Sapphire Radeon HD 6970 2GB GDDR5 Dual Fan

Test System

All tests were performed with the following system:

Benchmarks

3DMark Vantage

First up is 3DMark Vantage, one of the most high-profile DX10 synthetic benchmarks. Though this benchmark is somewhat long in the tooth, it gives us a good idea how games built on older tech will run. As you can see in both the screenshots above and the graphs below, the Sapphire HD 6970 manages to get smooth frame rates in the GPU and feature tests by sheer muscle.

3DMark 11

Next we look at the results from Futuremark’s most recent benchmark, 3DMark 11. While the Extreme preset is still somewhat beyond its capabilities, the Sapphire HD 6970 manages to post respectable frame rates at the Performance setting. In fact, given that the 3DMark benchmarks are meant to represent a worst-case scenario for gaming, these results are quite promising.

Unigine Heaven

One of the first synthetic benchmarks to support DirectX 11, Unigine Heaven offers us a glimpse of a fantastically detailed Renaissance-era village floating among the clouds. Heaven is unique among the commonly available synthetic benchmarks in that it has both DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.0, allowing a side-by-side comparison of the two APIs on any given graphics card.

As you can see, DX11 performance is quite good, managing to stay in the 40FPS range most of the time. OpenGL 4.0 performance suffers somewhat, with an average frame rate of just over 20FPS.

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