Powercolor HD6970 PCS+ Review – silent and deadly

Stone Giant is a benchmark tech demo that showcases and measures DirectX 11 performance using the BitSquid Engine. This is a very heavy tessellation dependant benchmark which runs very well on nVidia hardware.

nVidia solutions, unsurprisingly, score the highest with the Stone Giant benchmark. This is not without some controversy however, in our recent interview with AMD guru Richard Huddy he said “With artificial tests like Stone Giant, which was paid for by nVidia, tessellation can be done down to the single pixel level. Even though that pixel can’t be broken away from the 3 other pixels in its quad. Doing additional processing for each pixel in a group of 4 and then throwing 75% of that work away is just sad”.”

Regardless, it is a popular benchmark and we felt it was worth an inclusion in our review today. The GTX570 as expected is literally miles ahead, with the overclocked PCS+ card trailing in second place, just ahead of the GTX460 OC model.

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