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.
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Parhel - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
That's the truth. And even worse is that, after this review, I can no longer trust Anandtech as an unbiased review site. Along with the cards arriving on their doorsteps, NVidia tells the review sites which settings to use for both their own cards and AMD's. If the FTW edition card was included, I have to assume that the 'special' settings were used as well, which invalidates this whole article. Cementing that position is that HardOCP, I site I trust 100% but which is not one of my favorites, shows the new AMD cards performing MUCH better than we see them on Anandtech.spigzone - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I doubt Nvidia even tried to roll Kyle.What's more pathetic than someone knowing they are being rolled and trying to rationalize why it's okay as it's happening as if to say 'see, I'm TELLING you I'm getting rolled, so I DO have integrity ... you can see that, can't you???
Thank god for the Kyles of the world to provide integrity benchmarks.
Lolimaster - Sunday, October 24, 2010 - link
Is not even unbiased towards AMD cpu's. This explain everything.Trully PATHETIC
Will Robinson - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
It actually doesn't matter that much.After reading all the reviews out its pretty clear both the 6850 and 6870 are damn good cards and have some great new features.You can run 6 screens off one card,each at different resolutions,refresh rate and orientation.
That's pretty awesome.
NVDA obviously prefers a highly overclocked card to be used in the benchmarking but its pretty clear who the winners are.
Crossfire scaling and performance looks very nice....these new cards the new mid range champs.
Manu64 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
So far i've always valued Anandtech as a neutral PC site, now i'm losing my faith... Whole article written in favor of NVDA because of an heavily overclocked card? You are losing your standards :-(Jamahl - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I must agree. The whole front page bangs on about how Anandtech never uses overclocked cards blah blah, then throws it out the window.Anandtech hits an all time low.
kmmatney - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I don't mind an overclocked card - its a card you can buy right now on NewEgg, so its a valid option. HOWEVER, it would have been much better to at least give an odea of how the new ATi cards overclock.mac2j - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I also don't think the 460 (OC) belonged in this article.Compare reference to reference .
Compare the custom 6850s to custom 450s/460s.
Compare the custom 6870s which are coming later to OC 460s/470s.
Are the 6950/6970 going to have to beat the Point of View TGT GTX480 beast or the N480GTX Lightning from MSI? Cards built on limited numbers of hand-selected chips and custom overclocked?
It's pretty ridiculous what you did ... and didn't even mention the possible future advantages of these cards thanks to them having Displayport 1.2 support.
mindbomb - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I disagree.When the gtx 460 1gb OC models price is around the price of a regular 6870, you can compare them.
bji - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Finally some reasonable logic in this panties-in-a-bunch fest.