ONLY when a 100% impossible non-realistic goal is met that you'll be interested in NVidia's products; yet you have the audacity to call anyone else biased in any way, shape, or form? That pretty much sums up your intentions in a nut-shell, you'll ONLY like a brand if they can do something that is not physically possible, yet you'll buy the other brand regardless... That's an open and shut case right there.

[Calmatory]

As for the final part... So you're pretty much saying ONLY when a 100% impossible non-realistic goal is met that you'll be interested in NVidia's products; yet you have the audacity to call anyone else biased in any way, shape, or form? That pretty much sums up your intentions in a nut-shell, you'll ONLY like a brand if they can do something that is not physically possible, yet you'll buy the other brand regardless... That's an open and shut case right there.

You sir have no clue what you're talking about; I haven't bought a single discrete GPU since late 2008, and I don't realistically see myself buying any ever again. Ever. I couldn't care less how AMD or Nvidia twist their products and marketing; it doesn't touch me in any way. However, I'm curious about the show. It is just entertainment for me to follow this circus. Thus said; I'm not buying AMD either.

Oh, and it WILL be possible for Nvidia to build multi-dozen general purpose processing cores which will consume less than 1 W. Not yet. Possibly not with silicon. What I was after was that I'm genuinely interested in their products once they can really produce something I'm interested about; general purpose(as in, I can compile Linux kernel on them), low power hugely parallel processors. Current GPUs are ALMOST there. They only need to make the ISA open; improve the general purpose logic and features, improve the memory subsystem and then shrink it down. I'm not sure if Nvidia will be around by the time all this becomes reality; maybe not. But as of right now, it seems that Nvidia will be the company to produce fun stuff like this; AMD and Intel push performance, ARM doesn't produce parallel processors and VIA can't deliver. Only Nvidia can do this. Maybe their products could be based on ARM ISA, I don't know. But right now GPUs are more or less worthless for me; I don't need graphics processing power. Heck, Intel's GMA 950 is fast enough for my needs and it even supports OpenGL 1.3; I can plot tons of texture mapped polygons at high framerates. Thats enough for now.

No doubt has Nvidia done some good product launches with Fermi; e.g. GTX 460. However, Fermi as a microarchitecture.. It sucks. It tried to be a GPGPU and gaming focused. It didn't do well(compared to the potential if it was focused on only one at a time) at either of them. Tons of transistors and heat for the performance provided. Not efficient. And given that efficiency is the #1 thing to focus these days(thin clients; battery powered portable devices; low costs; being "eco-friendly") it just makes it worse. I have no problem to have Nvidia GPU in my future notebook; if it can provide good performance for low power consumption then I'm all for it. But really, Fermi can't quite deliver that. And even if it could I wouldn't care, as I have no plans to get a new one for a while. Maybe when we're at 28 nm, or even 22 nm.

Oh well, there's ONE thing good about Nvidia; their developer support. They're actively supporting and encouraging developers with their Developer Zone. Heck, they even support demoscene with nVision. It's damn valuable for us devs who are interested to work with the hardware. Nvidia just has no interest in pushing open standards which would push the technology forward. Kind of like Microsoft, "it's just business".

In the end, no matter if it is Nvidia, AMD, Intel, VIA or ARM having the crown, consumers will get screwed. Just look at Apple or Microsoft. Are they pushing the technology or making money?