Enthusiast Graphics Card Showdown GTX 580 & 570 vs Radeon HD 6970 & 6950 Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,281 words · ~6 min read
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At long last, here is my performance review for the GTX 570, which I never
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did one for, as well as AMD's new Radeon
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6T900 series graphics card. So, that's the 6T70, which I have on my test bench
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right now. I'm running Battlefield Bad Company 2 for my uh my sort of pre
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premeditated run through that I do on all of the cards to get you guys some uh
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Fraps recorded results. So, I have the 6T970. I have the 6T950 here. I've also
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got on the GeForce side, the green side, the GTX 570 as well as the GTX 580. And
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then I've included in my graphs the 6870
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as well as a Hawk Edition GTX 460. So,
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that should give you guys some uh some sort of a a measuring stick against a
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performance series card. So, like a 460 or a 6870 versus one of these enthusiast
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grade cards, including the sixtyn00 series as well as the GTX 500 series.
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So, the games that I'm going to be showing today are Metro 2033,
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Battlefield Bad Company 2, uh 3D Mark 11, which is not a game
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technically, as well as, uh the Heaven
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benchmark, and I will be running all of
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them at 1080p. Oh, yeah. Crisis 2. and
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running at fairly high detail settings. That means I have enabled anti-aliasing
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in all tests. And the idea was to really
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stress these cards. So, at the settings I was running in Metro 2033, actually
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both the 6870 and the GTX 460 uh are
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were what I considered a fail. Um like it was 14 frames per second. I could
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measure frames per second, but it was just too choppy, completely unplayable.
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So anyway, stay tuned for boring charts
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and graphs and uh other things coming soon. So other than straight
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performance, let's talk a bit of a feature comparison between the green
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team and the red team for this particular generation of products. So
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there's a few different things that are similar. First of all, these are both
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direct X11 graphics cards with beefy tessellation performance, support for
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all the latest standards and all of that noise and hoo-ha. Okay, so they are both
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feature complete. Now, we have had times in the past when one company actually
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has a more advanced product than the other. For example, AMD was ahead of
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NVIDIA for DirectX11 and NVIDIA was way ahead of AMD for DirectX10, but we're
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not in a situation like that right now. So, the feature differences that we
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actually run into are some different things. So, first of all, AMD has their
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iinity technology. You can see they have a good number of outputs on the back of
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their card. two DVI, two mini DisplayPort, one mini rather, one HDMI, and
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that is what enables AMD as well as some special configuration of the card to run
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up to four displays off of a single card
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with affinity. So that means you could do three displays with your crosshair in
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the middle middle peripheral vision and then you could have like your uh your
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chat on another screen above it or whatever you want to do or you can even
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run just three displays off one card for triple HD resolution off of one card.
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Now to counter that NVIDIA has their NVIDIA surround which isn't quite there
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compared to iffinity because you do need two cards. So, if you run SLI on any
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supported GPU, which includes anything back to, as far as I know, the GTX 200
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series, you can run two monitors off the top card, one monitor off the bottom
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card, and you can get surround gaming, but it doesn't run off one card. Now,
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NVIDIA also has a couple other features, including their 3D vision. Okay, so I
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have the glasses up here, and this is actually a 3D vision ready monitor, so
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you can play in stereoscopic 3D. Mind you, AMD also has their competing HD 3D
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now. So, while you have to
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bear in mind that both of these approaches are slightly different, with NVIDIA, you're bound to certain
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standardized components, including the glasses and the displays. The AMD
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approach is a little bit different in that you are not bound to a standard.
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There are a bunch of different ways to go about it, but not all of them are
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created equal. Finally, last but not least, we have CUDA and PhysX on the
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NVIDIA side, as well as full support for direct compute on the AMD side. So,
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these are both a couple of competing standards, and it really remains to be
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seen which one is going to emerge as victorious. So, you kind of have to uh
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pick a road and walk down it at this point and hope you made the right
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choice. So, that is my feature summary. They both Oh, yeah, of course. They both
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support uh SLI, Crossfire, multiGPU configurations. Well, they don't support
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both support SLI. This one supports SLI. And they don't both support Crossfire.
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Only this one does, but they both support uh two-way and 3-way GPU
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configurations except on their performance grade cards. So, that is on
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the enthusiast grade cards, support up to 3-way. But you can see both of the
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performance grade cards I have here, that is the GTX 460 as well as the
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Radeon 6870 only have a single multiGPU
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connector each. So, those ones only support two-way multi-GPU
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configurations. Graphs to come. Crazy Russian also
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brought to my attention that the Radeon 6000 series also supports adaptive
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anti-aliasing. And I missed one feature that they both have, and that is support
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for HDMI 1.4A, which enables you to play
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back 3D Blu-ray with supported software and display.
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So, in conclusion, I'm not really going to declare there to be a winner because
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I think it's a bit of a mistake for graphics card reviews. Um because what
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happens is these guys are both so competitive, AMD and NVIDIA, that as
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soon as the market condition changes, they'll both be adjusting their
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strategies and their pricing structures in order to compete better with each
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other. So all you really need to do is look at the performance. And I do
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recommend checking out written reviews in addition to any video reviews you
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might see because quite frankly a lot of the written reviews have a lot more time
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spent on crunching the numbers and getting into the nitty-gritty of the
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technology. So check out for example the review on hardware that is
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www.hardkconnects.com. The GPU review guy over there is a total
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guru. So please do check them out. And
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so, yeah, I'm not going to declare a winner because what you really have to do is whether you're watching this video
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right now or watching it 6 months down the road, you can look at these cards
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and compare them in terms of their performance, but you also have to bear
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in mind the price. So, you'll have to just see what are the prices at that
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time and how do they stack up against each other when you factor in the bang
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for the buck aspect of the equation. So, thanks for checking out my Linus Tech
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Tips review of the GTX 570 as well as the Radeon 6900
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series. And don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings,
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reviews, and other videos.