GIGABYTE HD6970 2GB Review

Back in December, AMD released their much awaited Cayman based HD69XX
series of cards. It represented a transition to a revised architecture that
was more catered towards compute performance with new features such as
Morphological Anti-Aliasing and enhanced tessellation performance to meet
the requirements of newer DX10/11 titles. For the most part, the HD6970 was
a success despite its specifications appearing subtly different to the
highly popular but ageing HD5870. Employing the VLIW4 architecture, AMD had
managed to maintain improved performance over their previous generation of
card without compromising on die size. We found the HD6970 to be an 18%
improvement over the HD5870 on average despite sporting 1536 stream
processors rather than the 1600 available on the Cypress HD5870 GPU. On the
other hand, we were disappointed to see that for a next generation flagship
graphics card (until we see the HD6990), the performance increase was still
not enough to outcompete Nvidia's simultaneously released refreshed
line-up...