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.


MSI’s Lightning has a clear advantage over the reference HD6970 thanks to its 60MHz overclock and the 4.7% performance benefit is enough to take it above the GTX570, the card’s closest competitor from the green team.


After overclocking all the cards, the Lightning is still unmatched by the reference card, producing an overall 5.1% better performance thanks to its 6.5% higher overclock. Although not quite linear, it is welcoming to see such a performance advantage from the Lightning’s superior overclocking headroom and it further suggests that PowerTune only had a very minimal impact on performance. Where the reference design failed in matching Nvidia’s offerings in the form of the GTX480 and GTX570, the R6970 lightning proves to be more competitive and unlike the former, the thermal dissipation was under control. The overclock was still not enough to match the sheer headroom available on Nvidia GF110 GPU and was thus unable to outperform the GTX570. On closer analysis of the results, we find that the 2GB framebuffer on the AMD card diminishes the performance gap at higher resolutions and with higher levels of AA but the GTX570 delivers the raw performance to compensate for this disadvantage.