AMD's Radeon HD 6790: Coming Up Short At $150
by Ryan Smith on April 5, 2011 12:01 AM ESTCivilization V
Civilization 5 is the latest incarnation in Firaxis Games’ series of turn-based strategy games. Civ 5 gives us an interesting look at things that not even RTSes can match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world, and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.
Civilization V is another title that we don’t use MSAA on at 1680 due to the game’s already low performance and the additional strain of MSAA. This works to the advantage of the 6790, giving it some of the best results relative to the 6850 of our entire test suite. Here the two cards are in fact virtually tied, and Barts’ improved tessellator gives it 20% over the 5770. However NVIDIA’s continued strong showing here means that the 6850 is largely tagging out for the GTX 460 768MB here, which is why the GTX 460 is nearly 20% ahead, and even the GTX 550 isn’t too far behind. If more games were like Civilization V the 6790 would be in better shape, but the rest of the Barts lineup wouldn’t be doing nearly as well.
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SquattingDog - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
"it's LEANING from the past..." should be it's LEARNING from the past. Otherwise a great article, very speedily put out. Looks to be an interesting card, depending on what pricing it is available at here. Of course the 6850/6870 are much better and the 6850 looks to be better bang for buck, but when people cannot squeeze a few extra bucks out of the wallet, it should be pretty reasonable. Especially once the GTX460s are out of circulation, which is bound to happen soon enough.Glad to see more competition and finally some products reaching further down in the retail sector not just OEM from AMD.
ZL1Corvette - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
2nd to last page possible typo:"Last but not least as always is our look at the power consumption, temperatures, and acoustics of the GTX 550 Ti."
Did you mean 6970?
ZL1Corvette - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
See, we all make mistakes. I meant 6790.stm1185 - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
800 Stream Procs, 40 Texture Units, 16 ROPs, 256 bit memory bus. Only the 6970 has a 840mhz clock compared to 750 mhz, and 1050mhz on the memory compared to 900mhz on the 4870.My card has held up well it seems.
james.jwb - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
I have a 4890 with a 2560x1440 screen, and to my surprise, i can play quite a few games at 30fps, and most older ones at 60+fps. Like F1 2010, around 50fps.What a card, eh?
WhatsTheDifference - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
hello. nice card. I play everything at 19x12 with my 4890 (in this case, an msi cyclone soc) with never a problem of any kind. it bloodies the 285's face.kind of a wondrous thing, then, that anandtech.com has banned the 4980 from all benchmarks...ain't it? XD
B3an - Wednesday, April 6, 2011 - link
*rolls eyes* ... They dont have any 2xx series here either. The ATI 4xxx and NV 2xx series do not belong here.If you want to see how your 4890 stacks up simply go the the GPU Bench page to compare.
WhatsTheDifference - Saturday, April 9, 2011 - link
what would you say these are, at least at first sight?NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216
and
AMD Radeon HD 4870X2
AMD Radeon HD 4870
......?
please make your way to 'index' and 'the test'. or, maybe I'm confusing articles.
now adding the always-juvenile *rolls eyes*
pandemonium - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
Gotta take the bad with that good though.Both the 4870 and 4870x2 run much hotter and take a butt load more power to produce lower framerates. And the 4870 was never a lower tier card by any means. Plus, no DX11 support on the 4870. Not that it's incredibly important, but just another note.
I'd say this is a good example of hardware evolution.
edpierce - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
I disagree. Recent video card innovations have been real unimpressive lately. It really does seem like we are not much further than 3 years ago in terms of visual video card performance. Are we hitting a massive roadblock here?