AMD’s Radeon HD 6870 & 6850: Renewing Competition in the Mid-Range Market
by Ryan Smith on October 21, 2010 10:08 PM ESTThe third game on our list is one of the games new to our benchmark suite: Starcraft II. Under normal circumstances Starcraft II isn’t particularly GPU limited – it spends much of its time CPU limited – but in 2-player battles in particular we find that it responds more to GPU performance than it does CPU performance. As icing on the cake we have 4x AA enabled, which thanks to the deferred rendering workarounds used by AMD and NVIDIA, crushes the performance of all the cards involved.
Do note that due to the amount of time it takes to run this benchmark we had to cut our testing short. We’ll have our full results in Bench next week.
When we were running our benchmarks for Starcraft, Anand asked me more than once whether our results were a fluke. At 2560 the Radeon cards trample the GTX 460, and at 1920 it’s still lopsided when the 6850 breaks-even in most other games. Compared to the other Radeon cards the 6000 series continues to perform near the 5850, but otherwise the GTX 460 is at a clear disadvantage.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
197 Comments
View All Comments
pcfxer - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
The problem with that is that GPUs are much more complex than the way a single score can paint. The technology is complex and thus explaining performance across the board is also complex. It very much is the nature of the beast.The only way to go is to scour the web for reviews of the videocards that you are looking at specifically and for the applications you would like to run. It is still true though, that a 5870 will outperform a 5850 or a 5770 so they made that simple.
AMD definitely has ruined the simple 5850 5870 5890 nomenclature though...
Krich420 - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 - link
I think if they just named it 6850/6830 instead of 6870/6850 they could have saved themselves a lot of negative sentiment.Sparks_IT - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
Any information on Eyefinity. I thought there was to be an update/improvement? And is an active adapter still needed?Jansen - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
There are connections for 2 mini DisplayPort, 1 HDMI 1.4a, and 2 DVI.http://www.dailytech.com/Radeon+6800+Series+Launch...
There are some pretty cheap mini-DP adapters out now.
Jansen - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
My point should have been that you can now use 4 monitors natively with a single card.Stuka87 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Actually its still limited to two displays at once as I recall. It has four interfaces, but they cannot function simultaneously.mino - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
4 it is.DP interfaces are independent from DVI/HDMI ones.
So yeas, you can use any 2 of the DVI-DVI-HDMI plus those 2 DP interfaces.
AnnihilatorX - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
No way, that's not how Eyefinity worksEyefinity allows 3 monitors to be driven by a single card, I don't think they would make it any less with the new cards. It may not be 4, but 3 should be alright
Stuka87 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Ahh yeah, you are right. For some reason that bit of detail was not in mind at the time that I posted. Guess thats what I get for responding so late at night :)ninjaquick - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
Actually, Barts can push 6 screens... As could cypress but it was crippled to three most of the time, with the exception being eyefinity series cards that had 6 DP on the back.