AMD’s Radeon HD 6870 & 6850: Renewing Competition in the Mid-Range Market
by Ryan Smith on October 21, 2010 10:08 PM ESTWhat’s In a Name?
GPU naming is rarely consistent. While NVIDIA is usually the biggest perpetrator of naming confusion or suddenly switched names AMD does not have a clear record either (the Mobility 5100 series comes to mind). However we’re not sure there’s precedent for AMD’s latest naming decision, and there’s really no stepping around it. So we have a few thoughts we’d like to share.
Since the introduction of the Radeon 3870 in 2007, 800 has been the series designation for AMD’s high-end products. The only time they’ve broken this is last year, when AMD ditched the X2 moniker for their dual-GPU card for the 5900 designation, a move that ruffled a few feathers but at least made some sense since the 5970 wasn’t a true 5870 X2. Regardless, the 800 series has since 2007 been AMD’s designation for their top single-chip product.
With that naming scheme come expectations of performance. Each 800 series card has been successively faster, and while pricing has been inconsistent as AMD’s die size and costs have shifted, ultimately each 800 series card was a notable step up in performance from the previous card. With the 6800 this is not the case. In fact it’s absolutely a step down, the 6800 series is on average 7% slower than the 5800 series. This doesn’t mean that AMD hasn’t made enhancements to the card –we’ve already covered the enhanced tessellation unit, AA/AF, UVD3, and other features – but these are for the most part features and not performance enhancements.
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Today AMD is turning their naming scheme on its head by launching these Barts cards with the 6800 name, but without better-than-5800 performance. AMD’s rationale for doing this is that they’re going to be continuing to sell the 5700 series, and that as a result they didn’t want to call these cards the 6700 series and introduce confusion. Furthermore AMD is trying to recapture the glory days of the 4800 series, where those parts sold for under $300 and then quickly under $200. It wasn’t until the 5800 series that an 800 series card became outright expensive. So for these reasons, AMD wanted to call these Barts cards the 6800 series.
We find ourselves in disagreement with AMD here.
We don’t have a problem with AMD introducing the 6 series here – the changes they’ve made, even if not extreme, at least justify that. But there’s a very real issue of creating confusion for buyers of the 5800 series now by introducing the 6800 series. The performance may be close and the power consumption lower, but make no mistake, the 5800 series was faster.
Ultimately this is not our problem; this is AMD’s problem. So we can’t claim harm per-say, but we can reflect on matters. The Barts cards being introduced today should have been called the 6700 series. It would have made the latest rendition of the 700 series more expensive than last time, but at the same time Barts is a very worthy upgrade to the 5700 series. But then that’s the problem for AMD; they don’t want to hurt sales of the 5700 series while it’s still on the market.
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StriderGT - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I agree with you that the inclusion of the FTW card was a complete caving and casts shadows to a so far excellent reputation of anandtech. I believe the whole motivation was PR related, retaining a workable relation with nvidia, but was it worth it?!Look how ugly can this sort of thing get, they do not even include the test setup... Quote from techradar.com:
We expected the 6870 to perform better than it did – especially as this is essentially being pitched as a GTX 460 killer.
The problem is, Nvidia's price cuts have made this an impossible task, with the FTW edition of the GTX 460 rolling in at just over £170, yet competently outperforming the 6870 in every benchmark we threw at it.
In essence, therefore, all the 6870 manages is to unseat the 5850 which given its end of life status isn't too difficult a feat. We'd still recommend buying a GTX 460 for this sort of cash. All tests ran at 1,920 x 1,080 at the highest settings, apart from AvP, which was ran at 1,680 x 1,050.
http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/pc-compone...
oldscotch - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
...where a Civilization game would be used for a GPU benchmark.AnnihilatorX - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
It's actually quite taxing on the maps. It lags on my HD4850.The reason is, it uses DX 11 DirectCompute features on texture decompression. The performance is noticeably better on DX11 cards.
JonnyDough - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
"Ultimately this means we’re looking at staggered pricing. NVIDIA and AMD do not have any products that are directly competing at the same price points: at every $20 you’re looking at switching between AMD and NVIDIA."Not when you figure in NVidia's superior drivers, or power consumption...depending on which one matters most to you.
Fleeb - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I looked at the load power consumption charts and saw the Radeon cards are better in this department and I don't clearly understand your statement. Did you mean that the nVidia cards in these tests should be better because of superior power consumption or that their power consumption is superior in a sense that nVidia cards consume more power?jonup - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I think he meant the nVidia has better drivers but worse power consumption. So it all depends on what you value most. At least that's how I took it.zubzer0 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Great review!If you have the time I would be wery happy if you test how well these boards do in Age of Conan DX10?
Some time ago you included (feb. 2009) Age of Conan in your reviews, but since then DX10 support was added to the game. I have yet to see an official review of the current graphics cards performance in AoC DX10.
Btw. With the addon "Rise of the godslayer" the graphics in the new Khitai zone are gorgeous!
konpyuuta_san - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
In my case (pun intended), the limiting factor is the physical size of the card. I've abandoned the ATX formats completely, going all out for mini-ITX (this one is Silverstone's sugo sg06). The king of ITX cases might still be the 460, but this is making me feel a bit sore about the 460 I'm just about to buy. Especially since the 6870 is actually only $20 more than the 6850 where I live and the 6850 is identically priced to the 460. There's just no way I can fit a 10.5 inch card into a 9 inch space. The 9 inch 6850 would fit, but there's a large radiator mounted on the front of the case, connected to a cpu water cooling block, that will interfere with the card. I've considered some crazy mods to the case, but those options just don't feel all that attractive. The GTX460 is a good quarter inch shorter and I'm getting a model with top-mounted power connectors so there's ample room for everything in this extremely packed little gaming box. I'm still kind of trying to find a way to put a 6850 in there (bangs and bucks and all that), which leads to my actual question, namely:The issue of rated power consumption; recommended minimum for the 460 is 450W (which I can support), but for the 6850 it's 500W (too much). How critical are those requirements? Does the 6850 really require a 500W supply? Despite having lower power consumption than the 460?! Or is that just to ensure the PSU can supply enough amps on whatever rail the card runs off? If my 450W SFF PSU can't supply the 6850, it really doesn't matter how much better or cheaper it is ....
joshua4000 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
let me get this straigt, fermi was once too expensive to manufacture due to its huge die and stuff but its striped down versions sell for less and outpace newley released amd cards (by a wide margin when looked at the 470)amds cheaper to manufacture cards (5xxx) on the other hand came in overpriced once the 460 had been released (if they havent been over priced all along...), still, the price did not drop to levels nvidia could not sell products without making a loss.
amd has optimised an already cheap product price wise, that does not outperforme the 470 or an oced 460 while at the same time selling for the same amount $.
considering manufacturing and pricing of the 4870 in its last days, i guess amd will still be making money out of those 6xxx when dropping the price by 75% msrp.
NA1NSXR - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Granted there have been a lot of advancements in the common feature set of today's cards and improvement in power/heat/noise, but the absolute 3D performance has been stagnant. I am surprised the competition was called alive and well in the final words section. I built my PC back in 7/2009 using a 4890 which cost $180 then. Priced according to the cards in question today, it would slot in roughly the same spot, meaning pretty much no performance improvement at all since then. Yes, I will repeat myself to ward off what is certainly coming - I know the 4890 is a pig (loud, noisy, power hungry) compared to the cards here. However, ignoring those factors 3D performance has barely budged in more than a year. Price drops on 5xxx was a massive disappointment for me. They never came in the way I thought was reasonable to expect after 4xxx. I am somewhat indifferent because in my own PC cycle I haven't been in the market for a card, but like I said before, disappointment in the general market and i wouldn't really agree with the statement that competition is alive and well, at least in any sense that is benefiting people who weight performance more heavily in criteria.