AMD's Radeon HD 6790: Coming Up Short At $150
by Ryan Smith on April 5, 2011 12:01 AM ESTCrysis: Warhead
Kicking things off as always is Crysis: Warhead, still one of the toughest games in our benchmark suite. Even three years since the release of the original Crysis, “but can it run Crysis?” is still an important question, and for three years the answer was “no.” Dual-GPU halo cards can now play it at Enthusiast settings at high resolutions, but for everything else max settings are still beyond the grasp of a single card.
Unlike NVIDIA, AMD doesn’t advertise their cards around specific resolutions, however from Crysis it’s quickly apparent that the 6790 is better suited for 1680 than it is for 1920, particularly when anti-aliasing is involved.
Overall the 6790 is quite competitive with the 5830, the GTX 285, and the GTX 460 768MB here; 36.9fps at 1680 isn’t great, but it’s going to be playable. The problem for the 6790 is that the 6850 is 20% faster for around $10 more, and this is going to be a repeating scenario. If AMD dropped the price by $20 it would be a much better fit between the 6850 and 5770, and it would easily vanquish the GTX 550 Ti at that price.
The story with minimum framerates is much the same as it is with the averages. The 6790 actually manages to edge out the 5830 here, but the 6850 is still 20% ahead.
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SquattingDog - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
"it's LEANING from the past..." should be it's LEARNING from the past. Otherwise a great article, very speedily put out. Looks to be an interesting card, depending on what pricing it is available at here. Of course the 6850/6870 are much better and the 6850 looks to be better bang for buck, but when people cannot squeeze a few extra bucks out of the wallet, it should be pretty reasonable. Especially once the GTX460s are out of circulation, which is bound to happen soon enough.Glad to see more competition and finally some products reaching further down in the retail sector not just OEM from AMD.
ZL1Corvette - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
2nd to last page possible typo:"Last but not least as always is our look at the power consumption, temperatures, and acoustics of the GTX 550 Ti."
Did you mean 6970?
ZL1Corvette - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
See, we all make mistakes. I meant 6790.stm1185 - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
800 Stream Procs, 40 Texture Units, 16 ROPs, 256 bit memory bus. Only the 6970 has a 840mhz clock compared to 750 mhz, and 1050mhz on the memory compared to 900mhz on the 4870.My card has held up well it seems.
james.jwb - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
I have a 4890 with a 2560x1440 screen, and to my surprise, i can play quite a few games at 30fps, and most older ones at 60+fps. Like F1 2010, around 50fps.What a card, eh?
WhatsTheDifference - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
hello. nice card. I play everything at 19x12 with my 4890 (in this case, an msi cyclone soc) with never a problem of any kind. it bloodies the 285's face.kind of a wondrous thing, then, that anandtech.com has banned the 4980 from all benchmarks...ain't it? XD
B3an - Wednesday, April 6, 2011 - link
*rolls eyes* ... They dont have any 2xx series here either. The ATI 4xxx and NV 2xx series do not belong here.If you want to see how your 4890 stacks up simply go the the GPU Bench page to compare.
WhatsTheDifference - Saturday, April 9, 2011 - link
what would you say these are, at least at first sight?NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216
and
AMD Radeon HD 4870X2
AMD Radeon HD 4870
......?
please make your way to 'index' and 'the test'. or, maybe I'm confusing articles.
now adding the always-juvenile *rolls eyes*
pandemonium - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
Gotta take the bad with that good though.Both the 4870 and 4870x2 run much hotter and take a butt load more power to produce lower framerates. And the 4870 was never a lower tier card by any means. Plus, no DX11 support on the 4870. Not that it's incredibly important, but just another note.
I'd say this is a good example of hardware evolution.
edpierce - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 - link
I disagree. Recent video card innovations have been real unimpressive lately. It really does seem like we are not much further than 3 years ago in terms of visual video card performance. Are we hitting a massive roadblock here?