The 6950 improves somewhat if you consider the cards' base prices of $249 and $259 instead, but even then the GTX 470 beats the board on 17 and 14 of our 26 tests, respectively.
2, versus 83 fps and 53 fps for the 6950), did comfortably better (43.7 fps versus 36.7 fps in Lost Planet 2 at 1,920 by 1,200), or merely outperformed the 6950 above its price differential. The 6950's scores of 30.9 frames per second (fps) with DX10 and 16.9 fps with DX11 (versus 12.3 fps and 9.1 fps) are likely because it has nearly double the GTX 470's frame buffer (1,280 MB). Against a Galaxy GTX 470 factory overclocked to 625 MHz ($229 after rebate), the 6950 scores decisive victories in only two tests: both in the Heaven Benchmark 2.1 at 2,560 by 1,600, and using both DX10 and DX11 shaders. So to place the 6950 in terms of performance, we need to look at similar (and still-available) Nvidia releases from the last and current generation.Īs of this writing, cards based on Nvidia's GTX 470 chipset (the second-most-powerful first-generation Fermi GPU) are available for as little as $229 after mail-in rebates, or about $249-$259 before them. The primary problem-and, we assume, why AMD has priced this card as it has-is that Nvidia doesn't have a current product that directly competes at $300. With gaming video cards, however, it's performance that counts most, and that's where the 6950 starts looking mighty curious. The 6970 also introduces AMD's PowerTune technology, which aids in overclocking by letting the user specify a maximum TDP (up to 200 watts) at which to constrain power usage and maintain peak performance over a longer stretch of time. It also sports expanded anti-aliasing support, with the 6000 series' new Morphological Anti-Aliasing now joined by an Enhanced Quality Anti-Aliasing (EQAA) mode: EQAA can have up to 16 coverage samples per pixel, is compatible with adaptive and super-sample anti-aliasing, and AMD claims it offers better quality for the same memory cost.
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Like its bigger brother, the 6950 supports the full range of DirectX 11 (DX11) rendering capabilities, such as tessellation. Both cards also have the same display outputs: two DVI (one single-link, one dual-link), two mini DisplayPort jacks, and one HDMI connector, letting the user connect a maximum of six displays for taking advantage of AMD's much-touted Eyefinity multimonitor display technology. This includes appearance: Except for decals identifying the specific model number, our reference boards for both were identical in every way, including their 11-inch length and their requiring two expansion slots (one for the PCI Express x16 connection and one to accommodate the fan and heat sink assembly). The cards are similar in other ways as well. Both cards also have similar power characteristics: a typical gaming utilization of 140 watts and idle power consumption of 20 watts, though the 6950 requires two six-pin connections from your power supply rather than the one six-pin and one eight-pin the 6970 demands. The 6950 has the same number of ROPs (32), the same amount of frame buffer (2GB), and a memory path of the same width (256 bits), but fewer stream processors (22 versus 24), texture units (88 versus 96), and reduced memory speed (5 Gbps versus 5.5 Gbps). It packs 2.25 teraflops of compute power and a core clock speed of 800 MHz, both barely shaved off the 6970's 2.7 teraflops and 880-MHz clock speed. The 6950 is a gently scaled-back version of the 6970, offering almost all the same features with just a bit less flair. While there's no doubt the Radeon HD 6950 will find a home there among gamers who consider $300 the most a video card should cost, its performance otherwise marks it as a somewhat tough proposition. While nudging the 6970 to $369 to spar directly with Nvidia's new GTX 570, AMD is also inserting a card into a price range Nvidia doesn't exactly cover: $299. With its newest 6000-series releases, in its high-end single-GPU "Cayman" family, AMD is notching things up next to the next roundest number. Given Nvidia's success capturing the $200 territory with its GeForce GTX 460 video card earlier this year, it wasn't surprising when the first two cards in AMD's new 6000 series, the Radeon HD 68, hovered around that same price.
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