Final words and conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

So first off, did you guys check the difference in-between the 1GB and 2GB 6950 versions as well, yeah ... the results are nearly NIL. The added benefit of an extra full GB is excruciatingly hard to measure, even with all games setup with the best image quality settings, hefty shaders and massive textures. The reality is that for 98% of you with today's games 1 GB is absolutely sufficient.

Why would you opt 2GB you might ask yourself ? Well, there are several scenarios, first off very simply, being future proof. In time games will be more demanding when it comes to things like texture requirements. But a more important reason would be multi Monitor gaming, thus Eyefinity. It's there where you breach any foreseeable limitation versus resolution and that's where the extra memory can come into play.

Compared to the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, the R6950 1GB shows a little more muscle, overall performance was a tad higher albeit we are talking about a couple of frames per second here and there. Now I really want to say this again, the R6950 was never supposed to be targeted against the GTX 560 as it is a high-end product whereas the GTX 560 is an upper segment mid-range product. So it makes sense that the R6950 wins in almost any scenario, albeit not with a huge margin. I honestly can't see AMD making any serious profit at all at 219 EUR for the 2.64 Billion transistor encounting silicon with it's 1408 active shader processors. But for you as a consumer, this of course is wicked news (!), as that just oozes pure value.

Keep in mind the following variables, we test at default driver settings. Now we deliberately used the new 11.1 Hotfix drivers in this test for one reason and one reason only, AMD has listened to denigration from Guru3D and others and as you guys know, we have been quite serious about the fact that AMD applies a series of optimizations with the drivers left at default "Quality mode". That series of image quality optimizations started to bother us more and more.

Some good news on this front, starting at the 11.1 Hotfix  AMD/ATI altered their approach on optimizations.

AMD: The Quality setting has now been improved to match the HQ setting in all respects except for one it enables an optimization that limits Trilinear anisotropic filtering to areas surrounding texture mipmap level transitions, while doing bilinear anisotropic filtering elsewhere. Sometimes referred to as bilinear filtering, it offers a way to improve filtering performance without visibly affecting image quality. It has no impact on texture sharpness or shimmering, and this can be verified by comparing it visually with the High Quality setting. Default Quality setting is now set back to where it was with 10.9 and earlier and its applying an optimization that is also applied by default on the competitors driver.

So that improves on shimmer effects, there's one optimization left, back in the days we called that Brilinear and Trislope optimizations. We can state that NVIDIA does not apply them on DX10 and DX11 whatsoever, whereas ATI/AMD apparantly does.

So what did that all mean relative to performance ? Well, Catalyst 11.1 Hotfix drivers bring in some more performance to the table, however the removal of some optimizations, lowers performance. The end result is nearly NIL difference compared to say 10.12 WHQL drivers, yet you gain more pure image quality. That's a small win in my book as that is an even tradeoff.

With all variables in mind never ever we had such a hard time picking a winner or preference based on either of the two products. We do need to mention though that when overclocked the GTX 560 Ti cards jump up in performance real fast, then again the R6950 overclock to 950 MHz perfectly fine as well yet seems to benefit from overclocking a little less. Overall the R6950 will be a tiny bit faster, but runs hotter and makes more noise.

Performance remains close to each other, and each brand offers some specific features that can appeal you. The massive choice in factory overclocked products from NVIDIA might make the difference for many of you.

Yeah, the graphics card arena is a cutthroat business these days, as a result you guys get to purchase an incredible amount of gaming performance for very, really very acceptable prices.

As such we leave the choice completely to you, whatever rocks your boat man. Either way you can't go wrong as it is imperative to understand the value you have in your hands with a graphics card like the ones shown today.

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