The overall performance analysis looks at the relative performance between all the cards on test across all the settings used in our benchmark suite. For an explanation of our benchmarking procedure, have a look at the descriptions on each test page.


Strangely, the ASUS HD6950, despite its 10MHz overclock, couldn’t keep up with the reference HD6950 from HIS. This behaviour was observed throughout the entire benchmark suite and using every known driver since the release of the Cayman GPU made no impact in improving its performance. As a result, it drops behind the standard HD6950 by 1.1%. Compared to other cards, the ASUS HD6950 represents a marginal upgrade from the Cypress based HD5870. It also ends up 12% behind the HD6970.


The truth is that the card was built for overclocking so that’s what we will focus on. Once overclocked, it leaps ahead of the reference card and closes the gap even on the overclocked HD6970. For reference, the latter was clocked to 949MHz on the core, not far behind the 984MHz achieved on the ASUS card. The difference between the two was a mere 3% showing that even though the DirectCU II card cannot be unlocked, it can still match HD6970 performance level. In fact, the overclocked ASUS HD6950 did just that and managed to draw level with a stock clocked HD6970. It can be argued that a reference card will do so more easily through unlocking and still have further headroom for overclocking but they would lack the thermal benefits of the DirectCU II cooler. The overclocked ASUS card is no match to the overclocked GTX480 and GTX570 in this case which are priced similarly.