Stone Giant is a benchmark tech demo that showcases and measures DirectX 11 performance using the BitSquid Engine. This is a very heavy tessellation dependant benchmark which runs very well on nVidia hardware.
nVidia solutions, unsurprisingly, score the highest with the Stone Giant benchmark. This is not without some controversy however, in our recent interview with AMD guru Richard Huddy he said “With artificial tests like Stone Giant, which was paid for by nVidia, tessellation can be done down to the single pixel level. Even though that pixel can’t be broken away from the 3 other pixels in its quad. Doing additional processing for each pixel in a group of 4 and then throwing 75% of that work away is just sad”.”
Regardless, it is a popular benchmark and we felt it was worth an inclusion in our review today. The Asus HD6970 Direct CU II equals the overclocked GTX460 with average frame rate scores, but manages to outperform it with minimum frame rate figures.
I am sporting a semi after reading the overclocking page (first thing I skipped too as the default clocks of this are stupid).
Makes that XFX card look really bad.
Very yummy indeed, but the 3 slot cooler is a little extreme. surely they could have done that in a dual slot design. the heatpipes and heatsink arent that big.
that cooler really is insane looking. very similar to MSI’s frozr, which is also great. I dont understand the low core clock speeds. if t his card can hit 1.1ghz with voltage increase then 1ghz should be easy enough. if they sold it as a 1ghz model I bet they would sell tons more. people dont always know how high a card will OC. now we do !
THey always made good boards, but they can be slow getting them out. all the early adopters miss these cards cause they already have other ones.
Thats a fucking kick ass product. 3 slot cooler is really massive, wouldnt fancy trying to fit three of these in a system for 3 way CFx
id rather have their GTX580, but both are pretty class leading designs whatever way you look at it.
whats next? sapphire with a four slot cooler?
Asus have probably the best engineers in the world, look at their mars and ares cards for instance. we will all never forget em.
I would be more then happy with a card of such calibre running in any of my desktops and I think this card is going to be truly amazing when it comes to staying cool which as we all know opens up lots of over-clocking possibilities
i have bought one 6970 direct Cu 2 and i fails bad
here is forum with the real temps
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?p=4151379&posted=1#post4151379