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 GTX570 as expected is literally miles ahead, with the overclocked PCS+ card trailing in second place, just ahead of the GTX460 OC model.
Some very nice hardware this week Zardon. thanks man.
Great pictures of the board, great looking card that, very hefty
I always like their PCS+ cards, but I never know what their UK warranty is like, so I buy sapphire everytime.
That is fucking killer looking ! those heatpipes are wicked. Are yoyotech going to stock it?
Dual fans always works for me, better coverage and slower speeds. makes sense to everyone.
Apart from AMD.
As much as I love Sapphire and XFX, I think PC get ignored a lot and its not really fair, some of their designs are just as radical as sapphire. I think this card is brilliant, those noise levels are class leading
The cooler is awesome, really works well. I think their balance might be a bit in favour of noise though, but I suppose you could set up a manual profile for a little more noise for slightly lower temps
Its all good. apart from the free game. seriously, its over a year old now, can none of these manufacturers clear stock? how about Dead space 2 or something people really want?
WHats the price? dont see it anywhere 🙁
I dont think its out yet man. probably £20-30 more, as usual. worth it. I might sell my 6850 cf setup and get one of these, to lower the noise levels, as my system is quite bad atm
Seems its quite near the core limit. wonder why they went with such a relaxed memory timing, clearly that hynix is way capable of more. that OC was very good indeed.
Hmmm, looking at the cooler taken out from the video card. I am wondering what is cooling the memory chips and other components?
@rickshaw – the dual fans are. Clearly indicated by the huge oc potential on the memory.
Nice~~~ Powercolor has done it again, cant wait to get one of those
Wow, just wow, ultra heavy wow! After my comment on the PCS+ 6870, this was exactly what I was expecting, and that’s why I asked you to ask them for a sample to review.
I’m going to buy it right now. Enough said!