At long last, here is my performance review for the GTX 570, which I never
did one for, as well as AMD's new Radeon
6T900 series graphics card. So, that's the 6T70, which I have on my test bench
right now. I'm running Battlefield Bad Company 2 for my uh my sort of pre
premeditated run through that I do on all of the cards to get you guys some uh
Fraps recorded results. So, I have the 6T970. I have the 6T950 here. I've also
got on the GeForce side, the green side, the GTX 570 as well as the GTX 580. And
then I've included in my graphs the 6870
as well as a Hawk Edition GTX 460. So,
that should give you guys some uh some sort of a a measuring stick against a
performance series card. So, like a 460 or a 6870 versus one of these enthusiast
grade cards, including the sixtyn00 series as well as the GTX 500 series.
So, the games that I'm going to be showing today are Metro 2033,
Battlefield Bad Company 2, uh 3D Mark 11, which is not a game
technically, as well as, uh the Heaven
benchmark, and I will be running all of
them at 1080p. Oh, yeah. Crisis 2. and
running at fairly high detail settings. That means I have enabled anti-aliasing
in all tests. And the idea was to really
stress these cards. So, at the settings I was running in Metro 2033, actually
both the 6870 and the GTX 460 uh are
were what I considered a fail. Um like it was 14 frames per second. I could
measure frames per second, but it was just too choppy, completely unplayable.
So anyway, stay tuned for boring charts
and graphs and uh other things coming soon. So other than straight
performance, let's talk a bit of a feature comparison between the green
team and the red team for this particular generation of products. So
there's a few different things that are similar. First of all, these are both
direct X11 graphics cards with beefy tessellation performance, support for
all the latest standards and all of that noise and hoo-ha. Okay, so they are both
feature complete. Now, we have had times in the past when one company actually
has a more advanced product than the other. For example, AMD was ahead of
NVIDIA for DirectX11 and NVIDIA was way ahead of AMD for DirectX10, but we're
not in a situation like that right now. So, the feature differences that we
actually run into are some different things. So, first of all, AMD has their
iinity technology. You can see they have a good number of outputs on the back of
their card. two DVI, two mini DisplayPort, one mini rather, one HDMI, and
that is what enables AMD as well as some special configuration of the card to run
up to four displays off of a single card
with affinity. So that means you could do three displays with your crosshair in
the middle middle peripheral vision and then you could have like your uh your
chat on another screen above it or whatever you want to do or you can even
run just three displays off one card for triple HD resolution off of one card.
Now to counter that NVIDIA has their NVIDIA surround which isn't quite there
compared to iffinity because you do need two cards. So, if you run SLI on any
supported GPU, which includes anything back to, as far as I know, the GTX 200
series, you can run two monitors off the top card, one monitor off the bottom
card, and you can get surround gaming, but it doesn't run off one card. Now,
NVIDIA also has a couple other features, including their 3D vision. Okay, so I
have the glasses up here, and this is actually a 3D vision ready monitor, so
you can play in stereoscopic 3D. Mind you, AMD also has their competing HD 3D
now. So, while you have to
bear in mind that both of these approaches are slightly different, with NVIDIA, you're bound to certain
standardized components, including the glasses and the displays. The AMD
approach is a little bit different in that you are not bound to a standard.
There are a bunch of different ways to go about it, but not all of them are
created equal. Finally, last but not least, we have CUDA and PhysX on the
NVIDIA side, as well as full support for direct compute on the AMD side. So,
these are both a couple of competing standards, and it really remains to be
seen which one is going to emerge as victorious. So, you kind of have to uh
pick a road and walk down it at this point and hope you made the right
choice. So, that is my feature summary. They both Oh, yeah, of course. They both
support uh SLI, Crossfire, multiGPU configurations. Well, they don't support
both support SLI. This one supports SLI. And they don't both support Crossfire.
Only this one does, but they both support uh two-way and 3-way GPU
configurations except on their performance grade cards. So, that is on
the enthusiast grade cards, support up to 3-way. But you can see both of the
performance grade cards I have here, that is the GTX 460 as well as the
Radeon 6870 only have a single multiGPU
connector each. So, those ones only support two-way multi-GPU
configurations. Graphs to come. Crazy Russian also
brought to my attention that the Radeon 6000 series also supports adaptive
anti-aliasing. And I missed one feature that they both have, and that is support
for HDMI 1.4A, which enables you to play
back 3D Blu-ray with supported software and display.
So, in conclusion, I'm not really going to declare there to be a winner because
I think it's a bit of a mistake for graphics card reviews. Um because what
happens is these guys are both so competitive, AMD and NVIDIA, that as
soon as the market condition changes, they'll both be adjusting their
strategies and their pricing structures in order to compete better with each
other. So all you really need to do is look at the performance. And I do
recommend checking out written reviews in addition to any video reviews you
might see because quite frankly a lot of the written reviews have a lot more time
spent on crunching the numbers and getting into the nitty-gritty of the
technology. So check out for example the review on hardware that is
www.hardkconnects.com. The GPU review guy over there is a total
guru. So please do check them out. And
so, yeah, I'm not going to declare a winner because what you really have to do is whether you're watching this video
right now or watching it 6 months down the road, you can look at these cards
and compare them in terms of their performance, but you also have to bear
in mind the price. So, you'll have to just see what are the prices at that
time and how do they stack up against each other when you factor in the bang
for the buck aspect of the equation. So, thanks for checking out my Linus Tech
Tips review of the GTX 570 as well as the Radeon 6900
series. And don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings,
reviews, and other videos.