Powercolor HD6970 Crossfire Review

FarCry 2

We’ve been fairly surprised by the great performance of the PowerColor HD6970s when Crossfire’d, but all our testing has shown most of their performance comes from improved pipelines and similar rather than any claw-hammer levels of pixel pumping. Not so in FarCry 2, a game which up to now has totally been dominated by fast cards instead of clever ones. The HD6970XF setup keeps pace with the vastly pricier nVidia setup. Impressive.

 

HAWX 2

Now the middle of our page of surprises comes another. Is it that the single GTX580 goes as well as the SLI setup? Is it that HD6970XF is poor but still good? We can’t decide. Any of the cards on test will spank the game hard, but we can’t work out why HAWX 2, a game that doesn’t stress a toaster, would perform so poorly here.

 

Metro 2033

Finishing up as we always do with the very stern Metro 2033. A game that makes full use of DirectX 11 features and so should run well on the HD6970XF, but also enjoys some serious PhysX and so prefers the nVidia hardware generally. Everything has come full-circle though with the GTX580SLI comfortably ahead, but our final surprise is the big margin by which the PowerColor HD6970XF setup on review today manages to totally beast the GTX480SLI setup.