Sapphire Radeon HD 6970 2GB GDDR5 Dual Fan

Benchmarks

Furmark

Furmark is both elegant and brutal in its method: it creates an ideal representation of a fur-covered donut pillow, then asks your video card to render said fur-covered donut pillow with no tricks, shortcuts or gimmicks. The result is one of the most gruelingly difficult tasks your video card will ever have to perform, far in excess of anything any actual game would ask it to do.

Pitting the Sapphire HD 6970 against this hairy monster yields some interesting results; the 720 preset benchmark stayed steady around 50FPS, while the 1080 preset hovered near 30FPS. What’s equally interesting here is the temperature readout: over the course of a 30 minute burn test, the temperature never rose above 76°C. Given that this temperature is where many NVIDIA cards idle, the difference is quite noteworthy.

PerformanceTest 7.0

Among its other metrics, PerformanceTest 7.0 offers a test of something most benchmarks ignore: GUI rendering speed. Yes, that boring, prosaic thing that everybody figured out how to do decades ago. Surprisingly, some modern cards manage to stumble here, producing choppy, tear-prone scrolling, aliasing bugs, and other strangeness.

Thankfully, there are no missed steps here. 2D performance is flawless, and the 3D performance ranges from jaw dropping high frame rates on the simple test to a still smooth 50FPS on the DX10 test.

Video Playback

Life’s not always about the latest and greatest 3D extravaganzas though; sometimes you just want to sit back and watch a movie.

Running a few sample videos through Windows Media Player—Big Buck Bunny and the WipEout HD 60fps trailer—the results were exactly on-target with the source media. Big Buck Bunny, which is encoded at 24fps, stayed at or near 24fps at all times. The WipEout HD trailer, which has been known to make lesser video cards stutter and choke, was silky-smooth throughout, never dipping below 55FPS and spending much of its time at 59FPS.

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