Benchmark Results: F1 2010 (DX11)
AMD’s Radeon HD 6990 does well in F1 2010. However, its lead isn’t as commanding as we’ve seen in other apps.
More important, turning on anti-aliasing hammers performance in a major way, making the 6990 the slowest card across the board with that feature enabled. AMD claimed the issue is related to its Catalyst Application Profiles and issued us an update. But the new profile didn’t affect performance at all.
With that said, the mature Radeon HD 5970 is the next-fastest board, and it handles anti-aliasing, no problem. Nvidia’s flagship GeForce GTX 580 again comes in third place, sans AA.
Update: After our initial benchmarks were run with the 11.4 preview driver, AMD issued an updated Catalyst Application Profile to fix F1 2010 performance with AA enabled. It didn't improve our scores. It issued us yet another update after that, and this third attempt finally yielded productive results.
We’re still left with a reminder that, although we’re working with one PCI Express x16 graphics card, we’re subject to the constraints and requirements of a CrossFire configuration.