AMD Radeon HD 6970 already benchmarked? Enough to beat GTX480 in Tesselation?

[Lonbjerg]

The question is... what is the 580 gonna be benchmarked against?

if the 580 costs more at launch, than a 5970... will it be benched against that? The step down to a 5870 compaired to a 580 is huge, not only in performance but also in price.

So Im kinda hopeing we ll see a 580 vs 5970 in reviews... otherwise not really much point to doing reviews until the 6970s are out.

Depends on what hot-fix drivers AMD gots out at that moment don't you think...since CrossFire scaling is really a hit and miss due to driver issues.

 

[Skurge]

Depends on what hot-fix drivers AMD gots out at that moment don't you think...since CrossFire scaling is really a hit and miss due to driver issues.

Not with the 5970 it isn't. Even when the 5870/5850 had their issues, The 5970 was still performing as well if not better than when it was launched.

 

[RussianSensation]

Not with the 5970 it isn't. Even when the 5870/5850 had their issues, The 5970 was still performing as well if not better than when it was launched.

One important aspect many forget is how much more sensitive GTX480 cards are in regard to CPU clock speed compared to the Radeons. Xbitlabs showed that GTX470/480 were somewhat held back bottlenecked by the Core i5 750 vs. Core i7 965 compared to Radeon cards, even at 1920x1080 4AA :$. But with Tom's Hardware doing a CPU scaling article with the $140 GTX460 768mb (seriously??!!!), some still forget just how important the CPU is for minimum framerates when paired with $500 videocards. Therefore, GTX580 shouldn't be any different with its steep requirement for faster CPUs.

 

[Arkadrel]

Does anyone have any idea what "off chip buffering" in tessellation means with the upcomeing 6970s? will it store some of the tessellation in video card memory?

From this:

**edit:
found this in [H]forums: (from Samurai1999)

Just guessing, but it's probably that the triangle data from the Tesselator needs to be buffered before it can be used for the rasterisers & pixel shaders
- at the moment this buffering is on-chip, which means the buffers are small
- this means that the chip is having to task-swap between Tesselation tasks and Rasteriser/pixel shader tasks continually
- whereas, in the HD6900 this data can use larger off-chip buffers, and so the amount of task swapping is reduced....
(because, in DX11, the Tesselation shaders (HS & DS) are just like any other shader, and run in the main shader core)

*if* above is true, then the 6970 may use its ROPs more effective than a 5870 ect when doing stuff that also has tessellation. So not only improve tessellation performance, but also the performance that might have been limited by the task swaping.

The 6970 is probably first card by AMD to do tessellation the right way.

 

[extra]

The thing is though that in reality all the current dx11 cards are fast enough in tessellation for tessellation levels that actually matter. Everyone arguing about these extremely high levels of tessellation are just silly imho--even a 5770 is fast enough for great looking tessellation levels.

 

[Lonbjerg]

The thing is though that in reality all the current dx11 cards are fast enough in tessellation for tessellation levels that actually matter. Everyone arguing about these extremely high levels of tessellation are just silly imho--even a 5770 is fast enough for great looking tessellation levels.

Because current games where designed on AMD hardware.
Now there is hardware out that performs a lot better...hence why AMD is whining about to much tessellation.

Expect that picture to change andnot in favour o AMD's current offerings.

 

[Arkadrel]

@Lonbjerg the 6970 seems to beat the 480 by alot in Ungine 2.1 with extreme tessellation mode. (from leaked benchmarks).

So its pretty much given the 6970 will have much better tessellation than the 5xxx cards and the 68xx cards. Will it beat a 580 in tessellation? probably not... but it might not be far from it, judgeing by the leaked benchmarks.

The tessellation is supposed to be scalable like the nvidia ones, in the 6950/6970 cards too.

 

[PingviN]

Because current games where designed on AMD hardware.
Now there is hardware out that performs a lot better...hence why AMD is whining about to much tessellation.

Expect that picture to change andnot in favour o AMD's current offerings.

To be honest, current games are probably a mix-and-mash. Cypress has been out for a year or so, most games take waaay longer than that to develop. Upcoming games in 2011 and 2012 will probably have a more AMD-dominated hardware development.