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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Ryan Smith - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Quality is unchanged. UVD 3 adds a few fixed function blocks, but quality is a matter of post-processing and hence affected by the drivers once you have sufficient shader power to do all the post-processing.Pastuch - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I posted about this earlier but my post was deleted.Ryan there is a ton of HTPC users on this site.
1. Exactly how long is the Radeon 6870/6850 vs the GTX 460?
2. How does the GTX460 compare to the Radeon 6 series regarding bitstreaming high def audio?
3. How UVD3 post-processing compare to Nvidias?
Ryan Smith - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
It's exactly the same as this: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3973/nvidias-geforce...HigherGround - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Why was EVGA card included in this test? The rest of the field is generic (non OC, no brand), so why included an OC card, which skews the readers perspective? Pretty sure EVGA paid you to included its top OC card in this review ...Parhel - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
No, NVidia paid them to include it. NVidia sends "guidelines" to all the hardware review sites, telling them what settings to use and which cards to use in the comparison. In the guidelines for today's review was to use the EVGA GTX 460 FTW, and and site you see using it is essentially a paid NVidia shill.I could care less about ATI vs NVidia, as I'm not really a gamer, but I'm very disappointed today to see my long time favorite hardware site stooping to this level. In the end, it gives consumers bad information, which should be antithetical to the purpose of a site like this.
AtwaterFS - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I agree, this site is typically class-leading, but this article give AnandTech a bit of a black eye and the results dont particularly jive with "un-biased" sites like HardOCP.DrKlahn - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I was going to post the same thing. As a long time reader of this site, I was very disappointed with the decision to include the overclocked card. Either the ATI cards should have been overclocked and their results provided in every test or it should have been excluded as per the normal benchmarking guidelines.I would have no issue with a followup or side article comparing factory overclocked offerings. But this is clearly bowing to pressure from Nvidia and I expected better of this site.
aungee - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
To Include the EVGA GTX 460 FTW was unfair and whether intentional or not it did spoil the launch party for AMD on this site to some degree. It would have been more appropriate to make a small mention of it's existence and to benchmark it in the future against any factory OC 6800 cards.After getting your head around the naming, AMD needs to be credited for bringing such a performance on only a 255 mm2 package (it even caused the price drop for the 530mm2 GTX 470) . AMD has headroom to drop the price of the 6800 cards so lets hope they do soon.
tigersty1e - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I couldn't find the clocks, but if you do include an OC'd card in your benches, you should give us the clocks.dertechie - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
850 MHz Core, 1700 MHz shaders, 4 GHz Memory, up from 675 MHz Core, 1350 MHz shaders, 3.6 GHz Memory.That's a 26% Core OC and an 11% Memory OC. However, the cost has been OC'd too, the FTW card costs the same $240 as the stock Radeon 6870.