AMD’s Radeon HD 6870 & 6850: Renewing Competition in the Mid-Range Market
by Ryan Smith on October 21, 2010 10:08 PM ESTThe second new game on our list is 4A Games’ Metro 2033, their tunnel shooter released earlier this year. Last month the game finally received a major patch resolving some outstanding image quality issues with the game, finally making it suitable for use in our benchmark suite. At the same time a dedicated benchmark mode was added to the game, giving us the ability to reliably benchmark much more stressful situations than we could with FRAPS. If Crysis is a tropical GPU killer, then Metro would be its underground counterpart.
From the moment you run Metro it’s clear that it’s going to be a shader-heavy game, and the results from our benchmarks mirror this. The 6800 series does particularly poorly compared to the 5800 series here as a result of the loss of shaders, giving the 5800 series a solid 10% lead over the 6800 series, and showcasing why AMD’s rebalanced design for Barts comes with its own set of tradeoffs.
In the 6870 pack, we’re looking at a dead heat; how Metro reports averages creates a wider spread than the actual performance differences in these cards. Metro is a hard game but it’s a fair game: everything is equally slow. Meanwhile the 6850 manages a small lead over the GTX 460 1GB.
Finally, looking once more at Crossfire scores we see the same mysterious pattern: the 6800 series nearly closes the 5800 series gap.
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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.