AMD Radeon HD 6990 4 GB Review: Antilles Makes (Too Much) Noise
Several months late and supposedly only a couple of weeks ahead of Nvidia's own dual-GPU flagship launch, AMD's Radeon HD 6990 has no trouble establishing performance superiority. But does speed at any cost sacrifice too much of the user experience?
Benchmark Results: Lost Planet 2 (DX11)
Lost Planet 2 was previously one of those titles that Nvidia rocked consistently, even when we put its GeForce GTX 580 up against the Radeon HD 5970—a card that would normally outperform the GeForce in other tests. Radeon HD 6990 flips that all around, though, by crushing the GF110-based board all the way through 2560x1600.
The fact that there’s very little performance impact, even after turning on 8x MSAA, is quite impressive. We can even go so far as to compare the performance of the Radeon HD 6990 to the 6970. The dual-GPU board effectively doubles frame rate at 2560x1600 with 8x AA turned on, making that extreme combination of settings playable above 60 FPS.
Notice how the Radeon HD 5970 2 GB again falls on its face at 2560x1600 with AA enabled—a consequence of its insufficient 1 GB-per-GPU frame buffer.
One interesting note: at 1680x1050, exclusively, testing on the Radeon HD 6990 with the Catalyst 11.4 preview driver caused shimmering/flickering to appear in Lost Planet 2’s setup menu. This wasn’t the only game we saw this, and when we dropped in other cards, using the same driver, we could reproduce it. AMD confirmed it saw the same artifact and claimed restarting the game should fix it, but we weren’t able to get it to go away.
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CrazeEAdrian Great job AMD. You need to expect noise and heat when dealing with a card that beasts out that kind of performance, it's part of the territory.Reply -
jprahman This thing is a monster, 375W TDP, 4GB of VRAM! Some people don't even have 4GB of regular RAM in their systems, let alone on their video card.Reply -
one-shot Did I miss the load power draw? I just noticed the idle and noise ratings. It would be informative to see the power draw of Crossfire 6990s and overclocked i7. I see the graph, but a chart with CPU only and GPU only followed by a combination of both would be nice to see.Reply -
anacandor For the people that actually buy this card, i'm sure they'll be able to afford an aftermarket cooler for this thing once they come out...Reply -
cangelini one-shotDid I miss the load power draw? I just noticed the idle and noise ratings. It would be informative to see the power draw of Crossfire 6990s and overclocked i7. I see the graph, but a chart with CPU only and GPU only followed by a combination of both would be nice to see.Reply
We don't have two cards here to test, unfortunately. The logged load results for a single card are on the same page, though! -
bombat1994 things we need to see are this thing water cooled.Reply
and tested at 7680 x 1600
that will see just how well it does.
That thing is an absolute monster of a card.
They really should have made it 32nm. then the power draw would have fallen below 300w and the thing would be cooler.
STILL NICE WORK AMD -
Bigmac80 Pretty fast i wonder if this will be cheaper then 2 GTX 570's or 2 6950's?Reply
But omg this thing is freakin loud. What's the point of having a quite system now with Noctua fans :(