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AMD's New Flagship HD 6970 Tested
I.M.O.G. writes "Today AMD officially introduces their newest flagship GPU, the Radeon HD 6970, hot on the heels of the Radeon HD 6870 released at the end of October, then the NVIDIA GTX 580 in early November, which is Nvidia's current flagship card. Initial testing and overclocking results are publishing at first tier review sites now. While the HD 6970 is a strong performer and the price point is outstanding for consumers, the GTX 580 retains the flagship crown while the AMD 5970 keeps the single card performance crown with its dual GPUs on a single card."
Haven't had a driver related problem in a while.
I have a 5770 driving three monitors on Kubuntu and everything works as you would expect. Of course, I did have to pay an extra $100 for the active DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter...
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Does "everything" include hardware accelerated video playback, multichannel LPCM-audio over HDMI and 64-bit support?
I haven't looked at the state of AMD video card support in Linux for a while but as recently as a couple of years ago, NVidia was the pretty much the only usable option for media centers.
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Yeah, it's really not that confusing. The first number is the generation. So a 6xxx card is newer than a 5xxxx card. But a new low-end card is not necessarily better than last year's high-end card.
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Unless you have some sort of performance chart you can't tell shit.
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ gives a pretty comprehensive overview of just about every video card out there... this new AMD/ti video card will probably be added within the next few days. It's a great starting point before heading over to http://tomshardware.com/ or http://anandtech.com/ to read about all the details, caveats, and more comprehensive benchmark results.
Also, it tends to be the only good resource out there when trying to make comparisons between different market segments (what notebook GPU could keep up with my desktop GPU?) or completely different generations (would this cheap embedded GPU actually be a decent upgrade from my ancient media player box?)
They went more confusing than normal this time around. So let me try and break it down for you:
The 6000 series are the replacements to the 5000 series. As time goes on, the 5000 series will be faded away. They use the same fabrication technology (TSMC 40nm) but are a redesign that is capable of accomplishing more on the same amount of silicon, mostly thanks to redesigned shaders.
Ok clear enough? However the problem is they fucked with the in-generation naming. Previously the 5870 was the highest end single GPU card, now the 6970 is. As such the situation you have is:
5750->6850
5770->6870
5850->6950
5870->6970
In each case the 6000 series part is faster by a reasonable bit, say 20ish%, than the 5000 series part it replaces. All features are supported by both generations of cards they are both DirectX11/Shader Model 5.0 cards.
So the 6000 series is just a minor refresh, getting more out of the same amount of material basically, which is really nice. The confusing part is the change in making. If you buy a 6870 to replace a 5870, you'll be disappointed to find you have a small performance decrease because the 6870 is actually analogous to the 5770 part.
As a practical matter if you already own a 5000 series card and are happy with it, keep it. The new cards are a bit faster but not so much as to be worth buying. If you are looking at a new card, then look at the 6000 series as they give you more performance at a given die size. If you are looking at a used or cheaper card, then maybe look at a 5000 series since people are in fact getting 6000 series cards and dumping their 5000 series.
Either way you have a fully current part, one that supports all the latest graphics tech.