AMD’s Radeon HD 6870 & 6850: Renewing Competition in the Mid-Range Market
by Ryan Smith on October 21, 2010 10:08 PM ESTThe last new game in our benchmark suite is Civilization 5, the latest incarnation in Firaxis Games’ series of turn-based strategy games. Civ 5 gives us an interesting look at things that not even RTSes can match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world, and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.
It’s also one of the few games banned at AnandTech, as “one more turn” and article deadlines are rarely compatible.
Civ 5 has given us benchmark results that quite honestly we have yet to fully appreciate. A tight clustering of results would normally indicate that we’re CPU bound, but the multi-GPU results – particularly for the AMD cards – turns this concept on its head by improving performance by 47% anyhow. The most telling results however are found in the GTX 460 cards, where there’s a clear jump in performance going form the 768MB card to the 1GB card, and again from the 1GB card to the EVGA card. The 1GB GTX only improves on memory, memory bandwidth, and ROPs, greatly narrowing down the factors. No one factor can explain our results, but we believe we’re almost simultaneously memory and geometry bound.
With that in mind, this is clearly a game that benefits NVIDIA’s GPUs right now when we’re looking at single-GPU performance. This likely comes down to NVIDIA’s greater geometry capabilities, but we’re not willing to rule out drivers quite yet, particularly when a partially CPU-bound game comes in to play. In any case NVIDIA’s advantage leads to their wiping the floor with AMD here, as even the mere GTX 460 768MB can best a 5870, let alone the 6800 series.
Crossfire changes things up, but only because NVIDIA apparently does not have a SLI profile for Civ 5 at this time.
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Finally - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Thank God morons don't compare prices.Naming is irrelevant as long as you actually get more performance for half the price when the HD5850 was introduced.
softdrinkviking - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
The fact that all of these people are complaining about the naming proves that it isn't irrelevant.Names are important to some people.
Not to you, clearly, but you're not everybody.
krumme - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I was wondering before if Anandtech was going to use the overclocked 460 card. This day was a test for the new cards from AMD but it was more a test of Anandtech i my view.What a mess for the consumer, Anand and Ryan! - i know you must have discussed this.
- where does this lead to?
1. More agressive intervention from AMD and Nvidia on the review sites
2. More OC cards on the launch dates
This is not good for the transparancy for the consumer.
Therefore its a sad day. And i guess from your own writing, you dont feel quite comfortable about it yourself. Why the f... didnt you listen more to your own doubt?
- next time listen to yourself.
Otherwise a fine review - worth criticizing.
SandmanWN - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Exactly. If I were controlling the media for AMD I would start shipping out hand selected overclocked 5970's on every Nvidia review and demand they be used or no longer receive free review samples.Starting a bad trend here.
Mygaffer - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Other sites didn't bow to the pressure and include the OC'd gtx460. Guru3d is one that comes to mind. Not only that, but after admitting its your policy to not included them you include the very fastest OC'd gtx460 on the market?LAME. At least OC the 6850 so you can show that an OC'd 6850 beats an OC'd gtx460.
I've lost some respect for you with that decision.
AnnihilatorX - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
The CF HD6850 seems to be quite a good value for high end users.They seem to have improved crossfire performance on this generation
A single HD5870 still retails at twice the price of HD6850
but 2 HD6850s are 50-70% faster than a single HD5870
MeanBruce - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Notice the idle noise levels within this comparative are all in the 40db range, with load noise in gaming mode up to the 50 and 60db range. Anyone interested in gaming or working in the 10db range? It is very possible, I am doing it now with an older ATI 4850, talk about peaceful computing and late night gaming. Yup add an uber-efficient aftermarket heatsink I have tried a few from Arctic Cooling and Thermalright, the best one so far is the MK-13 from Prolimatech! Clip on a Noctua NF-S12B uln fan 6db or a 140mm Noctua FLX attenuated to 10db and you are there baby! Total Upgrade Costs: $85. Peace of Mind: Priceless. Bruce out!Ryantju - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I used to play Crysis with HD 4830, which is not very good and I can't see the benchmarks. Since HD 4870's has such a outstanding Price/Performance, can it run Crysis 2?shiznit - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Anand I thought you tested the 5870 in WoW? The ugly texture transitions were blatantly obvious from the start. Imagine my dismay when upgrading from a 8800GT to a brand new just released 5870 and seeing worse texture filtering...Techman123 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I got my 5870 over a year ago and have been enjoying great frame-rates on my 30in monitor at 2560x1600. Even though it wasn't cheap, it has to have been one of the best buys I ever made, as this card is still one of the top tier of cards on the market. It's not often that a video card over a year old is still that competitive. Plus I have the option of adding a 2nd card once they are relegated to 2nd tier status.It is interesting the way they are introducing this card. With the 58xx series, they came out with the high end card first. It makes it seem that although the 6900 series will improve over the 5800 series, it won't be the huge step the 5800 was.