Diamond, Sapphire & XFX AMD Radeon HD 6870 Video Card Roundup

H.A.W.X. 2 Benchmark

We wanted to include a new benchmark for this review, so Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2 was added in to see how it looked. This benchmark got some attention recently for not being neutral over the failure to use optimized code for better tessellation performance on AMD and NVIDIA cards, but that doesn’t matter to us as we will be using this benchmark to look at just AMD cards.

Aerial warfare has evolved. So have you. As a member of the ultra-secret H.A.W.X. 2 squadron, you are one of the chosen few, one of the truly elite. You will use finely honed reflexes, bleeding-edge technology and ultra-sophisticated aircraft – their existence denied by many governments – to dominate the skies. You will do so by mastering every nuance of the world’s finest combat aircraft. You will slip into enemy territory undetected, deliver a crippling blow and escape before he can summon a response. You will use your superior technology to decimate the enemy from afar, then draw him in close for a pulse-pounding dogfight. And you will use your steel nerve to successfully execute night raids, aerial refueling and more. You will do all this with professionalism, skill and consummate lethality. Because you are a member of H.A.W.X. 2 and you are one of the finest military aviators the world has ever known. H.A.W.X. 2 is due out on November 16, 2010 for PC gamers.

We ran the benchmark in DX11 mode and cranked up all the Antialiasing and Advanced image quality settings. We also enabled hardware tessellation as without that setting turned on the cards were getting well over 120FPS at a resolution of 1920×1200 and over 160FPS at 1280×1025. We wanted to stress the cards a bit and enabling tessellation appeared to do the trick as you’ll see below.

Benchmark Results: This benchmark looks amazing and you should really download it and try it out if you haven’t done so yet. We found all of the Radeon HD 6870 video cards were able to play this upcoming game demo just fine and, remember, this is without the driver fix for tessellation that AMD says they have in the works. The overclocked Diamond Radeon HD 6870 XOC was 3-4% faster than XFX and Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 cards with AMD reference clocks.