| PowerColor Radeon HD 6870 PCS+ Video Card |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Video Cards | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Written by Bruce Normann | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tuesday, 11 January 2011 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
PowerColor PCS+ HD6870 Video Card ReviewAMD's new Radeon HD 6800 series occupies a brand new position in the product hierarchy. The HD 5830 GPU only made economic sense if you had awful yields at the wafer fab, and the Cypress chip, with 334 square millimeters of silicon, is way too big for just 1120 shaders and 16 ROPS. The new Barts GPU uses just 255 mm2 to do the same job only better, with twice the number of ROPs as the 5830. The first HD 6870 cards on the market were all based on the AMD reference design, which used the tried-and-true blower in a box design for cooling. Some of us prefer axial cooling fans, and have been anxiously awaiting some original designs to hit the marketplace. PowerColor saw the need for a different interpretation on the Barts theme and have launched their PCS+ version that has potentially better cooling, and certainly quieter cooling if nothing else. They've also applied the traditional overclock, which is a standard feature for this series. Although AMD was denied the opportunity to roll out 32nm-based chips for this product cycle, they were able to go back to the drawing board with relaxed design rules for the 40nm process at TSMC. With one full year of volume production under their belts, they optimized this latest generation of GPUs for the current manufacturing constraints. In the HD 5000 series, they had to use estimates for defect density, maximum L/D ratios, and a whole host of other design guidelines that are supposed to ensure you get usable chips at the end of the production line. AMD did a better job of interpreting the rule book last product cycle, and as a result their full line of 40nm chips was first out of the gate, and stayed out in front for a full 6 months.
In the wake of the HD 6900 series debut last month, the Barts GPU and its place in the product line finally makes perfect sense. Everyone seems to have massive heartburn over the product numbering scheme that AMD introduced with the new 68xx cards. The fact that AMD has successfully introduced a completely new class of GPU (as defined by die size), to fill the product gap everyone complained about with the 5000 series, seems to have been overlooked by all. Something had to give, and it was the auspicious title of HD x870 that got handed down from the previous King to the new Crown Prince. You may have seen some benchmarks for the Radeon HD 6870 already, but let's take a complete look, inside and out, at the PowerColor PCS+ HD6870 1GB GDDR5. Then we'll run it through Benchmark Review's full test suite. We're going to look at how this non-reference card performs with a factory 940 MHz overclock on the graphics core, and a memory clock of 1100 MHz. These are both safe, but significant overclocks that are within spitting distance of the 1.0 GHz wall that most 40nm graphics cores from TSMC seem to have.
Manufacturer: PowerColor (TUL Corporation) Full Disclosure: The product sample used in this article has been provided by PowerColor. Closer Look: PowerColor PCS+ HD 6870The PowerColor PCS+ HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 is based on the AMD reference card, but it is not identical. The board layout is the same, but one card has a few more power supply chokes, the other has one or two more MOSFETs in the smaller VRM sections, and the PowerColor board has a different hardware arrangement for providing power to the cooling fan. I think the phrase; "Six of one and half a dozen of the other..." applies here. All of that only applies after you get down to the board level though. Let's start at the top. The first thing you notice when you pick up this video card is that it's fairly light; it's not dense and solid like the reference card. The single fan is an axial type, placed at the center of the card, near the GPU location. The fan pushes air down through the main opening and it spreads out through the fin assembly and down to the component level on the PC board.
The fan shroud is the antithesis of a completely sealed-off design; there are vents all over the black plastic cover. The overall styling is modeled after the general layout of ultra-performance sport cars, right down to the headlights and the wheel well vents on the fender. The fan is a basic DC-powered design with a 3-wire electrical connection for a tachometer output signal, but the RPM of the fan was not reported to various monitoring and control utilities, just the percentage. We will see later that there has been a major change to the board layout, which avoids the dreaded overheating of the VRM section that plagued the HD 5870 reference design. The main voltage regulator modules have been relocated to the end closest to the I/O plate. After the GPU itself, these voltage regulator chips are the things that benefit the most from active cooling. The axial design of the cooling fan pretty much guarantees that they are getting decent airflow in this design, and the shroud does nothing to prevent that. The memory also benefits from direct airflow, but my experience with GDDR5 memory is that it runs pretty cool all by itself.
With high-end video cards, the cooling system is an integral part of the performance envelope for the product. Make it run cooler, and you can make it run faster, has been the byword for achieving gaming-class performance with all recent GPUs. Even some midrange models have turned out to be supreme overclockers with enhanced cooling. The PowerColor PCS+ HD6870 1GB GDDR5 has a fairly straight forward design for its cooling, compared to other high-end reference designs released for the HD 6870. The thermal load for this new Barts GPU is lower, so the cooler doesn't need to use all the tricks in the book to keep temperatures down. The PCS+ models from PowerColor have always sported decent overclocks and excellent cooling performance, so I'm expecting good results.
The layout of the various elements of the cooler design is a little easier to see in this straightforward view from the GPU's perspective. An oversized copper block mates with the GPU and transfers heat directly to the three copper heatpipes running directly over the center of the GPU.
Two 8mm and one 6mm diameter heatpipes are soldered between the copper mounting plate and the aluminum fin assembly, with all three pipes closely spaced and passing directly over the center of the GPU die. Once they exit from there, they spread to the outer reaches of the aluminum fin assembly. This cooler uses traditional assembly techniques, with solder firmly attaching the pipes to the fins and the GPU interface plate. The solder also acts as a reasonably good heat conductor, and electronics manufacturers are intimately familiar with soldering things together, so it's a tried and true assembly technique. The thermal interface material (TIM) was very evenly distributed by the factory, but was applied slightly thicker than necessary. One day, anxious manufacturing engineers are going to figure out that too little TIM is better than too much. For the rest of us who end up correcting these things, a thorough discussion of best practices for applying TIM is available here. I have never had the thermal performance of a video card degrade after I've taken it apart and reassembled it with a smaller amount of high quality TIM paste.
The layout on the front and back of the printed circuit board is somewhat unusual in the arrangement of its power supply components. Most cards keep the current paths as short as possible by grouping the power distribution and voltage regulator module sections somewhere between the power input connectors and the major electrical loads, which are the GPU and the memory modules. With a radial blower on the reference design, there is a dead spot directly behind the blower wheel where there is very little airflow. This is exactly where the VRM section usually ends up, and these components can generate some serious heat. The HD 6870 flips the main VRM section over to the left side of the board, and makes the DC power come ¾ of the way down the length of the card and then do a U-turn before heading into the GPU. I can just see all the electrical engineers doing the face-palm.... Of course, they ultimately gave in, rather than redesigning everything after de-rating all the components due to the higher expected temps. The axial fan on this card doesn't require this arrangement, but it isn't handicapped by it either.
This new mid-range card from AMD is not as simple and cheap to produce as the GTX460 design, which is its current Fermi-based competitor. It's also not as compact, but it still runs cool and doesn't use as much power as its direct ATI performance twin, the HD 5850. It is however, simpler and less costly to produce than the GTX470, which is also its near neighbor in terms of performance, if not price. In the next section, let's take a more detailed look at some of the new components on this non-reference board. I did a full tear-down, so we could see everything there is to see... PowerColor PCS+ HD 6870 Detailed FeaturesThe full PWM-based voltage regulator section that supplies power to the HD 6870 GPU is shown here. It is a 4-phase design that is controlled by a relatively new chip: the CHL8214 from CHiL Semiconductor Corporation. It is a dual-loop digital multi-phase buck controller specifically designed for GPU voltage regulation. Dynamic voltage control is programmable through the I2C protocol. CHil's first big design win in the graphics market was with a slightly meatier 6-phase chip in the GTX480 Fermi card, a power monster if there ever was one. The CHL8214 is a 4+1 design, but I don't see where the "extra" controller loop is used. It looks like the sense inputs for the "+1" controller are just tied to ground.
MSI is now supporting voltage control for the CHL8214 with their Afterburner software; it was only a matter of time before it was included. When the HD 6870 was first released, Alexey Nicolaychuk, the creator of RivaTuner, said "Development is in progress." It didn't take very long at all, less than a month for it to appear in a beta release. This is one of the advantages PowerColor got when it based their new design on the reference board; quick access to first-class monitoring and control software.
The VRM section also features another new chip in this application space; a DrMOS design from Texas Instruments that includes both the driver transistors and the High-Low MOSFET pair in one tightly integrated package. It's positioned right above the R22 chokes in the image above. It's a very small device, with markings of 59901M, and it's so new I can't find any specs for it. It has a bit of a reputation already though, as it is being blamed for the production delays of the AMD 6900 series cards. Apparently, it is in short supply for some unexpected reason, so AMD and their AIB partners had to do a fast workaround to get the Radeon HD6970 and HD6950 cards to market. It saves a huge amount of board space, which is critical in this unusual layout, where the designers have moved the VRM section to the flip side of where it's usually located; it is now situated between the GPU and the output connectors. A full complement of discrete MOSFETs and drivers for low side and high side circuits would not have fit in this area of the board.
This new DrMOS chip is considerably smaller than previous parts. It's only 6mm x 5mm, where some earlier DrMOS chips were 8mm x 8mm. It doesn't sound like such a big change, but the new part has less than half the surface area (30mm2 v. 64mm2). There is a single heatsink for the DrMOS chips, that's a custom design for this card. Look at the asymmetry of the layout, and you can see why this is not an off-the-shelf part. The foam heat transfer tape is thinner than most types I see lately, which improves its performance. By using a small, dedicated heat sink, the dimensional fit-up errors can be reduced, allowing a thinner tape to be used. The HD 6870 reference design has the DrMOS chips interfacing with the full-length carrier plate that covers the whole surface of the card. There is no (economical) way to make that large casting as precise as this small part.
The PC board had excellent solder quality and reasonably good precision on component placement, as can be seen below. This is the area on the back side of the board, directly below the GPU, and it's one of the most crowded sections of any graphics card. On my LCD screen, this image is magnified 20X, compared to what the naked eye sees. The small SMD capacitors located side-by-side in this view are placed on 1mm centers. This is one of the most critical sections of the PCB for build quality, as variations in stray capacitance here could impact the performance of the GPU, and certainly its overclocking ability.
This board was above average for cleanliness, compared to some of the samples I've looked at recently. There were some traces of residue across different sections of the board, but they weren't excessive. Once you start looking at macro photographs like this, there's no place for any manufacturing shortcuts to hide. All manufacturers are under intense pressure to minimize the environmental impact of their operations, and cleaning processes have historically produced some of the most prolific and toxic industrial waste streams. The combination of eco-friendly solvents, lead-free solder, and smaller SMD components have made cleaning of electronic assemblies much more difficult than it used to be.
The memory choice for the PowerColor PCS+ HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 is consistent with the AMD reference designs. The basic Radeon HD 6870 specs only require 1050 MHz chips for the memory, but these Hynix H5GQ1H24AFR-T2C GDDR5 parts are designed for up to 1250 MHz. The 1250 MHz Samsung chips on the HD 5xxx series of Radeon cards have been mediocre overclockers; we'll have to see if these Hynix parts are a little more willing to exceed their ratings. Let's dig a little deeper inside the Features and Specifications of the Radeon HD 6870 GPU, before we get into full-on test mode... AMD Radeon HD 6870 GPU FeaturesThe AMD Radeon HD 6870 GPU contained in the PowerColor HD 6870 PCS+ video card has all of the major technologies that the Radeon 5xxx cards have had since last September. AMD has added several new features, however. The most important ones are: the new Morphological Anti-aliasing, the two DisplayPort 1.2 connections that support four monitors between them, 3rd generation UVD video acceleration, and AMD HD3D technology. In case you are just starting your research for a new graphics card, here is the complete list of standard GPU features, as supplied by AMD:
AMD RadeonTM HD 6870 GPU Feature Summary:
Now, here are the usual disclaimers:2010 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All rights reserved. AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, Catalyst, CrossFireX, PowerPlay, Radeon and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Microsoft, Windows, Windows Vista, and DirectX are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the U.S. and/or other jurisdictions. PCI Express is a registered trademark of PCI-SIG. Other names are for informational purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective owners. Additional hardware (e.g. Blu-ray drive, HD or 10-bit monitor, TV tuner) and/or software (e.g. multimedia applications) are required for the full enablement of some features. Not all features may be supported on all components or systems - check with your component or system manufacturer for specific model capabilities and supported technologies.
AMD Radeon HD 6870 GPU Detail Specifications
 GPU Engine Specs for PowerColor HD 6870 PCS+:
Memory Specs:
Display Support:
Standard Graphics Card Dimensions:
Source:AMD.com and PowerColor.com Now that we've had the grand tour of the PowerColor PCS+ HD 6870, inside and out, it's time to put it to the test. Well, Benchmark is our first name, so don't worry. There are a wide variety of tests waiting for you in the next several sections, including some new entries. Let's start off with a complete description of the Video Card Testing Methodology. Video Card Testing MethodologyWith the widespread adoption of Windows7 in the marketplace, and given the prolonged and extensive pre-release testing that occurred on a global scale, there are compelling reasons to switch all testing to this highly anticipated, operating system. Overall performance levels of Windows 7 are favorable compared to Windows XP, and there is solid support for the 64-bit version, something enthusiasts have anxiously awaited for years. After almost a year of product testing with Win7-64, I can vouch for its stability and performance; I can't think of any reasons why I would want to switch back to XP. Our site polls and statistics indicate that the over 90% of our visitors use their PC for playing video games, and practically every one of you are using a screen resolutions mentioned below. Since all of the benchmarks we use for testing represent different game engine technology and graphic rendering processes, this battery of tests will provide a diverse range of results for you to gauge performance on your own computer system. All of the benchmark applications are capable of utilizing DirectX 10 or DirectX 11, and that is how they were tested. Some of these benchmarks have been used widely for DirectX 9 testing in the XP environment, and it is critically important to differentiate between results obtained with different versions. Each game behaves differently in DX9 and DX10 formats. Crysis is an extreme example, with frame rates in DirectX 10 only about half what was available in DirectX 9. At the start of all tests, the previous display adapter driver is uninstalled and trace components are removed using Driver Cleaner Pro. We then restart the computer system to establish our display settings and define the monitor. Once the hardware is prepared, we begin our testing. According to the Steam Hardware Survey published at the time of Windows 7 launch, the most popular gaming resolution is 1280x1024 (17-19" standard LCD monitors) closely followed by 1024x768 (15-17" standard LCD). However, because these resolutions are considered 'low' by most standards, our benchmark performance tests concentrate on the up-and-coming higher-demand resolutions: 1680x1050 (22-24" widescreen LCD) and 1920x1200 (24-28" widescreen LCD monitors). Each benchmark test program begins after a system restart, and the very first result for every test will be ignored since it often only caches the test. This process proved extremely important in several benchmarks, as the first run served to cache maps allowing subsequent tests to perform much better than the first. Each test is completed five times, the high and low results are discarded, and the average of the three remaining results is displayed in our article. A combination of synthetic and video game benchmark tests have been used in this article to illustrate relative performance among graphics solutions. Our benchmark frame rate results are not intended to represent real-world graphics performance, as this experience would change based on supporting hardware and the perception of individuals playing the video game.
Intel P55 Express Test System
DirectX 9/10 Benchmark Applications
DirectX 11 Benchmark Applications
Video Card Test Products
3DMark Vantage Performance Tests3DMark Vantage is a computer benchmark by Futuremark (formerly named Mad Onion) to determine the DirectX 10 performance of 3D game performance with graphics cards. A 3DMark score is an overall measure of your system's 3D gaming capabilities, based on comprehensive real-time 3D graphics and processor tests. By comparing your score with those submitted by millions of other gamers you can see how your gaming rig performs, making it easier to choose the most effective upgrades or finding other ways to optimize your system. There are two graphics tests in 3DMark Vantage: Jane Nash (Graphics Test 1) and New Calico (Graphics Test 2). The Jane Nash test scene represents a large indoor game scene with complex character rigs, physical GPU simulations, multiple dynamic lights, and complex surface lighting models. It uses several hierarchical rendering steps, including for water reflection and refraction, and physics simulation collision map rendering. The New Calico test scene represents a vast space scene with lots of moving but rigid objects and special content like a huge planet and a dense asteroid belt. At Benchmark Reviews, we believe that synthetic benchmark tools are just as valuable as video games, but only so long as you're comparing apples to apples. Since the same test is applied in the same controlled method with each test run, 3DMark is a reliable tool for comparing graphic cards against one-another. 1680x1050 is rapidly becoming the new 1280x1024. More and more widescreen are being sold with new systems or as upgrades to existing ones. Even in tough economic times, the tide cannot be turned back; screen resolution and size will continue to creep up. Using this resolution as a starting point, the maximum settings were applied to 3DMark Vantage include 8x Anti-Aliasing, 16x Anisotropic Filtering, all quality levels at Extreme, and Post Processing Scale at 1:2. 3DMark Vantage GPU Test: Jane Nash
Our first test shows the single HD 6870 clearly besting the GTX460 and slotting in about 15% below the HD 5870 in this synthetic test. This "replacement" card does quite a bit more than fill the same slot occupied by the HD 5770, but its lack of shaders compared to the HD 5870 shows here. The GTX480 beats it by at least 10 FPS, as it should for the price difference. All of the dual-GPU pairs beat the fastest single-GPU cards, by a big margin. The GTX 460 SLI combo really stands out here, a matched pair of MSI Cyclone cards, with the mild factory OC of 725MHz on the core. You can see the advantage the GF104 GPU has over the first Fermi chips, which has now been ported over to the GF110 GPU in the new 5xx series from NVIDIA. Even though CrossFireX frequently gets compared unfavorably to SLI, it does a good job scaling here, keeping the dual 6870 cards ahead of the GTX460 SLI pair.
At 1920x1200 native resolution, things are much the same as the lower screen size; just the absolute values are lower, the ranking stays the same. Only the sub-$300 cards seemed choppy at times, as they didn't come close enough to the 30 FPS visual barrier. There is quite a price range represented here, from a low of $210 on the left to a high of $580 on the right. Oddly enough, if you take the e-tail prices and divide them by ten, you get a rough estimate of the frame rate in this benchmark. Let's take a look at test #2 now, which has a lot more surfaces to render, with all those asteroids flying around the doomed planet New Calico. 3DMark Vantage GPU Test: New Calico
In the medium resolution New Calico test, the MSI N460GTX Cyclone does so well that it basically ties with the PowerColor HD 6870 PCS+ in both single-GPU form and in SLI. The HD 6870 is also a few paces behind the HD 5870, with the reduced number of shaders the likely factor. The GTX460 seems to get a boost from this benchmark. It takes a $400 graphics solution to get over 30 FPS in this 1680x1050 benchmark, which shows how tough this medium resolution test really is. With two cards running in tandem though, you are well over the hump.
At the higher screen resolution of 1920x1200, the HD 6870 ends up in a virtual tie with the 1GB GTX460 again. The GTX 460 SLI set also kicks butt one more time, and just barely edges out the HD 6870 CrossFireX pair. The HD 5870 continues to do well in this test, and the GTX 480 does, too. This benchmark suite may have recently been replaced with DX11-based tests, but in the fading days of DX10 it has been a very reliable and challenging benchmark for high-end video cards. We need to look at some actual gaming performance to verify these results, so let's take a look in the next section, at how these cards stack up in the standard bearer for DX10 gaming benchmarks, Crysis.
Crysis Performance TestsCrysis uses a new graphics engine: the CryENGINE2, which is the successor to Far Cry's CryENGINE. CryENGINE2 is among the first engines to use the Direct3D 10 (DirectX 10) framework, but can also run using DirectX 9, on Vista, Windows XP and the new Windows 7. As we'll see, there are significant frame rate reductions when running Crysis in DX10. It's not an operating system issue, DX9 works fine in WIN7, but DX10 knocks the frame rates in half. Roy Taylor, Vice President of Content Relations at NVIDIA, has spoken on the subject of the engine's complexity, stating that Crysis has over a million lines of code, 1GB of texture data, and 85,000 shaders. To get the most out of modern multicore processor architectures, CPU intensive subsystems of CryENGINE2 such as physics, networking and sound, have been re-written to support multi-threading. Crysis offers an in-game benchmark tool, which is similar to World in Conflict. This short test does place some high amounts of stress on a graphics card, since there are so many landscape features rendered. For benchmarking purposes, Crysis can mean trouble as it places a high demand on both GPU and CPU resources. Benchmark Reviews uses the Crysis Benchmark Tool by Mad Boris to test frame rates in batches, which allows the results of many tests to be averaged. Low-resolution testing allows the graphics processor to plateau its maximum output performance, and shifts demand onto the other system components. At the lower resolutions Crysis will reflect the GPU's top-end speed in the composite score, indicating full-throttle performance with little load. This makes for a less GPU-dependant test environment, but it is sometimes helpful in creating a baseline for measuring maximum output performance. At the 1280x1024 resolution used by 17" and 19" monitors, the CPU and memory have too much influence on the results to be used in a video card test. At the widescreen resolutions of 1680x1050 and 1900x1200, the performance differences between video cards under test are mostly down to the cards themselves, but there is still some influence by the rest of the system components.
With medium screen resolution and no MSAA dialed in, Crysis shows a completely different picture than 3DMark. Unlike many so-called TWIMTBP titles, Crysis has always run quite well on the ATI architecture, and the Radeon HD 6870 is able to put some distance between it and the GTX460. The GTX 460 SLI pair, with the little GF104 chip, comes out on top here, but it's not very competitive cost-wise. The HD 5870 and the GTX480 are roughly equal here, which should tell you a little bit about how well AMD does in a Crysis. Crysis is one of those few games that stress the CPU almost as much as the GPU. As we increase the load on the graphics card, with higher resolution and AA processing, the situation may change. Remember all the test results in this article are with maximum allowable image quality settings, plus all the performance numbers in Crysis took a major hit when Benchmark Reviews switched over to the DirectX 10 API for all our testing. None of the cards are struggling at these low settings, though. You may have noticed that the CrossFireX combinations are missing from these results, and that is because I couldn't get meaningful results with that arrangement. Try as I might, the results were all over the place, and I just didn't trust them. All the single-GPU results were very consistent, like they normally are with this test.
At 1900 x 1200 resolution, the relative rankings stay the same; the raw numbers just go down. Even with the increased load on the GPU, every card from the HD 6870 on up still gets over the 30FPS hump convincingly. Any of these high-end GPUs can muster up the muscle to play Crysis at high resolution with all the bells and whistles turned on, much to everyone's relief. Can it play Crysis? Yes.
Now let's turn up the heat a bit on the ROP units, and add some Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing. With 4x MSAA cranked in, the top cards lose about 5 FPS at 1680x1050 screen resolution but they manage to stay well above the 30 FPS line. The PowerColor PCS+ HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 keeps its lead over the GTX460 and stays within hailing distance of the HD 5870. The Gigabyte GTX 480 SOC has also managed to do quite well. It even keeps up with the GTX 460 SLI pair, which has the advantage of the second generation Fermi GPU, and 672 CUDA cores between the two of them.
This is one of our toughest tests, at 1900 x 1200, maximum quality levels, and 4x AA. Only one GPU drops below 30 FPS in this test, which is unbelievable when I think back to the first days of DirectX 10 testing with Crysis. In the middle ranges, the HD 6870 hangs close to the performance leaders, and pushes the GTX 460 out of the running. Even a massive overclock on the GTX 460 won't come up even with the HD 6870 on this test. I ran the MSI GTX460 HAWK at 950 MHz core clock last month, and it only got 26 FPS at these settings. On this, the toughest of the four benchmark configurations, the GTX 480 SOC finally edges out an overall win and shows its thoroughbred pedigree. Our next test is a relatively new one for Benchmark Reviews. It's a DirectX 10 game with all the stops pulled out. Just Cause 2 uses a brand new game engine called Avalanche Engine 2.0, which enabled the developers to create games of epic scale and with great variation across genres and artistic styles, for the next generation of gaming experiences. Sounds like fun, let's take a look...
Just Cause 2 Performance Tests"Just Cause 2 sets a new benchmark in free-roaming games with one of the most fun and entertaining sandboxes ever created," said Lee Singleton, General Manager of Square Enix London Studios. "It's the largest free-roaming action game yet with over 400 square miles of Panaun paradise to explore, and its 'go anywhere, do anything' attitude is unparalleled in the genre." In his interview with IGN, Peter Johansson, the lead designer on Just Cause 2 said, "The Avalanche Engine 2.0 is no longer held back by having to be compatible with last generation hardware. There are improvements all over - higher resolution textures, more detailed characters and vehicles, a new animation system and so on. Moving seamlessly between these different environments, without any delay for loading, is quite a unique feeling."
Just Cause 2 is one of those rare instances where the real game play looks even better than the benchmark scenes. It's amazing to me how well the graphics engine copes with the demands of an open world style of play. One minute you are diving through the jungles, the next you're diving off a cliff, hooking yourself to a passing airplane, and parasailing onto the roof of a hi-rise building. The ability of the Avalanche Engine 2.0 to respond seamlessly to these kinds of dramatic switches is quite impressive. It's not DX11 and there's no tessellation, but the scenery goes by so fast there's no chance to study it in much detail anyway. Although we didn't use the feature in our testing, in order to equalize the graphics environment between NVIDIA and ATI, the GPU water simulation is a standout visual feature that rivals DirectX 11 techniques for realism. There's a lot of water in the environment, which is based around an imaginary Southeast Asian island nation, and it always looks right. The simulation routines use the CUDA functions in the Fermi architecture to calculate all the water displacements, and those functions are obviously not available when using an ATI-based video card. The same goes for the Bokeh setting, which is an obscure Japanese term for out-of-focus rendering. Neither of these techniques uses PhysX, but they do use specific computing functions that are only supported by NVIDIA's proprietary CUDA architecture. There are three scenes available for the in-game benchmark, and I used the last one, "Concrete Jungle" because it was the toughest and it also produced the most consistent results. That combination made it an easy choice for the test environment. All Advanced Display Settings were set to their highest level, and Motion Blur was turned on, as well.
The results for the Just Cause 2 benchmark look similar to the ones we saw for 3DMark, with one or two exceptions. While I'm getting used to the GTX 460 SLI pair popping up above its nearest neighbors, the HD 6870 CrossFireX set really shines in this test as well. They take the top spot, despite being $100 cheaper than a pair of HD 5870 cards. The Gigabyte GTX 480 SOC hangs a little closer to the 460s in SLI here, despite being at a severe disadvantage in the number of CUDA cores. On the whole, I'd call this a pretty well behaved benchmark, and the game's a blast, too. Let's take a look at one of the newer titles, that oddly enough uses DirectX 9 for its basis. The combination of PhysX, DX9, and SSAO packs quite a visual punch. 2K Games gives us an impressive blend of modern graphics technology and classic crime scenes, called Mafia II.
Mafia II DX9+SSAO Benchmark ResultsMafia II is a single-player third-person action shooter developed by 2K Czech for 2K Games, and is the sequel to Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven released in 2002. Players assume the life of World War II veteran Vito Scaletta, the son of small Sicilian family who immigrates to Empire Bay. Growing up in the slums of Empire Bay teaches Vito about crime, and he's forced to join the Army in lieu of jail time. After sustaining wounds in the war, Vito returns home and quickly finds trouble as he again partners with his childhood friend and accomplice Joe Barbaro. Vito and Joe combine their passion for fame and riches to take on the city, and work their way to the top in Mafia II. Mafia II is a DirectX 9 PC video game built on 2K Czech's proprietary Illusion game engine, which succeeds the LS3D game engine used in Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven. In our Mafia-II Video Game Performance article, Benchmark Reviews explored characters and gameplay while illustrating how well this game delivers APEX PhysX features on both AMD and NVIDIA products. Thanks to APEX PhysX extensions that can be processed by the system's CPU, Mafia II offers gamers equal access to high-detail physics regardless of video card manufacturer. Equal access is not the same thing as equal performance, though. With PhysX technology turned off, both AMD and NVIDIA are on a level playing field in this test. In contrast to many gaming scenes, where other-worldly characters and environments allow the designers to amp up the detail, Mafia II uses human beings wearing ordinary period-correct clothes and natural scenery. Just like how high end audio equipment is easiest to judge using that most familiar of sounds - the human voice, graphics hardware is really put to the test when rendering things that we have real experience with. The drape of a wool overcoat is a deceptively simple construct; easy to understand and implement, but very difficult to get perfect.
This test shows a more linear trend, in terms of performance v. cost. Many of the prior tests had more of a "step" function, which is what you might expect when comparing single and dual-GPU configurations of the same cards. By arranging the cards in price-order, from left to right in the chart, you expect the bars to rise evenly as you progress up the pricing ladder. The fact that they do so in such a linear manner in this test indicates to me that this game is equally suited to either AMD or NVIDIA solutions. Given the fact that Mafia II makes excellent use of PhysX and 3D as described in our NVIDIA APEX PhysX Efficiency: CPU vs GPU article, both areas where NVIDIA has an edge, some of you are probably howling at that statement. But, except for the typical bump in the chart for the GTX 460 SLI, the results do scale pretty well with price.
At the higher screen resolution of 1920x1200, the NVIDIA cards start to lose some ground relative to the ATI clan. For a game clearly developed using NVIDIA hardware, it surprises me a bit to see the Radeon series doing so well. Of course, I DO miss the PhysX features, which are always turned off during comparison testing. Since Mafia II can't rely on tessellation for enhancing realism, it leans heavily on PhysX. If tessellation were in the mix, the new and improved tessellation engines in the HD 6870 and the GTX460 would be pushing those numbers up. Here is a game where brute force, meaning the number of shader processors, pays off. Our next benchmark of the series is not for the faint of heart. Lions and tiger - OK, fine. Guys with guns - I can deal with that. But those nasty little spiders......NOOOOOO! How did I get stuck in the middle of a deadly fight between Aliens vs. Predator anyway? Check out the results from one of our toughest new DirectX 11 benchmarks in the next section.
Aliens vs. Predator Test ResultsRebellion, SEGA and Twentieth Century FOX have released the Aliens vs. Predator DirectX 11 Benchmark to the public. As with many of the already released DirectX 11 benchmarks, the Aliens vs. Predator DirectX 11 benchmark leverages your DirectX 11 hardware to provide an immersive game play experience through the use of DirectX 11 Tessellation and DirectX 11 Advanced Shadow features.
In Aliens vs. Predator, DirectX 11 Geometry Tessellation is applied in an effective manner to enhance and more accurately depict HR Giger's famous Alien design. Through the use of a variety of adaptive schemes, applying tessellation when and where it is necessary, the perfect blend of performance and visual fidelity is achieved with at most a 4% change in performance. DirectX 11 hardware also allows for higher quality, smoother and more natural looking shadows as well. DirectX 11 Advanced Shadows allow for the rendering of high-quality shadows, with smoother, artifact-free penumbra regions, which otherwise could not be realized, again providing for a higher quality, more immersive gaming experience. Benchmark Reviews is committed to pushing the PC graphics envelope, and whenever possible we configure benchmark software to its maximum settings for our tests. In the case of Aliens vs. Predator, all cards were tested with the following settings: Texture Quality-Very High, Shadow Quality-High, HW Tessellation & Advanced Shadow Sampling-ON, Multi Sample Anti-Aliasing-4x, Anisotropic Filtering-16x, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)-ON. You will see that this is a challenging benchmark, with all the settings turned up and a screen resolution of 1920 x 1200; it takes an HD5870 card to achieve an average frame rate higher than 30FPS.
Now we get into the full DirectX 11 only benchmarks, so we're looking at the full potential for graphics rendering that's available on only the latest generation of video cards. AvP is a tough benchmark, but it has been a fair one so far, and it's very useful for testing the newest graphics hardware. The relatively high frame rates you see above are a testament to the very high performance of the latest and greatest cards, especially when paired up in SLI or CrossFireX. The GTX 460 SLI pair works its CUDA magic again and provides class-leading performance, but a pair of HD 6870 cards in CrossFireX provides 13% higher frame rates. The GTX 480 SOC turns in a good performance at 41.4 FPS, 22% higher than the ATI HD 5870, but it's no match for the multi-GPU choices. On this test, when using anything less than the top hardware, some scenes have a jumpy quality to them. This was only evident on the MSI N460GTX Cyclone and the PowerColor PCS+ HD6870, which picked up the two lowest slots, even with their enhanced tessellation muscle. This game needs shaders more than tessellation, as the performance of the GTX 460 SLI proves, with 672 CUDA Cores on the job. In our next section, Benchmark Reviews looks at one of the newest and most popular games, Battlefield: Bad Company 2. The game lacks a dedicated benchmarking tool, so we'll be using FRAPS to measure frame rates within portions of the game itself.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Test ResultsThe Battlefield franchise has been known to demand a lot from PC graphics hardware. DICE (Digital Illusions CE) has incorporated their Frostbite-1.5 game engine with Destruction-2.0 feature set with Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 features destructible environments using Frostbit Destruction-2.0, and adds gravitational bullet drop effects for projectiles shot from weapons at a long distance. The Frostbite-1.5 game engine used on Battlefield: Bad Company 2 consists of DirectX-10 primary graphics, with improved performance and softened dynamic shadows added for DirectX-11 users. At the time Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was published, DICE was also working on the Frostbite-2.0 game engine. This upcoming engine will include native support for DirectX-10.1 and DirectX-11, as well as parallelized processing support for 2-8 parallel threads. This will improve performance for users with an Intel Core-i7 processor. In our benchmark tests of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the first three minutes of action in the single-player raft night scene are captured with FRAPS. Relative to the online multiplayer action, these frame rate results are nearly identical to daytime maps with the same video settings.
Both the GTX 460 SLI and the HD 6870 CrossFireX rise above their immediate neighbors, and provide the best bang for the buck in this game. In the single-GPU arena, the PowerColor PCS+ HD6870 sits about halfway between the GTX460 and the Radeon HD 5870. This is not as tough a benchmark as some others; the developers trod a fine line between juicing up the visuals and keeping the performance levels up. As much as people may Oooh and Aaah over some newer titles like Mafia II that have more exacting graphics, no one is complaining about the look and feel of BF:BC2. This benchmark does not utilize tessellation, so as in our DX10 testing, the strength of the newest GPUs in this area are not having an impact here. Don't worry; we'll see some results later that will show clear differences between the generations with some tessellation-heavy titles. The little-documented feature in the basic game setup, which allows the application to choose which DirectX API it uses during the session, is not a factor here. All of the tested cards here are DX11-capable, and the game was running in DX11 mode for all the test results reported here. Even though this is primarily developed as a DX10 game, there are DX11 features incorporated in BF:BC2, like softened shadows. That one visual enhancement takes a small, but measureable toll on frame rates. It doesn't have as big an impact as aggressive use of tessellation would, either from the visuals standpoint or the computing perspective. In the next section we use one of my favorite games, DiRT-2, to look at DX11 performance. Life isn't ALL about shooting aliens; sometimes you just need to get out of the city and drive...!
DiRT-2 Demo DX11 Benchmark ResultsDiRT-2 features a roster of contemporary off-road events, taking players to diverse and challenging real-world environments. This World Tour has players competing in aggressive multi-car, and intense solo races at extraordinary new locations. Everything from canyon racing and jungle trails to city stadium-based events. Span the globe as players unlock tours in stunning locations spread across the face of the world. USA, Japan, Malaysia, Baja Mexico, Croatia, London, and more venues await, as players climb to the pinnacle of modern competitive off-road racing. 
Multiple disciplines are featured; encompassing the very best that modern off-roading has to offer. Powered by the third generation of the EGOTM Engine's award-winning racing game technology, DiRT-2 benefits from tuned-up car-handling physics and new damaged engine effects. It showcases a spectacular new level of visual fidelity, with cars and tracks twice as detailed as those seen in GRID. The DiRT-2 garage houses a collection of officially licensed rally cars and off-road vehicles, specifically selected to deliver aggressive and fast paced racing. Covering seven vehicle classes, players are given the keys to powerful vehicles right away. In DiRT-2 the opening drive is the Group N Subaru, essentially making the ultimate car from the original game the starting point in the sequel, and the rides just get even more impressive as you rack up points.
The primary contribution that DirectX-11 makes to the DiRT-2 Demo benchmark is in the way water is displayed when a car is passing through it, and in the way cloth items are rendered. The water graphics are pretty obvious, and there are several places in the Moroccan race scene where cars are plowing through large and small puddles. Each one is unique, and they are all believable, especially when more than one car is in the scene. The cloth effects are not as obvious, except in the slower-moving menu screens; when there is a race on, there's precious little time to notice the realistic furls in a course-side flag. I should also note that the flags are much more noticeable in the actual game than in the demo, so they do add a little more to the realism there, that is absent from the benchmark. On a side note, I appreciate the fact that the demo's built-in benchmark has variable game play. I know its lame, but I most always watch it intently, just to see how well "my" car is being driven. So far, my finest telekinetic efforts have yielded a best finish of second place!
The race winner is the GTX460 SLI combo again; imagine my shock and disbelief... For a title that was developed on AMD hardware, this is a somewhat surprising result, or it would be if I hadn't already seen the GTX460 pick a fight with every high end card it encountered. The HD 6870 and HD 5870 results look pretty lackluster here, as this is the first time the GTX 480 SOC is able to beat out both of the CrossFireX solutions, each of which costs more than the single GTX 480 video card. Fortunately, every setup I tested with here did a great job rendering all of the various scenes. As I said above, this is one of my favorite games, and I can confirm that the results above are not far off from real gameplay. There has been some concern in the community about the veracity of the Demo Benchmark compared to the in-game one, and/or FRAPS results. Despite that, I like to use the Demo version because everyone has access to it, and can easily compare results obtained with their own hardware. In the next section we'll take a look at one of the newest benchmarking tools, H.A.W.X. 2. It's a high flying aerial adventure filled with lots of tessellated terrain, blown-up airplane bits, and masses of blue sky as a background.
H.A.W.X. 2 DX11 Benchmark ResultsH.A.W.X. 2 has been optimized for DX11 enabled GPUs and has a number of enhancements to not only improve performance with DX11 enabled GPUs but also greatly improve the visual experience while taking to the skies.
The H.A.W.X.2 benchmark test is not quite the tessellation monster that Unigine Heaven is. It is supposed to represent an actual game, after all. However, the developers have taken full advantage of the DirectX 11 technology to pump up the realism in this new title. The scenery on the ground in particular is very detailed and vividly portrayed, and there's a lot of it that goes by the window of the F-22 Raptor that is your point of view. The blue sky, not so much.... The enhanced ability of the newest GPU designs to handle tessellation is quite evident here. Both the Fermi and Barts GPU win the battle against other comparable cards. The big surprise is the relative failure of the GTX 460 SLI pair to scale properly. I didn't have other SLI combinations to try and see if this was strictly a GTX 460 issue, or whether all SLI configurations would be affected. This benchmark was launched by NVIDIA and AMD had limited access during game development, so they were pretty far behind with regard to drivers. This test was run with the latest v10.12 Hotfix A drivers and each of the Radeon cards got about a 10 FPS boost compared to last month's performance. The GTX 480 ends up on the top of the pile in this test, because it doesn't do anything wrong. My guess is that once the GTX460 SLI gets its act together, it will out climb the GTX 480, though. Let's take a look at another DX11 benchmark, a fast-paced scenario on a Lost Planet called E.D.N. III. The dense vegetation in "Test A" is almost as challenging as it was in Crysis, and now we have tessellation and soft shadows thrown into the mix via DirectX 11.
Lost Planet 2 DX11 Benchmark ResultsA decade has passed since the first game, and the face of E.D.N. III has changed dramatically. Terra forming efforts have been successful and the ice has begun to melt, giving way to lush tropical jungles and harsh unforgiving deserts. Players will enter this new environment and follow the exploits of their own customized snow pirate on their quest to seize control of the changing planet.
Test A:The primary purpose of Test A is to give an indication of typical game play performance of the PC running Lost Planet 2 (i.e. if you can run Mode A smoothly, the game will be playable at a similar condition). In this test, the character's motion is randomized to give a slightly different outcome each time.
In Test A of Lost Planet 2, we see a familiar pattern. That is, the newest games are implementing the latest software technology and the newest graphics cards are optimized to handle exactly that. The HD 6870 actually does a bit better than the HD 5870 and the GTX 460 ran well in both single card mode and SLI. I saw one or two "slowdowns" during the test with the AMD cards that didn't occur with the NVIDIA products. They remained during the second and third runs of the benchmark, so it wasn't a "map loading" issue. It occurs at the beginning of scene two which is the most demanding, no matter what card is installed. In fact it's usually tougher than Test B. For simplicity's sake, we are reporting the average result, as calculated by the benchmark application. It is not an average of the individual scores reported for the three scenes. I'm sure there will be further optimizations as time marches on, but right now we have an almost ideal gaming environment where the software and hardware are finally in sync. As long as you are happy with the story lines, characters, scoring systems, etc. of the new games, you can enjoy a level of realism and performance that was only hinted at with the first generation of DX11 software and hardware. I keep thinking of some of the early titles as "tweeners", as they were primarily developed using the DirectX 10 graphics API, and then some DX11 features were added right before the product was released. It was a nice glimpse into the technology, but the future is now. Test B:The primary purpose of Test B is to push the PC to its limits and to evaluate the maximum performance of the PC. It utilizes many functions of Direct X11 resulting in a very performance-orientated, very demanding benchmark mode.
Test B shows broadly similar ranking as Test A, but the GTX 480 SOC and the HD 5870 make a bit of a comeback. The sea monster (I can't quite say "River Monster" for some reason...it reminds me of River Dance) is a prime candidate for tessellation, and given the fact that it is in the foreground for most of the scene, the full level of detail is usually being displayed. The water effects also contribute to the graphics load in this test, making it just a little bit tougher than Test A. The single card results are very close, but the dual-GPU tests reveal that the Radeon HD6870 and the GeForce GTX480 have the best measure of this benchmark. In our next section, we are going to continue our DirectX 11 testing with a look at our most demanding DX11 benchmarks, straight from the depths of Moscow's underground rail system and the studios of 4A Games in Ukraine. Let's take a peek at what post-apocalyptic Moscow looks like in the year 2033.
METRO 2033 DX11 Benchmark ResultsMetro 2033 is an action-oriented video game with a combination of survival horror, and first-person shooter elements. The game is based on the novel Metro 2033 by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. It was developed by 4A Games in Ukraine and released in March 2010 for Microsoft Windows. Metro 2033 uses the 4A game engine, developed by 4A Games. The 4A Engine supports DirectX-9, 10, and 11, along with NVIDIA PhysX and GeForce 3D Vision. The 4A engine is multi-threaded in that only PhysX has a dedicated thread, and it uses a task-model without any pre-conditioning or pre/post-synchronizing, thus allowing tasks to be done in parallel. The 4A game engine can utilize a deferred shading pipeline, and uses tessellation for greater performance, and also has HDR (complete with blue shift), real-time reflections, color correction, film grain and noise, and the engine also supports multi-core rendering. Metro 2033 featured superior volumetric fog, double PhysX precision, object blur, sub-surface scattering for skin shaders, parallax mapping on all surfaces and greater geometric detail with a less aggressive LODs. Using PhysX, the engine uses many features such as destructible environments, and cloth and water simulations, and particles that can be fully affected by environmental factors.
NVIDIA has been diligently working to promote Metro 2033, and for good reason: it is the most demanding PC video game we've ever tested. When an overclocked GeForce GTX 480 struggles to produce 29 FPS, you know that only the strongest graphics processors will generate playable frame rates. All of my tests use the in-game benchmark that was added to the game as DLC earlier this year. Advanced Depth of Field and Tessellation effects are enabled, but the advanced PhysX option is disabled to provide equal load to both AMD and NVIDIA cards. All tests are run with 4x MSAA, which produces the highest load of the two anti-aliasing choices.
We're back to a step increase in performance again, when two cards are harnessed together. The GTX 460 pair gets the top spot again with an average frame rate of 31.6 FPS, and the GTX 480 SOC from Gigabyte holds down second place with a respectable 29.0 FPS. That may sound low, but METRO 2033 is a punishing graphics load, and that's a very good result for a single card. The PowerColor Radeon HD 6870 PCS+ does very well in both single and multi-GPU arrangements. It doesn't scale as well as the GTX460 does in SLI, a trait that also affects the HD 5870. Once again, PhysX is disabled for all testing, although it only extracted about a 2 FPS penalty when it was enabled with an NVIDIA card installed. IMHO, the minor hit in frame rates is fully justified in terms of the additional realism that PhysX imparts to the gameplay. It adds a lot more than any amount of anti-aliasing, no matter what type...
At the higher screen resolution of 1920x1200, the step gets a little smaller as the multi-GPU scaling factors lose some steam. Once that happens, the GTX 480 SOC has an advantage and it pulls down the top spot in this test by a margin of 7% over the second place finisher, a pair of HD 5870 cards running at stock clocks of 850/1200. These are barely playable frame rates; it takes a bigger card than we have in the mix today to play this game with all the stops pulled out. In our next section, we are going to complete our DirectX 11 testing with a look at an unusual DX11 benchmarks, straight from mother Russia and the studios of Unigine. Their latest benchmark is called "Heaven", and it has some very interesting and non-typical graphics. So, let's take a peek at what Heaven v2.1 looks like.
Unigine Heaven 2.1 Benchmark ResultsThe Unigine "Heaven 2.1" benchmark is a free, publicly available, tool that grants the power to unleash the graphics capabilities in DirectX 11 for Windows 7 or updated Vista Operating Systems. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. With the interactive mode, emerging experience of exploring the intricate world is within reach. Through its advanced renderer, Unigine is one of the first to set precedence in showcasing the art assets with tessellation, bringing compelling visual finesse, utilizing the technology to the full extend and exhibiting the possibilities of enriching 3D gaming. The distinguishing feature in the Unigine Heaven benchmark is a hardware tessellation that is a scalable technology aimed for automatic subdivision of polygons into smaller and finer pieces, so that developers can gain a more detailed look of their games almost free of charge in terms of performance. Thanks to this procedure, the elaboration of the rendered image finally approaches the boundary of veridical visual perception. The "Heaven" benchmark excels at the following key features:
Starting off with a lighter load of 4x MSAA, we see the Gigabyte GTX 480 SOC taking the single GPU crown by a large margin. Even in the "normal" tessellation mode, this is a graphics test that really shows off the full impact of this DirectX 11 technology. The Fermi architecture has so much more computing power designated and available for tessellation, that it's no small surprise to see the card doing so well here. The same goes for the GTX 460 SLI combo, which ekes out a first place finish in this test. The HD 6870, with its revamped tessellation engine, gets within striking distance of the HD 5870 in single-GPU mode and nips past it by less than one FPS when they're both in CrossFireX mode. I'm amazed that it does this with only the same number of shaders as the Radeon HD 5830. There is no jerkiness to the display with any of the multi-GPU pairs at this resolution; now that I've seen the landscape go by for a couple hundred times, I can spot the small stutters pretty easily. This test was run with 4x anti-aliasing; let's see how the cards stack up when we increase MSAA to the maximum level of 8x.
Increasing the anti-aliasing just improved the already convincing performance of the MSI N460GTX Cyclone, relative to all of the other cards. There's no denying that the Fermi chip, in its best interpretation yet: the GF104, is a killer when called upon for tessellation duty. The GTX 480 SOC also gains some in this test; it advances to second place in these rankings, compared to fourth place when we had MSAA cranked down to 4x. Besides the most obvious trend of the GTX 460 SLI grabbing first place more often than not, the other thing I've noticed is a consistent improvement in performance by the GTX 480 when the going gets tough. In our next section, we investigate the thermal performance of the PowerColor PCS+ HD6870 1GB GDDR5 video card, and see how well this non-reference cooler works on this new class of GPU that sits between the old Cypress and Juniper form factors.
PowerColor PCS+ HD 6870 TemperaturesIt's hard to know exactly when the first video card got overclocked, and by whom. What we do know is that it's hard to imagine a computer enthusiast or gamer today that doesn't overclock their hardware. Of course, not every video card has the head room. Some products run so hot that they can't suffer any higher temperatures than they generate straight from the factory. This is why we measure the operating temperature of the video card products we test. To begin testing, I use GPU-Z to measure the temperature at idle as reported by the GPU. Next I use FurMark 1.8.2 to generate maximum thermal load and record GPU temperatures at high-power 3D mode. The ambient room temperature remained stable at 24C throughout testing. I have a ton of airflow into the video card section of my benchmarking case, with a 200mm side fan blowing directly inward, so that helps alleviate any high ambient temps. The PowerColor PCS+ HD6870 1GB GDDR5 video card recorded 36C in idle mode, and increased to 82C after 30 minutes of stability testing in full 3D mode, at 1920x1200 resolution, and the maximum MSAA setting of 8X. With the fan set on Automatic, the speed rose to a meager 38% under full load. The idle fan speed is a very low 20%, which is too low in my opinion, especially since the axial fan is pretty much inaudible at the higher settings. I then did a run with manual fan control and 80 - 100% fan speed. I was rewarded by a modest increase in fan noise and a reduced load temperature of 69 - 71C.
82C is not a very good result for temperature stress testing, and it is a direct result of the manufacturer's decision to keep the fan speeds artificially low. I've become used to seeing video card manufacturers keeping the fan speeds low, especially with radial blower wheels that make a racket at higher speeds, but with a single axial fan there's really no point to doing that. You can knock 10+ degrees off the load temps by running the fan higher, which is what I recommend. Heat kills electronic components, and there's no joy in assisted suicide for your video card, plus the increase in noise is not too bad at full tilt. Most users will want to make custom software profiles to optimize the fan speeds for this non-reference design.
Load temps got up to a maximum of 76C when running continuous gaming benchmarks, with automatic fan speeds ramping up to 35% with the most challenging titles. This is fairly close to stress-test-maximums, so despite all the industry protests about using an extreme tool like FurMark for stress testing, it's doing a good job of emulating a real-world graphics load, IMHO. That temperature is higher than I like to see, but the chip can obviously take it. It's all the other components that I worry about. FurMark is an OpenGL benchmark that heavily stresses and overheats the graphics card with fur rendering. The benchmark offers several options allowing the user to tweak the rendering: fullscreen / windowed mode, MSAA selection, window size, duration. The benchmark also includes a GPU Burner mode (stability test). FurMark requires an OpenGL 2.0 compliant graphics card with lot of GPU power!
FurMark does do two things extremely well: drive the thermal output of any graphics processor higher than any other application or video game, and it does so with consistency every time. While FurMark is not a true benchmark tool for comparing different video cards, it still works well to compare one product against itself using different drivers or clock speeds, or testing the stability of a GPU, as it raises the temperatures higher than any program. But in the end, it's a rather limited tool. In our next section, we discuss electrical power consumption and learn how well (or poorly) each video card will impact your utility bill... VGA Power ConsumptionLife is not as affordable as it used to be, and items such as gasoline, natural gas, and electricity all top the list of resources which have exploded in price over the past few years. Add to this the limit of non-renewable resources compared to current demands, and you can see that the prices are only going to get worse. Planet Earth is needs our help, and needs it badly. With forests becoming barren of vegetation and snow capped poles quickly turning brown, the technology industry has a new attitude towards turning "green". I'll spare you the powerful marketing hype that gets sent from various manufacturers every day, and get right to the point: your computer hasn't been doing much to help save energy... at least up until now. Take a look at the idle clock rates that AMD programmed into the BIOS for this GPU; no special power-saving software utilities are required. This is not the bleeding edge of what the industry is doing today, in terms of speed throttling to save energy, but its close enough. I was running Catalyst Control Center at the time with Overdrive, so the memory clock is higher than the absolute minimum of 81 MHz. This is one of the reasons why a factory overclocked card is sometimes better than a DIY approach. Whether you're using the chip maker's software to overclock the GPU, like AMD's Catalyst Control Center, or a vendor's application like MSI Afterburner, there is often the possibility that the idle clocks will be affected. If you're running a multi-GPU setup, it gets even more complicated. Suffice it to say that the surest way to get the lowest possible idle power is to use a factory overclocked card and run it without any additional monitoring and control software.
To measure isolated video card power consumption, I used the Kill-A-Watt EZ (model P4460) power meter made by P3 International. A baseline test is taken without a video card installed inside our computer system, which is allowed to boot into Windows and rest idle at the login screen before power consumption is recorded. Once the baseline reading has been taken, the graphics card is installed and the system is again booted into Windows and left idle at the login screen. Our final loaded power consumption reading is taken with the video card running a stress test using FurMark. Below is a chart with the isolated video card power consumption (not system total) displayed in Watts for each specified test product:
* Results are accurate to within +/- 5W.
The PowerColor PCS+ HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 Video Card pulled 46 (168-122) watts at idle and 198 (320-122) watts when running full out, using the test method outlined above. The PowerColor PCS+ HD 6870 is on par with the first generation of 40nm ATI cards, as far as power consumption at load, and a little better at idle. The reduced idle clocks play a part in that, and the factory overclock provides the opposite effect in the slightly higher-than-reference power draw under fully loaded conditions. We've all become used to the low power ways of the newest processors, and there's no turning back. BTW, just because you asked... GPU-Z reported a GPU voltage of 0.945V at idle, 1.195V in 2D mode, and 1.195V in full 3D mode. Next, I'll offer you some final thoughts, and my conclusions. On to the next page... AMD Radeon HD 6870 Final ThoughtsEvery now and then, tech companies manage to pull a rabbit out of a hat. I don't know exactly how they do it, or else I'd be rich and famous, but I believe its equal parts chance and effort. I know that runs counter to the words of the great Thomas Edison, who certainly pulled out more than a few rabbits in his day. As a product reviewer, nothing makes us happier than having said rabbit delivered to our door via FedEx. It's great when you can be a material witness to the impossible dream. It's exciting, and it's contagious; everyone wants in on the act. Every time I get a new product to evaluate, I ask myself if this thing looks like a rabbit or a tortoise. Sorry to mix my metaphors, but a great deal of progress is also made by products that move the ball down the playing field ten yards at a time. I have a lot of respect for those products because sometimes it's tougher to make the next first down than it is to make the touchdown. By now, the story is perfectly crystallized: Barts, as in St. Barts, is an incremental product. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) failed to deliver the 32nm technology node to its customers on time. At some point they just gave up and decided to skip it altogether, leaving some major customers with a real problem on their hands. The holiday buying season waits for no man, so AMD punted and took what they knew about the 40nm fabrication process back to the drawing board. They had used very conservative design rules for their Radeon HD 5xxx series of GPUs, and with one year of production under their belt they knew where they could stretch the rules a bit and get away with it. They also knew that they had left a gaping hole in their product line at the upper end of the mid-market. So, they bit the bullet and renumbered the product line to slot some new cards in the gap that the HD 5830 had failed to fill. Just like that, the HD 6870 was created, or at least the concept for it. As I said in my reviews of the GTX460, that chip is really comparable to an HD 5850 from a technology standpoint, and NVIDIA chose to sell it at a price point that was occupied by a lesser model, the HD 5830. Sounds like a good marketing plan, especially since every Cypress-based card and every GF104-based card share the same cost structure. That cost is based strictly on the technology node, the manufacturing platform used to produce it, and the size of the die. Sure, you can add or subtract features, but the fundamental production costs are comparable for both chips, even if the performance is not. At the time I thought, "All ATI needs to do is lower prices on their midrange cards, and the compelling case of the GTX460 just goes away." Well, AMD has gone one better. Not only have they reduced the selling price for 5850-class performance, they've also reduced their production costs by achieving the same level of performance with a GPU die size that's about 30% smaller than a Cypress or GF104.
When NVIDIA designed the GTX460 reference card, they went for the simplest design and lowest part count in order to keep the cost down. I didn't see the same thinking with the Radeon HD 6870 reference design. To me, it looked more like a "halo" product; one that is meant to impress. I am definitely NOT the marketing guy, but I thought that role was reserved for the high-end product line. Now that the non-reference cards are out, we're seeing some simplification of the design, and some price drops. The GPU itself has a 30% cost advantage over the Cypress part, and now the rest of the video card's design has been pared down to match it. The other good thing that has happened is software control of the GPU core voltage. More than one vendor is offering support for voltage control, and so the HD 6870 can finally compete on equal terms with the GTX460. PowerColor PCS+ HD 6870 ConclusionIMPORTANT: Although the rating and final score mentioned in this conclusion are made to be as objective as possible, please be advised that every author perceives these factors differently at various points in time. While we each do our best to ensure that all aspects of the product are considered, there are often times unforeseen market conditions and manufacturer changes which occur after publication that could render our rating obsolete. Please do not base any purchase solely on our conclusion, as it represents our product rating specifically for the product tested which may differ from future versions. Benchmark Reviews begins our conclusion with a short summary for each of the areas that we rate. From a performance standpoint, this is a 5850-class card with the potential to cost 30% less. It convincingly distances itself from the Radeon HD 5830, which used to occupy this price point. In stock form, it competes well with sanely overclocked GTX460 cards, and in overclocked form, it's starting to reach its full potential. The HD 6870 and its companion the HD 6850 fill a large performance gap AMD had in the 5xxx product line. I'm much happier with PowerColor's PCS+ style cooling solution, compared to the reference design with its loud radial blower. I'm disappointed by the fan profile though, as it could have been much more aggressive without sacrificing much in the way of noise performance. I observed much higher operating temperatures than I like to see during normal gaming scenarios. The appearance of the PowerColor PCS+ HD 6870 1GB GDDR5 video card is very attractive; I'm even willing to give it a pass on the toy-car styling, just because it still looks good. The decorative touches are a bit over-the-top, but it actually looks more like a modern Batmobile than the HD5000 series cards did. The red PCB material is a PowerColor trademark and it is perfectly appropriate here. When installed in a typical ATX-style PC case, the fans point down towards the ground and you mostly see the back side of the board, so it will fit in perfectly in an AMD setting.
The build quality of the PowerColor PCS+ HD 6870 card was well above average, which is fine for this segment of the video card gaming market. The overall impression of the card was more high tech than solid, since the cooler isn't a dense block like some other cards. All the open space on the shroud takes away from the rigidity of the assembly. The packaging was good quality and reasonably informative and the box itself is smaller than some in this price segment, which is fine by me - less waste. I was very happy to see that the PC board was mostly clean and free from residue; PowerColor has definitely improved their manufacturing processes, or at least the vendor who builds cards for them has. The power supply used high quality parts, and followed the reference design for the most part. I imagine that the cooling system comes in at a lower overall cost than the reference design, but that's the only place I saw any form of cost cutting. I honestly thought the HD 6870 reference design cooler was too posh for the market segment, so this lower-cost design actually seems more appropriate. The basic features of the PowerColor PCS+ HD 6870 are mostly comparable with the latest offerings from both camps, but it lacks PhysX Technology, which is a real disappointment for some. The big news on the feature front is the new Morphological Anti-aliasing, the two DisplayPort 1.2 connections that support four monitors between them, 3rd generation UVD video acceleration, and AMD HD3D technology. That's quite a handful of new technologies to introduce at one time, and proof that it takes more than raw processing power to win over today's graphics card buyer. All the functional features of the reference card are present here, including the I2C compatibility of the main PWM controller for voltage control on the GPU. The only thing missing is reporting of the fan RPM, which is odd because the fan has a three-wire connection which indicates a tachometer output feeding back to the PCB. As of early January 2011, the price for the PowerColor PCS+ HD 6870 AX6870 1GBD5-PP2DH Video Card is $274.99 at NewEgg. This is for a bundle with a Power Jack, that props up the far end of the video card to prevent strain on the PCI Express connector. This particular card is so light, I don't think it really needs a Power Jack, but it certainly can't hurt. I've also seen the card elsewhere for $249.99, and you can always check our shopping app here at Benchmark Reviews to look for the best price. In contrast to some recent launches, where the price went up by $20-$30 a few weeks after the card hit the market, the Radeon HD 6870 cards seem to be holding steady, or dropping slightly. It's probably all a marketing mind game to keep the pricing of the rumored NVIDIA GTX560 down. The PowerColor PCS+ HD 6870 takes the best of the Radeon HD 5770 and the HD 5850 and creates a lower cost version that equals the old high-priced spread. It also takes the best from the reference design and leaves the negatives behind, at least in my opinion. One day someone will invent a silent radial blower; until then, I will almost always prefer cooler designs that use an axial fan. The exhaust fans on my PC case do a great job at removing hot air, negating the only real reason I see for sticking with the AMD reference design for cooling. Even in CrossFireX, I don't see differential heating as an issue, because I don't see it - period. Maybe if you don't have good airflow into the side of your case, or the exhaust is not strong enough, then you might have an issue. Most of us have overkill airflow in our gaming cases and it ceases to be an issue. Two months after its release, the Radeon HD 6870 is a viable alternative in its market segment. It hasn't pushed the NVIDIA offerings aside, and it never will at its current price, but now there are two really good choices in the upper midrange. Pros:
Cons:
- Cooling fan profile is too slow, 20% - 38% normal range Ratings:
Final Score: 8.85 out of 10.Quality Recognition: Benchmark Reviews Silver Tachometer Award.Questions? Comments? Benchmark Reviews really wants your feedback. We invite you to leave your remarks in our Discussion Forum.
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+ Quiet cooling system