AMD’s Radeon HD 6870 & 6850: Renewing Competition in the Mid-Range Market
by Ryan Smith on October 21, 2010 10:08 PM ESTNVIDIA’s 6870 Competitor & the Test
As we mentioned on the front page of this article, AMD and NVIDIA don’t officially have competing products at the same price points. The 6870 and 6850 are more expensive than the GTX 460 1GB and 768MB respectively, and above the 6870 is the GTX 470. However NVIDIA is particularly keen to have a competitor to the 6870 that isn’t a GTX 470, and so they’re pushing a 2nd option: a factory overclocked GTX 460 1GB.
As a matter of editorial policy we do not include overclocked cards on general reviews. As a product, reference cards will continue to be produced for quite a while, with good products continuing on for years. Overclocked cards on the other hand come and go depending on market conditions, and even worse no two overclocked cards are alike. If we did normally include overclocked cards, our charts would be full of cards that are only different by 5MHz.
However with the 6800 launch NVIDIA is pushing the overclocked GTX 460 option far harder than we’ve seen them push overclocked cards in the past –we had an EVGA GTX 460 1GB FTW on our doorstep before we were even back from Los Angeles. Given how well the GTX 460 overclocks and how many heavily overclocked cards there are on the market, we believe there is at least some merit to NVIDIA’s arguments, so in this case we went ahead and included the EVGA card in our review. As a reference point it's clocked at 850Mhz and 4GHz memory versus 675MHz core and 3.6MHz memory for a stock GTX 460, giving it a massive 26% core overclock and a much more moderate 11% memory overclock.
However with that we’ll attach the biggest disclaimer we can that while we’re including the card, we don’t believe NVIDIA is taking the right action here. If they were serious about having a higher clocked GTX 460 on the market, then they need to make a new product, such as a GTX 461. Without NVIDIA establishing guidelines, these overclocked GTX 460 cards can vary in clockspeed, cooling, and ultimately performance by a very wide margin. In primary reviews such as these we’re interested in looking at cards that will be around for a while, and without an official product from NVIDIA there’s no guarantee any of these factory overclocked cards will still be around.
If nothing else, pushing overclocked cards makes for a messy situation for buyer. An official product provides a baseline of performance that buyers can see in reviews like ours and expect in any cards they buy. With overclocked cards, this is absent. Pushing factory overclocked cards may give NVIDIA a competitive product, but it’s being done in a way we can’t approve of.
Moving on, for today’s launch we’re using AMD’s latest beta launch drivers, version 8.782RC2, which is analogous to Catalyst 10.10. For the NVIDIA cards we’re using the WHQL version of 260.89.
Keeping with our desire to periodically refresh our benchmark suite, we’ve gone ahead and shuffled around a few benchmarks. We’ve dropped Left 4 Dead (our highest performing benchmark) and the DX11 rendition of BattleForge for Civilization 5 and Metro 2033 respectively, both running in DX11 mode.
With the refresh in mind, we’ve had to cut short our usual selection of cards, as we’ve had under a week to (re)benchmark everything and to write this article, shorter than what we usually have for an article of this magnitude. We’ll be adding these new cards and the rest of our normal lineup to the GPU Bench early next week when we finish benchmarking them.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Asus Rampage II Extreme |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | OCZ Summit (120GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 6870 AMD Radeon HD 6850 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 5850 AMD Radeon HD 5770 AMD Radeon HD 4870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 EVGA GeForce GTX 460 1GB FTW |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 260.89 AMD Catalyst 10.10 |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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Finally - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Did you have a look at the games market lately? Noticed all those shabby console ports? There is no progress because the graphics power of an XBOX or PS3 is exactly the same as it has been when they were introduced.Then again, who wants to play dumbed-down console games, made by illiterates for illiterates running on antique hardware which severely limits innovation in the graphics sector?
jimhsu - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
"I know the 4890 is a pig (loud, noisy, power hungry) compared to the cards here"And hence your point. Essentially, major COMPUTER manufacturers (not just video card makers) simply are less concerned about maximum performance anymore -- for 95% of the population, what we have now is "good enough", and for the remaining 5%, getting more of the cheap stuff is also "good enough" (HPC builders, SLI/CrossFire, etc). Instead, people look at things like "is this quiet" (heat production, fans) or "what does this mean for my bottom line" (power consumption, replacability). The age of the monolithic "fast chip" is over.
Jamahl - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
AMD naming the cards the 6800 series or Anandtech changing their policy of not reviewing overclocked cards.spigzone - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
AMD renaming their cards = more confusingAnandtech 'changing' their policy = more inexplicable.
softdrinkviking - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
i join the throngs of disgruntled consumers that object to the new naming convention of the 6800 series.it's silly and stupid, and you should be ashamed of your collective AMD selves.
spigzone - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
I didn't like it either ... until I saw the release prices ...Then I didn't much care anymore.
gorg_graggel - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
why the heck didn't they just call them 6850 and 6530? according to the numbers those are the the true internal competitors...that would also fit with the premise that a next-gen card with the same naming conventions is at least a bit faster...
the upcoming 6950 and 6970 cards could accordingly be named 6870 and 6890 respectively...
and the next 2-chip variant could have the 69xx namespace for itself as it clearly wouldn't be justified to append an x2 to it, due to the same reasons the 5000 dual-chip cards don't do this...
because of different chips? john doe doesn't know about such distinctions and just cares about performance (compared to older generations) when upgrading.
he's just confused why the 6870 is slower than a 5870 and the guy who knows more about the tech behind it is pissed, because he has to explain to him why the names are not analogous to performance and why it's not kept consistent at least for a few generations...
the explanations amd has given about this is not satisfying and gives me the impression that they deliberately want to confuse customers...however i can't think of a logical "why"...
jonup - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
To answer your question, Because that makes too much sense!Donkey2008 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I agree 100%. The new naming scheme is misleading and it seems like 6750 and 6770 would have been much more accurate IMO. From AMD releases over the last several years, the performance of nex-gen 2nd tier cards are ~ equal to the previous top tier cards. This is the first time AMD has strayed from their naming scheme in a long time and it has all the makings of a marketing dept telling the engineers what to call their cards.Like to pointed out, 95% of consumers (the ones who waddle into Best Buy and tell someone at the Geek Squad counter to "install a gaming card") won't know the difference. Most of these average consumers will believe that a 6870 is a much better card performance-wise then the previous generation 5870, so they will see the price and think it is a steal. AMD is playing the numbers game with uneducated consumers ("higher numbers are better, right?") and it is sort of disappointing IMO. I expect more from them as a psuedo-fanboy (I am a current of owner of a 4850 and (2) 4890)
I am still anxious to see what the 69xx has to offer, but some of the excitement of the entire 6xxx series launch has faded because of the new naming scheme. I just don't like marketing games and being played. Tech people are not only sharp, but HIGHLY biased and any deviation from outright perfection usually gets punished (i.e. Microsoft Vista, iPhone 4 antenna, Nvidia GT 250, etc etc). AMD should have known better.
gorg_graggel - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
hmmm well, on second thought it could make more sense in the future as the new scheme reorganized the naming to fit more to the performance categories...if they would have been named 6750/6770 their would be riots, because amd dared to raise the prices in the midrange segment, as the author of the article already said i think, which would be even worse...
in the past amd changed strategies of how big and fast chips are a few times, but the naming didn't...they just didn't have single chips that deserved a name in the x900-range...
so now that the cayman chip is in the 300w size amd changed its sweet-spot only strategy to a more standard strategy again with low-end, midrange, performance and high-end cards and the new naming does fit perfectly here...at least i have this impression...
so it maybe confusing now, but depending on how future products turn out it will make more sense again...