HIS Radeon HD 6950 Impressions

On Boxing Day of last year (which I suppose was only a few weeks ago), I managed to pick up a HIS Radeon HD 6950 from Memory Express on sale. I had been looking for a video card to rejuvenate my aging gaming PC for a while, and I figured that Boxing Day gave me a good excuse to take a chance on a distributor that I knew almost nothing about. I have chosen three games in order to measure the card’s performance: Battlefield 3 was chosen because it’s one of the most demanding games on the market right now in terms of resource consumption, Crysis was chosen because it’s considered by many to be the quintessential game for hardware benchmarking, and Hard Reset was chosen because I wanted to have at least one Unreal Engine 3 game on the list.

Here are the specs of my admittedly aging gaming PC:

Battlefield 3:

Here is a screenshot showing the video settings that I used while playing. It’s just the default settings that the game assigned to me - I didn’t bother messing around with any of it: http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/8758/bf3settings.jpg

Anyways, with those settings, I was averaging about 40-60 frames per second in a 32-player Conquest server (mostly Caspian Border and Grand Bazaar, though we had some Metro and Wake thrown in as well). The game only rarely dipped below 40, but for the most part, it held steady within that range. On a purely qualitative level, I was quite happy with the performance. Not once during my 2.5 hour session did I ever feel like the gaming was chugging. It looked great and ran great for the duration of my session. I had nobody to blame for my horrible kill-death ratio but myself ;).

Crysis:

Just for the hell of it, I decided to turn the settings up to Very High. The game had defaulted to High for most of the properties, but I was feeling slightly ambitious. Here is a screenshot showing the specific settings that I used: http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/8955/crysissettings.jpg

With those settings, I was getting around 30-50 frames per second, depending on how much action was happening on screen. Keep in mind that those frame rates were measured while I was walking around in a pretty large environment that overlooked the water and quite a bit of foliage. I took a couple of screenshots that show the environment I was walking through while these measurements were taken: here and here (looking at those screenshots in retrospect, I didn’t have my AA setting high enough, so that should probably be kept in mind when looking at those performance numbers). I understand that different people have different ideas of what is considered to be a tolerable frame rate, but personally I found the game to be perfectly playable with these graphics settings. Keep in mind that I only played through the first hour of the game, and so there’s a good chance that I could encounter an area later on that makes my frame rate take a nosedive (I remember Crysis Warhead taking a very large performance dip whenever the aliens were on screen, as opposed to the regular North Korean troops).

Hard Reset:

I didn’t mess around with any of the default graphical settings that the game gave me. The only thing I changed was AA, which I changed from “Off” to “FXAA”. Hard Reset’s options menu is really cramped (odd design decision), so I had to take two screenshots to capture it: here and here.

With those settings, I was getting around 80-120 frames per second during normal sections with a few small enemies on screen at a time. When bigger enemies started showing up and when I had 10+ enemies on screen at a time, the frame rate would briefly dip down to about 55 frames per second, but it typically didn’t remain there for long before jumping back up to the 80-85 range. The game felt very fluid, as you could imagine with those frame rate levels. Similar to my Crysis measurements, you should keep in mind that I only played the game for about an hour, so perhaps there’s a section later on in the game that’s going to kick my video card’s ass. I’m actually going to play this game through to completion over the next week (I’m in the mood for something nice and simple after Skyrim), so I guess we shall find out soon.

Hopefully that write-up was mildly helpful. As you can imagine, I don’t have a lot of experience with performance evaluation techniques, and so my impressions ultimately boil down to the rather unscientific question of: “is it playable?”. Still, feel free to contact me if you have anything that you want me to explore in further detail.