Tuesday, December 20th 2011
Radeon HD 6930 2 GB Tested
Unbeknownst to many, AMD launched the Radeon HD 6930 in some markets. The company apparently doesn't want this launch to disturb reviewers from key high-volume markets, who have their hands full with Radeon HD 7970, and so the HD 6930 got a limited launch. For one, the HD 6930 is most certainly launched in China, and so Expreview gave it a run against the HD 6950 1 GB. The Radeon HD 6930 is carved out of the 40 nm "Cayman" silicon, on which other HD 6900 series products are based. It features 1280 VLIW4 stream processors, 1 GB or 2 GB of GDDR5 memory over a 256-bit wide memory interface, 80 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and clock speeds of 750 MHz (core), 1200 MHz or 4.80 GHz effective (memory). Very few partners made English press-releases about this SKU, HIS was among them. The company launched an IceQ-X graphics card on Monday.
Performance summary follows.
Expreview put the HD 6930 through its usual battery of tests, covering a large variety of games and synthetic benchmarks. The results are tabled below. Overall, the HD 6930 was found to be about 7.8% slower than the HD 6950 2 GB.
Source:
Expreview
Expreview put the HD 6930 through its usual battery of tests, covering a large variety of games and synthetic benchmarks. The results are tabled below. Overall, the HD 6930 was found to be about 7.8% slower than the HD 6950 2 GB.
40 Comments on Radeon HD 6930 2 GB Tested
Look at their chart "Cayman CE Positioning".
Oh, see how 6930 is so superior to the 560 Ti
Now look at the benchmarks.
The 6930 is between 5%-20% SLOWER than the 560 Ti.
How about AMD Marketing gets honest. Put the 6930 NEXT TO the 560 Ti and say "this is our direct competitor product but at a price 30% lower, therefore buy US". No. Lie lie lie instead. :shadedshu
Their marketing can't be "honest" when their main competitor is just as "dishonest".
Edit: Some of those games run significantly better on nVidia hardware also do affect the results.
Those games where AMD is the slowest is when PhysX is on and AMD is 30% slower. When PhysX is off, it is still 25% slower.
WHAT DID YOU SAY? "Some of those games run significantly better on nVidia hardware also do affect the results." SERIOUS WTF? Are you saying benchmarks should exclude all those games where they run better on nV? ROFL IN DISBELIEF! BANGHEAD! So you want to exclude all the results where nV is better, and heypresto! AMD looks better if you only choose the games where AMD wins. Oh. Might not be many games in those results! :shadedshu
While I might not agree with some of the words John Doe has chosen, I do agree with his sentiment! He spotted you a mile off.
And even if every system in your house was AMD don't mean ya a fanboy.. Could be as simple as price\performance..
Not trying to say Mr John Doe is a Intel fanboy but he surly payed for his CPU.
Like others have said it's kinda late..
If you don't know by now in some games the 560TI do out-perform the 6970 because those games runs better on nVidia's arch.
I am not saying the results are wrong.
Edit: I never said that those games should be excluded at all, you are the one that implies that. :slap:
Just accept it. The 6930 does NOT beat the 560 Ti. To be competitive, AMD needs to price this lower than the 560 Ti. And to be honest AMD Marketing needs to fall on swords for yet another fail at misrepresenting what the AMD "can do". Again. Again. BD, now 6930. Just tell the truth AMD. You have a competitive product. And you can price it to "win". BUT NO YOU DONT HAVE THE BEST PERFORMING PRODUCT
+++++
I'm retiring from this discussion. The facts have been laid bare. Nothing more to discuss.
If the price is right, this would make a great "budget" high-end gaming card. I would be less interested in its performance vs the 6950, but how much better it would perform vs a 6870. Would it be enough to justify getting a 6930, at a slightly higher price point over the 6870, yet still cheaper than the 6950.
As far as the "PhysX" debate, you notice there is only one game listed using that engine? There is a reason for that, PhysX is all but dead. There are hardly any games that use it anymore, and even fewer mainstream games. Nvidia refuses to allow it to run on any GPU other than their own. An AMD card can run PhysX just as well as an Nvidia, its simply not allowed because AMD would have to pay Nvidia for the right to do so. That's simply not going to happen.
Most developers are not using PhysX anymore, they either use Havoc or their own physics engine. They do not want to alienate what constitutes over half of the their customer base, especailly on money maker titles, since AMD is topping Nvidia in worldwide discrete GPU sales more often than not. So why would AMD pay to use PhysX, simply put, they wont, it would be stupid. PhysX is a great engine, but it can do nothing over Havoc or engines that developers create themselves and those other engines will run on any GPU, no matter the branding. So in a nut shell, Nvidia is killing the PhysX engine.
but does it make sense buying one of these now when we are around a month away (possibly), from the launch of the 7xxx series...?