After being AnandTech’s senior GPU editor for nearly a year and a half and through more late-night GPU launches than I care to count, there’s a very specific pattern I’ve picked up on: the GPU market may be competitive, but it’s the $200-$300 that really brings out the insanity. I’m not sure if it’s the volume, the profit margins, or just the desire to be seen as affordable, but AMD and NVIDIA seem to take out all the stops to one-up each other whenever either side plans on launching a new video card in this price range.

Today was originally supposed to be about the newly released GeForce GTX 560 Ti – NVIDIA’s new GF114-based $250 video card. Much as was the case with the launch of AMD’s Radeon HD 6800 series however, AMD is itching to spoil NVIDIA’s launch with their own push. Furthermore they intend to do so on two fronts: directly above the GTX 560 Ti at $259 is the Radeon HD 6950 1GB, and somewhere below it one of many factory overclocked Radeon HD 6870 cards, in our case an XFX Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition. The Radeon HD 6950 1GB is effectively the GTX 560 Ti’s direct competition, while the overclocked 6870 serves to be the price spoiler.

It wasn’t always meant to be this way, and indeed 5 days ago things were quite different. But before we get too far, let’s quickly discuss today’s cards.

Back when the Radeon HD 6950 launched, AMD told us to expect 1GB cards sometime in the near future as a value option. Because the 6900 series is using fairly new 2Gb GDDR5, such chips are still in short supply and cost more versus the very common and very available 1Gb variety. It’s not a massive difference once you all up the bill of materials on a video card, but for the card manufactures if they can save $10 on RAM then that’s $10 they can mark down a card and snag that many more sales. Furthermore we’re not quite to the point where 2GB is essential in the sub-$300 market - where 2560x1600 monitors are rare – so the performance penalty isn’t a major concern. As a result it was only a matter of time until 1GB 6900 series cards hit the market, to fill in the gap until 2Gb GDDR5 came down in price.

The day has finally come for the Radeon HD 6950 1GB, and today is that day. Truth be told it’s actually a bit anticlimactic – the reference 6950 1GB is virtually identical to the reference 6950 2GB. It’s the same PCB attached to the same vapor chamber cooler with the same power and heat characteristics. There is one and only one difference: the 1GB card uses 8 1Gb GDDR5 chips, and the 2GB card uses 8 2Gb GDDR5 chips. Everything else is equal, and indeed when the 6950 is not RAM limited even the performance is equal.

The second card we’re taking a quick look at is the XFX Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition, the obligatory factory overclocked Radeon HD 6870. Utilizing XFX’s open-air custom HSF, it’s clocked at 940MHz core and 1150MHz (4.6Gbps data rate) memory, representing a 40Mhz (4%) core overclock and a 100MHz (9%) memory overclock. Truth be told it’s not much of an overclock, and if it wasn’t for the cooler it wouldn’t be a very remarkable card as far as factory overclocking goes, and for that reason it’s almost a footnote today. But it wasn’t meant to be, and that’s where our story begins.

When One Counter Isn’t Enough

Early on the week of January 17^th, AMD sent out the customary email letting the press know of some recent changes to AMD’s product lineup. AMD’s partners were launching their factory overclocked cards, and AMD like a proud papa had to let the world know and was happily mailing out cigars (sample cards) in the process. Meanwhile on the horizon AMD would be working with their partners to launch the Radeon HD 6950 1GB in mid-February for around $269-279. The final piece of news was that AMD was posting their Catalyst 11.1a Hotfix drivers for the press to preview ahead of a January 26^th launch.

The fact of the matter is that these kinds of announcements are routine, and also very transparent. Given the timing of the arrival of AMD’s sample hardware and the launch date of the new Catalyst driver it was clear this was meant to garner attention at the same time as NVIDIA’s launch of the GTX 560 Ti. This isn’t meant to be damning for any party – this is just the way the GPU industry operates. NVIDIA did something very similar for the Radeon HD 6800 series launch, shipping the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 1GB FTW to us unannounced while we were returning from AMD's press confernece.

If this is how things actually happened however, we wouldn’t be telling this story. For competitive reasons AMD and NVIDIA like to withhold performance and pricing information from everyone as long as possible so that the other party doesn’t get it. Meanwhile the other party is doing everything they can to get that information as soon as possible, so that they have as much time as possible for any counters of their own.

AMD's First GTX 560 Ti Competitor: The XFX Raden HD 6870 Black Edition

On the morning of Thursday the 20^th I was awoken by FedEx, who was delivering a priority overnight package from AMD. At the same time I received an email from AMD announcing that the 6950 1GB was sampling to the press immediately, and that we were under NDA until January 25^th.

Something had changed at AMD.

I don’t believe we’ll ever know the full details about what AMD was doing that week – some stories are simply never meant to be told – but it quickly became clear that AMD had to make a very sudden change of plans. On Monday the message from AMD was that the 6870OC was their immediate GTX 560 Ti competitor, and here 3 days later the message had suddenly changed to the 6950 1GB being their GTX 560 Ti competitor.

There are a million different reasons why this could be, but I believe it’s because in that intervening period AMD got access to reliable GTX 560 Ti performance data - if not the price too. If they did have that data then they would quickly see that the GTX 560 Ti was 10-15% faster than the 6870OC, reducing the 6870OC from a competitor to a price spoiler at best. The 6870OC could not and would not work as AMD’s GTX 560 Ti challenger.

The final piece of the puzzle only came together yesterday afternoon, when AMD announced that the 6950 1GB’s retail launch was getting pushed up from mid-February to January 24^th, or in other words yesterday. The 6950 1GB was to be available immediately for $259 – over half a month sooner than expected, and for roughly $20 less than AMD first said it would be.

Based on the performance of the GTX 560 Ti, the 6870OC, and the 6950 1GB, the only reasonable explanation we have at this time is that early last week AMD did an about-face and put everything in to launching the 6950 1GB ahead of schedule. Whatever motivated this about-face and however they managed to do it, all indications are that they managed to get Sapphire and XFX to manufacture a steady supply of 1GB cards in order for Newegg to have them up for sale Monday afternoon.

Meet The Radeon HD 6950 1GB and XFX Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition

We’ll start our look at today’s cards with the headliner: AMD’s Radeon HD 6950 1GB. As we’ve previously established our 6950 is an engineering sample – perhaps an early one – so there’s not much to look at. Save for the kind of cosmetic defects you’d expect on an engineering sample, it’s for all practical purposes identical to the production 6950 2GB, and that’s intentional. AMD set out to make the 6950 1GB identical to the 6950 2GB other than the use of lower capacity GDDR5 chips, and this is what they have accomplished.

Top: 6950 2GB. Bottom: 6950 1GB Engineering Sample

Top: 6950 1GB Engineering Sample. Bottom: 6950 2GB

Since producing a 1GB card involves little more than replacing 2Gb memory chips with 1Gb memory chips, the true design innovations are going to come from AMD’s partners. Sapphire already has a 6950 1GB out with a custom cooler, and as AMD’s other partners get situated with 1GB cards we expect to see much of the same with them.

One item worth noting is that because our card is based on the reference design, it includes the BIOS switch at the top of the card. This means reference-based 1GB cards are going to have the same BIOS failsafe in them – however suitable BIOSes for the unlockers among you are another matter. Without some BIOS hacking (and possibly more), existing 6970 BIOSes are unsuitable as they’re meant for 2GB cards. Until such a time comes where a 6970 1GB BIOS can be developed, the 6950 1GB is not going to be a good card for unlocking. For the time being unlockers are going to want to stick to 2GB cards.

The Radeon HD 6950 1GB is launching with an MSRP of $259. At this time you can find reference-style 2GB cards for as little as $269, making the 1GB cards a rather simple $10 trade-off if you don’t mind mail-in rebates.

XFX Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition

Our second card of the day is XFX’s 2nd generation Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition (687A-ZDBC), the card that AMD originally proposed as the GTX 560 Ti’s competitor. Clocked at 940MHz core and 1150MHz (4.6Gbps data rate) memory, it runs at 40Mhz (4%) core and a 100MHz (9%) memory over the reference 6870. Overall this is a mild overclock, particularly as the 6870 is core-bound as opposed to memory-bound most of the time.

With such a mild overclock we had little reason to pay attention to the card, particularly once we completed our GTX 560 Ti benchmarking and saw that it was 10-20% faster than the stock-clocked 6870. Indeed it wasn’t until we tested the card that we saw something that grabbed our attention. Or perhaps I should say heard.

At the risk of spoiling the rest of our article, this card is for all practical purposes silent. At idle it’s only as loud as the noise floor of our GPU testbed, and at load – even under Furmark – it’s the same story. We measured 41.4dB at both idle and load, making it the quietest actively cooled mid-range card we have ever tested in our existing rig. Even the remarkably quiet GTX 460 can’t hold its ground to the 6870 Black Edition, it’s that quiet.

So what’s XFX’s secret? It’s much the same story as with the GTX 460. While the 6870 reference design uses a blower XFX is using an open-air cooler, specifically a double-fan cooler with 3 copper heatpipes that’s very similar to MSI’s Twin Frozor and Gigabyte’s Super Overclock cooler. Open-air coolers are already capable of being much quieter than blowers, and when done correctly a double-fan arrangement can be quieter than driving a single fan at higher speeds. Combining this highly effective cooler with the 6870’s Black Edition’s low TDP (~160W) results in a very quiet card that by all indications cannot be beaten at this point in time.

Rounding out the package, there are no real meaningful extras to discuss. Aside from some trinkets (stickers, case badges, etc), the only other piece of hardware in the box is a short CrossFire bridge. XFX has kept it simple: the only things that really matter are the card and XFX’s lifetime warranty.

The Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition doesn’t have a set MSRP, but it’s currently available for around $229 with a mail-in rebate, making it roughly $10 more expensive than a stock-clocked card. Or compared to XFX’s lineup, the non-Black Edition version of this card is a mere $4 less at $225; so you’re looking at a $4 factory overclock and $6 for a supurb custom cooler.

AMD’s Catalyst 11.1a Hotfix

If the first 2 legs of AMD’s GTX 560 Ti counter-offensive were the 6950 1GB and factory overclocked 6870s, then the final leg of that offensive are the drivers. With barely a month between the launch of the 6900 series and today, AMD has only delivered their original launch drivers for the 6900 series. Meanwhile the 6800 series launched with the Catalyst 10.10 hotfix drivers, which due to how AMD organizes their driver branches are little different than the 10.12 drivers currently posted. So in spite of the nearly 2 month gap between the launches of these two card families, AMD is effectively providing the first real driver update for both.

Launching tomorrow will be the Catalyst 11.1a Hotfix drivers. As far as performance goes they contain the usual mix of game-specific performance improvements, with AMD specifically targeting Call of Duty: Black Ops, BattleForge, Metro 2033, and Aliens vs. Predators performance among other games. Having tested these drivers, overall we’re not seeing any significant performance impact in our benchmark suite, even with games that area on AMD’s list. In fact the only area where we are seeing a major change is with our SmallLuxGPU compute benchmark, which looks to be on the receiving end of some shader compiler optimizations by AMD. SLG performance on the 6900 series is up 25%-30%, providing some validity to AMD’s earlier claims that their VLIW4 shader compiler still has some room to grow as AMD learns how to optimize it like they did with the VLIW5 compiler in the past.

The bigger news is what AMD is doing to their control panel, and what it means to you.

Let me first introduce you to a new section of AMD’s 3D Application Settings control panel called Tessellation. With this new control panel feature AMD is implementing a tessellation factor override in to their drivers, allowing AMD and/or the user to clamp down on games and applications using high tessellation factors. The purpose of this feature is to deal with games such as HAWX 2, which uses very high tessellation factors and offers no tessellation configuration besides turning the feature on and off.

As we’ve already well established, NVIDIA has much better tessellation performance than AMD at high tessellation factors even with the 6900 series. This position leaves AMD on the defensive much of the time (“they’re overpowered” doesn’t have the same ring as “they’re underpowered”), but more so than that games like HAWX 2 are particularly damaging to AMD; they don’t just make AMD’s hardware underperform, but they leave users with only the option to accept poor tessellation performance or to turn tessellation off altogether.

The crux of AMD’s argument – and a point that we agree with – is that tessellation is supposed to be easily scalable. It is in fact the basis of tessellation, that a developer can use it to easily scale up a model based on the available hardware, using a combination of mip-chained displacement maps and an appropriate tessellation factor. The end-game of this scenario would be that a game would use low amounts of tessellation on low-end hardware (e.g. APUs), and large amounts of tessellation on high-end hardware such as GeForce GTX 580s and Radeon HD 6970s. But for that to happen game developers need to take advantage of the flexibility of tessellation by having their games and engines use multiple tessellation factors and displacement maps.

Ultimately games like HAWX2 that do not implement these kinds of controls are not easily scalable. This is the choice of the developer, but in long standing tradition both AMD and NVIDIA will override developer wishes in their drivers when they see fit. In this case AMD believes they are helping their customers by having their drivers cap the tessellation factor in some situations, so that their customers can use tessellation without very high tessellation factors bogging down performance.

And while we agree with AMD’s argument, AMD’s implementation leaves us uneasy. Having this feature available is great, just as is the ability to override v-sync, purposely use poor texture filtering quality for speed purposes, and clamping LOD biases .The bit that makes us uneasy is where the default will lie. AMD offers 3 different “modes”: AMD Optimized, which uses an AMD chosen tessellation factor, user control, and Use Application Settings. AMD intends to make the default “AMD Optimized”, which is to say that in the future all games would use the tessellation factor AMD chooses.

We sincerely believe AMD is doing what they think is best for their users even if they also stand to gain in benchmarks, however we find ourselves in disagreement with their choice. While the actions of games like HAWX2 are unfortunate for users, tessellation is well defined in the DirectX 11 specification. We’re more than willing to entertain creative interpretations of matters like texture filtering where the standard doesn’t dictate a single filtering algorithm, but DX11 doesn’t leave any ambiguity here. As such there’s little room in our opinion for drivers to override a game’s request by default. Drivers should not automatically be substituting a lower tessellation factor on their own – this is a power that should be reserved for a user.

Tessellation in action

Admittedly this is a minefield – modern GPUs are all about taking shortcuts, as these are necessary to get reasonable performance with the kind of complexity modern games are shooting for. But it’s our opinion that there’s no better time to take a stand than before an optimization like this is implemented, as once it’s done then it’s almost impossible to change course, or even to have a meaningful discourse about the issue.

At this time AMD has not defined any tessellation factors in their profiles, and as a result the AMD Optimized setting is no different than the Use Application Settings setting. At some point this will change. We would like to see AMD build this feature in to their drivers and leave the choice up to the user, but only time will tell how they proceed.

On that note, tessellation factors are not the only minefield AMD is dabbling in. With the Catalyst 10.10 drivers AMD began playing with their texture filtering quality at different levels. Previously at High Quality (previously known as Catalyst AI Off) AMD would disable all optimizations, while at the default setting of Quality (Catalyst AI Standard) AMD would use a small set of optimizations that had little-to-any impact on image quality, and at Performance (Catalyst AI Advanced) they would use a number of optimizations to improve performance. Texture filtering optimizations are nothing new (having been around practically as long as the 3D accelerator), but in a 2-player market any changes will make a wave.

In the case of AMD’s optimizations, for Quality mode they picked a new set of optimizations that marginally improved performance but at the same time marginally changed the resulting image quality. Many tomes about the issue have already been written, and there’s very little I believe we can add to the subject – meaningful discourse is difficult to have when you believe there’s room for optimizations while at the same time believing there is a point where one can go too far.

AMD Radeon HD 6870, Catalyst 10.10e

In any case while we have found very little to add to the subject, this has not been the case elsewhere on the internet. As such after 3 months AMD is largely reverting their changes to texture filtering, and will be returning it to similar quality levels as what we saw with the Catalyst 10.9 drivers – which is to say they’re now once again shooting for a level of texture filtering quality similar to NVIDIA.

As we have little to add beyond this, here are AMD’s full notes on the matter:

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 “brilinear” 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.

We continue to recommend the Quality setting as the best one to use for competitive testing for the following reasons:

• It should be visually indistinguishable from the High Quality setting for real textures (with the exception of special test patterns using colored mip levels)
• Visual quality should now be equal to the default setting used on HD 5800 series GPUs with Catalyst 10.9 and earlier drivers, or better when used on HD 6800/6900 series GPUs due to other hardware filtering improvements
• It matches the default texture filtering quality setting currently implemented on our competitor’s GPUs, which make use of the same trilinear filtering optimization

The Test & Gaming Performance

For our testing we are using both AMD and NVIDIA’s latest drivers where suitable. For AMD this means the 11.1a Hotfix, and for NVIDIA this means the 266.58 drivers for the GTX 400 and 500 series, 266.56 for the new GTX 560 Ti, and 262.99 for the GTX 200 series. Compared to our previous benchmarks NVIDIA Civilization V performance is way up, and SmallLuxGPU performance is up for both AMD and NVIDIA. There are no significant performance improvements elsewhere.

For NVIDIA cards all tests were done with default driver settings unless otherwise noted. As for AMD cards, we are disabling their new AMD Optimized tessellation setting in favor of using application settings (note that this doesn’t actually have a performance impact at this time), everything else is default unless otherwise noted.

For our look at gaming performance we’re going to skip our running commentary at this time. In practice the 1GB 6950 is just as fast as the 2GB 6950 at 1920x1200 and 1680x1050 – the essential resolutions for a $260 card. It’s only at 2560x1600 and Eyefinity resolutions that the 2GB card makes a difference with most games at this time. This is likely to change in the near future, but for the time being –and as you’ll see – there’s little disadvantage to a 1GB 6950 right now.

Meanwhile we’re also including the XFX Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition in these charts. In general it’s around 5% faster than a stock-clocked 6870, which isn’t enough to cut in to the GTX 560 Ti’s 10-15% lead. At $20 less than the GTX 560 Ti this makes it a potential value spoiler, but not a direct competitor.

Power, Temperature, & Noise

As was the case with gaming performance, we’ll keep our running commentary thin here. The Radeon HD 6950 1GB is virtually identical to the 2GB card, so other than a few watts power difference (which can easily be explained by being an engineering sample) the two are equals. It’s the XFX Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition that has caught our attention.

While the XFX 6870 has the same load voltage as the reference 6870, between the change in the cooler and the higher core and memory frequencies power usage still goes up. Under Crysis this is 11W, and under FurMark this expands to 16W. Unfortunately this factory overclock has wiped out much of the 6870’s low power edge versus the 6950, and as a result the two end up being very close. In practice power consumption under load is nearly identical to the GTX 460 1GB, albeit with much better gaming performance.

Meanwhile this is one of the few times we’ll see a difference between the 1GB and 2GB 6950. At idle and under Crysis the two are nearly identical, but under FurMark the 1GB reduces power consumption by some 12W even with PowerTune in effect. We believe that this is due to the higher operating voltage of the 2Gb GDDR5 modules AMD is using on the 2GB card.

As far as temperatures go both cards are in the middle of the pack. The vapor chamber cooler on the 6900 series already gives it a notable leg up over most cards, including the XFX 6870. At 41C the XFX card is a bit warm at idle, meanwhile 78C under load is normal for most cards of this class. Meanwhile the 6950 1GB and 2GB both perform identically, even with the power consumption difference between the two.

Last but certainly not least we have our noise testing, and this is the point where the XFX 6870 caught our eye. The reference 6870 was an unremarkable card when it came to noise – it didn’t use a particularly advanced cooling design, and coupled with the use of a blower it ended up being louder than a number of cards, including the vapor chamber equipped Radeon HD 6970. The XFX 6870 reverses this fortune and then some due to XFX’s well-designed open-air cooler. At idle it edges out our other cards by a mere 0.1dB, but the real story is at load. And no, that’s not a typo in the load noise chart, the XFX Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition really is that quiet.

In fact at 41.4dB under load, the XFX 6870 is for all intents and purposes a silent card in our GPU testbed. Under load the fans do rev up, but even when doing so the card stays below the noise floor of our testbed. Compared to the reference 6870 we’re looking at just shy of a 14dB difference between said reference card and the XFX 6870, a feat that is beyond remarkable. With the same warning as we attach to the GTX 460 and GTX 560 – you need adequate case cooling to make an open-air card work – the XFX Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition may very well be the fastest actively cooled quiet card on the market.

Meanwhile for the Radeon HD 6950 1GB and 2GB, we’re once again left with results that are nearly indistinguishable. Under load our 1GB card ended up being .6dB quieter, an imperceptible difference.

Final Words

AMD’s GTX 560 Ti counter-offensive leaves us with a few different thoughts, none of which have much to do with the GTX 560 Ti.

First and foremost we have the newly launched Radeon HD 6950 1GB. Having 2GB of VRAM does have its advantages, but at this point in time there aren’t any games that can exploit this advantage at the common resolutions of 1920x1200, 1920x1080, or 1680x1050. It’s only once we get to 2560x1600 or similarly large Eyefinity resolutions that we see the 1GB 6950 fall behind its 2GB counterpart.

In the long run (e.g. a year or longer) I believe having that extra 1GB of VRAM is going to make a difference at resolutions like 1920x1200, but amidst my prognostics we’re effectively making an argument on the futureproofness of a product, which is a difficult argument to make even in the best of times. Perhaps the best argument is one of price: the 6950 1GB starts at $259, while the 6950 2GB can be found for as little as $269, putting a $10 premium on the extra 1GB. For $10 I would suggest taking the plunge, however if your budget is absolutely critical then it’s clear under most games right now you will never notice the difference between a 1GB 6950 and a 2GB 6950.

Our second card presents a more interesting scenario. The factory overclock on the XFX Radon 6870 Black Edition is not very high, but then neither is the effective price of the overclock. Instead this is a story about a custom cooler, and whether at about $10 over the average price of a reference Radeon HD 6870 it’s worth the price. While I would not call the reference 6870 loud, I also would not call it quiet by any stretch of the word; if anything I would call it cheaply built. If you don’t care about noise then the Black Edition brings little to the table, but in a suitable case those of you with sensitive ears will be in for quite a surprise. Thus while the XFX 6870 comes up short as a true GTX 560 Ti competitor as AMD would seem to be hoping for, it clearly has other redeeming values.

With AMD’s latest cards squared away, our final thought is on today’s launch in general. If nothing else, hopefully today’s write-up has entertained you, and with any luck we’ve imparted upon you a bit of practical wisdom about how the GPU industry operates. As far as we can gather AMD went through quite a bit of effort to launch a viable GTX 560 Ti competitor today – a feat they appear to have succeeded at. The GPU industry is competitive from top to bottom, but there’s something special about the $200-$300 price range that brings out the insanity on all sides. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.