A tandem of two Radeon HD 6950 cards in CrossFire can achieve excellent performance levels that easily surpass AMD's aging HD 5970 dual card and also beat NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580 by over 25%. Especially in higher resolutions like 2560x1600 we see the gap widen. 2560x1600 should be considering the entry level resolution for a setup like this, says it all and its thr 6950 lol with no overclocking or voltage changeing lol mega cards o and take the fact u can xfire for under the price of a 580 o.o
Single cards have their own appeal. Many would rather have that than a CF or SLI setup. Look at the numbers of CF owners who jumped ship for the 580 and saying it was a far better experience.
from the reviews ive seen so far crossfire scaling is just as good if not better than SLI with these cards - especially at higher resolutions
we talking defaults here no option disable texture filtering optimizations in driver options for ati cards, so you have knock off 8% for the real figures for fair comparison.
Well come xmas nvidia seem to be on top and amd have dropped the ball somewhat. The 6970 is cheaper than the 580 but has lost out on overall power + heat. Could also be noisier and power consumption isnt that better. 480 for me was a fail for nvidia but fair play with the 460 and 580 they turned things around. also on the plus side i think their drivers are better but that could have been because i was running xfire. would i pay the extra for the 580 over a 6970. most definately. glad i made the switch. still the new ati cards arent bad just a bit of a flop. as pc enthusiasts we are spoilt for choice come xmas. which is an excellent thing!! great review hilbert. merry xmas capitan!!! as a guru pointed out xfire 6950's are great bang for buck. but i wouldnt go back to xfire in a million yrs...well not for now at least.
AMD RADEON card seriously need to consider about changing Graphic architecture of their GPU, Like the shader clock which is same as the core clock of the GPU, they need to implement seperate shader engine for it to give more performance and their clock does not rely upon core clock of GPU.
Well seeing the power consumption of the 6870 which is near to the 570, Nvidia could do the same for a dual card.
How in this world any company introduce new products instead of improving and fixing current product performance and stability. Like AMD instead of fixing their HD 5XXX series performance in both single and crossfire mode, just for the money and profts they are releasing more newer products to cash in. But people dont understand that they will get the same level of treatment for their new cards just like the current one. Hardware is changing very fast but software that drive that hardware not improving faster. I will say IMHO dont buy their new products let the drivers of the current products get mature enough so that it will give user the full benefit of their money value.
Of Course Nvidia will do that but think about the cost factor here, Nvidia 590 GTX X2 will cost you by 700$. Even if u donate ur one kidney you cant SLI those cards.
Wow, that was disappointing. NVIDIA is getting more and more attractive by the minute. The 580 absolutely trumps the 6970, which is completely unacceptable even if the latter is more affordable. :no:
yes there is an option. there is a slider with 5 options with performance on one end, quality on the other. the middle is a balanced option which provides both improved performance and provides equivalent quality to the Nvidia cards. The user has the ability to change for better image quality if they want but at the balanced level there is no real visible image degradation compared to Nvidia's, so there still at comparable levels.
Nvidia Gpu Architecture is twice as fast than Radeon cards and add the nvidia driver support over it and u will get GTX 580 like performance but ask yourself first why you need 200 fps at 1920x1080 resolution when 60 fps is more than enough for more smooth playback even in heavy action enviroment. My point is sure you can QUAD SLI GTX 580 for 400 fps in games but is that worth it every penny spent seeing the current trend of console port games for PC.