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AMD Radeon HD 6970 review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £290
inc VAT

An incredibly powerful card at an impressively reasonable price, its only competition comes from the cheaper HD 6950.

Graphics card manufacturers usually release the high-end versions of a new architecture first, and then scale down the design to provide more affordable versions of the graphics card. AMD, having now discarded the ATI brand, has taken a different strategy with its 6000-series.

We saw the mid-range 6800 cards a couple of months back, such as the Radeon HD 6870, and now we have the more enthusiast-orientated 6900 pairing – consisting of the HD 6970 and 6950 predictably. Both are actually based on a different architecture from their little siblings.

AMD Radeon HD 6970

The cards’ Cayman graphics core has the same 40nm fabrication process as the Barts core in 6800 cards, and the whole 5000 series. It’s not the major step forward then that we’d hoped for, but it’s still an impressive chip, the biggest AMD have ever made, with 2,640 million transistors, up from 2,154 from the previous generation.

There are still plenty of interesting revisions in the design. Dual graphics engines are one innovation, so it can handle greater quantities of geometry and has two tessellation engines – DirectX 11 supports tessellation to add more detail into scenes. AMD claim they have increased tessellation performance by up to three times over their previous architecture.

The HD 6970 has a massive 1,536 stream processors, which support new image quality features. The key one of these is Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing (EQAA), which takes extra samples from a scene during anti-aliasing for almost no performance hit. The extra samples increase accuracy and so improve edge smoothing, it’s only really noticeable at low resolutions and low anti-aliasing settings – which aren’t why you buy a high-end card like this.

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Basic Specifications

Price £290
Rating ****
Details www.amd.com
Award Ultimate
Interface PCI Express x16 2.1
Crossfire/SLI CrossFire
Slots taken up 2
Brand AMD
Graphics Processor AMD Radeon HD 6970
Memory 2GB GDDR5
Memory interface 256-bit
GPU clock speed 880MHz
Memory speed 1.38GHz
Card length 275mm

Features

Architecture 1,536 stream processors
Anti aliasing 24x
Anisotropic filtering 16x

Connectors

DVI outputs 2
VGA outputs 0
S-video output no
S-Video input no
Composite outputs no
Composite inputs no
Component outputs no
HDMI outputs 1
Power leads required 1x 6-pin PCI Express, 1x 8-pin PCI Express

Extras

Accessories N/A
Software included none

Benchmark Results

3DMark Vantage 1680 N/A
Call of Duty 4 1680 4xAA 88.9fps
Call of Duty 4 1440 4xAA 89.3fps
Crysis 1680 High 4xAA 73.2fps
Crysis 1440 High 4xAA 85.1fps

Buying Information

Warranty one-year RTB
Price £290
Supplier http://www.overclockers.co.uk
Details www.amd.com

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