Aliens vs. Predator
Aliens vs. Predator
The standalone Aliens vs. Predator benchmark uses DX11 features such as hardware tessellation and advanced shadow sampling to draw and animate everyone's favourite xenomorph.
We have an extra result for the HD 6950 that's suffixed with an 'IQ'. As mentioned in the notes, the numbers represent an altered image quality setting that's closer to NVIDIA's. As you can see, the change doesn't cost the GPU a great deal of performance.
Looking at the 2,560x1,600 out-of-the-box numbers, here's how it pans out.
| HD 6970 Comparison at 25x16 | GTX 580 | GTX 570 | HD 5870 | HD 6950 |
| Faster/slower (per cent) | -9.6 | +5.6 | +15.9 | +11.9 |
| HD 6950 Comparison at 25x16 | GTX 570 | GTX 470 | HD 5870 | HD 6970 |
| Faster/slower (per cent) | -5.6 | +17.1 | +3.7 | -10.6 |
The improved tessellation engine provides a nice bump in performance for the Cayman cards, helping them trade blows with GTX 580/570 and put a bit of daylight between them and older cards. We'd hazard that the HD 6950 wouldn't be able to beat the HD 5870 without the presence of a much-improved tessellation function.
It doesn't pass us by that the two sub-£300 multi-GPU setups are able to beat all single-GPU cards.
