ATI Radeon HD 6970 2GB Review

Performance Analysis

We were truly excited to finally get chance to put the Radeon HD 6970 2GB through its paces, mainly because we were genuinely unsure how it would perform. Would it beat the excellent and similarly priced GeForce GTX 570 1.3GB? Would it manage to even get within touching distance of the imperious GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB? How much would it beat a Radeon HD 5870 1GB by? We just didn’t know.

It was a bit of an anti-climax, then, to see the HD 5970 2GB perform only averagely in Dirt 2. At 1,920 x 1,200 with no AA the cards minimum frame rate fell behind that of the recently released GTX 570 1.3GB by 17fps, which is a fairly large margin. Things didn’t improve when we enabled AA either, as the HD 6970 2GB still lagged behind its Nvidia competitor by 11fps with AA set to 4x.

So not a great start then, but there were some positives. The HD 6970 2GB was 10fps faster than its predecessor the HD 5870 1GB at 1,920 x 1,200 with 4x AA, and as Dirt 2 favours Nvidia hardware anyway, we were hoping for better results in Call of Duty: Black Ops.


Fortunately, the HD 6970 2GB didn’t disappoint. At 1,920 x 1,200 with no AA the card sat triumphantly at the top of the performance graphs, narrowly nosing out the HD 5870 1GB and HD 6950 2GB. Indeed, the card performed very well at all resolutions when AA was disabled, but despite the improvements ATI has made to the ROPs of the HD 6900-series, the card still suffered when we applied AA.

At 1,920 x 1,200 with 4x AA the HD 6970 2GB fell behind the GTX 570 1.3GB by a couple of frames per second, which is a disappointing result. It's striking that the HD 6970 2GB went from 5fps quicker than the GTX 580 1.5GB with AA disabled to 4fps slower with it set to 4x. This is a frustrating issue, as anyone looking to buy a top-end graphics card is likely to want to enable AA in their games; AA is after all one of the main benefits PC gaming has over console hardware.

The honours were slightly more even in Just Cause 2, however, with neither the HD 6970 2GB nor the GTX 570 1.3GB able to pull out a convincing lead over the other in the game. The GTX 570 1.3GB nosed ahead at lower resolutions such as 1,680 x 1,050, but the HD 6970 2GB clawed back the advantage as the resolution rose. At 2,560 x 1,600 the ATI card beat its Nvidia competitor with or without AA, though it’s worth pointing out that neither card could play the game with 4x AA enabled.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 followed a relatively similar trend, with the GTX 570 1.3GB proving too much for the HD 6970 2GB at lower resolutions. At 1,680 x 1,050 with 4x AA enabled the GTX 570 1.3GB managed a minimum frame rate that was 25 per cent quicker than that of the HD 6970 2GB. At higher resolutions the HD 6970 2GB could make better use of its 2GB of video memory, meaning it snuck ahead of the GTX 570 1.3GB by 2fps at 1,920 x 1,200 with no AA. This situation reversed with 4x AA enabled, however, with the HD 6970 2GB dropping a whopping 20fps to trail behind the Nvidia card by a significant 8fps.


If you’re buying a top-end card then it’s likely you’d be pairing it with a large monitor, so it’s significant that at 2,560 x 1,600 the HD 6970 2GB beat the GTX 570 1.3GB whether AA was enabled or not. The margins were extremely small though, with both cards able of the same, playable minimum with 4x AA enabled - only the HD 6970 2GB’s slightly higher average frame rate of 38fps (rather than 36fps) gave it the edge.

Thermals and Power Consumption

At least the HD 6970 2GB was quiet throughout our testing as its vapour chamber equipped cooler proved very adept at quickly moving heat away from the GPU. Even when stress testing the card the cooler was barely audible over the air conditioning system in our lab while still managing to cool the GPU to a reasonable peak delta T of 54^oC.

The power consumption figures we saw from the HD 6970 2GB were acceptable rather than astonishing, with our test rig drawing 306W from the wall when the card was equipped. This is a significant 36W more than the HD 5870 1GB. At least the HD 6870 2GB was less hungry than the GTX 570 1.3GB.