KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
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 reviews today. We can see that nVidia hardware scores well, claiming both of the top positions, followed closely by the AMD HD6970. Those who pay attention will see that the all important minimum frame rates of the HD6970 is higher than the GTX460 card, meaning it is slightly smoother to the naked eye. AMD are clearly improving their tessellation performance.
I think these are good boards, even though a lot of people will be disappointed with the fact the 580 is still leading the single card attack
@Sam: Not quite. The 5970 is still the fastest card. The GTX580 is definitely the fastest single chip.
The price is the biggest selling point. I dont think they are the performance killers we expected, but the 280 price for the 6970 means its actually only 30 more than the 5850 was at launch. thats quite a good figure for them to achieve. I think they are doing what they do against intel in the CPU sector. drop pricing as low as poss.
CFx is very good with these cards. the drivers must be much better than I last remember
@Faith – thats what I meant, ill be sure to make sure I analyse the text perfectly before posting next time 😉
these arent too shabby. good job from AMD. they hit the sweet spot on the pricing