AMD’s Radeon HD 6670 & Radeon HD 6570: Two’s Company, Sub-$100’s A Crowd

Civilization V

Civilization V is the latest incarnation in Firaxis Games’ series of turn-based strategy games. Civ5 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.

At 1680 the 6670 can almost – but not quite – hit 30fps. As a turn based game this should be playable, but it definitely won’t be smooth if you’re scrolling around. It is interesting to note though that the 5750 doesn’t have its usual advantage here: it’s only ahead by 6%. Compared to AMD’s other cards this is a good showing for the 6670, but thanks to NVIDIA’s implementation of command lists, they have a significant advantage in this game.

Overall the 6670 enjoys a 12% lead over the 5670 at 1680, and 11% at 1280; and at the same time we see a 20% lead over the 6570, one of the biggest gaps between the two cards that we’ll ever see. Meanwhile the 6570 can’t quite keep up with the 5670, falling behind by 8% at 1280. Indeed even with its massive memory bandwidth advantage, it’s only 11% ahead of the 5570 at this resolution. Ultimately Civ V is bottlenecked by more than just shaders and memory bandwidth, and as a result it’s difficult for the 6570 to break 30fps even at 1280 with medium quality settings.