AMD Radeon 6990 Review - Just Cause 2

Article Type: 
Review

Just Cause 2

Just Cause 2 is the wildly popular sequal to the wildly popular Just Cause. You take control of protagonist Rico Rodriquez and rain down over the top destruction across a small desert island. The game is a free roaming title that offers literally limitless options to wreck havoc with your "hook shot" grapling device.

While the benchmark tool in the demo doesn't offer anything in the way of explosions or destruction, it does offer some beautiful scenery that is still quite demanding on multi-monitor environments.

The CFX configurations max out at 120fps for single widescreens, and top out at 60fps for Eyefinity. Single cards easily hit 60fps for widescreen and 30fps for Eyefinity. It's great to see a current, modern, and beautiful game performing this well across the whole range of cards and price points.

As with several other titles, widescreen configurations are no match for any of these cards. Additionally, virtually any card configuration pushes Eyefinity past 30fps. The Radeon HD 6990 pushes at 5x1600x900 right to 60fps.

One interesting thing to note about the Just Cause 2 demo. I first started testing with the demo benchmark. It only recognized 4GB of the RAM in my system. However, the benchmark in the full game recognizes all 12GB. I can't determine if the extra RAM provides any benefits, as the demos are different.

Below is a table that outlines the performance difference between the Radeon HD 6990 and the comparable SKUs. For example, the Radeon HD 6990 provides a 17fps improvement over an Eyefinity6 CFX configuration in 3x1600x900, and that represents a 40% increase over that Eyefinity6 CFX configuration.

  % improvement of an HD 6990 vs... % improvement of an HD 6990 vs...
E6
CFX
E6 5970 6970
CFX
6950
CFX
E6
CFX
E6 5970 6970
CFX
6950
CFX
5x1 1920x1080 8 21       24% 100%      
1600x900 17 30       40% 103%      
3x1 1920x1080 12 29 18 1 4 25% 94% 37% 2% 6%
1600x900 7 29 14 6 7 11% 73% 25% 10% 11%
WS 1920x1080 9 53 24 -4 1 8% 78% 25% -3% 1%
1600x900 -1 43 9 -1 -1 -1% 53% 8% -1% -1%



AMD 6990 JC2 5x1


AMD 6990 JC2 EF


AMD 6990 JC2 WS