AMD’s Radeon HD 6870 & 6850: Renewing Competition in the Mid-Range Market
by Ryan Smith on October 21, 2010 10:08 PM ESTThe last new game in our benchmark suite is Civilization 5, the latest incarnation in Firaxis Games’ series of turn-based strategy games. Civ 5 gives us an interesting look at things that not even RTSes can match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world, and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.
It’s also one of the few games banned at AnandTech, as “one more turn” and article deadlines are rarely compatible.
Civ 5 has given us benchmark results that quite honestly we have yet to fully appreciate. A tight clustering of results would normally indicate that we’re CPU bound, but the multi-GPU results – particularly for the AMD cards – turns this concept on its head by improving performance by 47% anyhow. The most telling results however are found in the GTX 460 cards, where there’s a clear jump in performance going form the 768MB card to the 1GB card, and again from the 1GB card to the EVGA card. The 1GB GTX only improves on memory, memory bandwidth, and ROPs, greatly narrowing down the factors. No one factor can explain our results, but we believe we’re almost simultaneously memory and geometry bound.
With that in mind, this is clearly a game that benefits NVIDIA’s GPUs right now when we’re looking at single-GPU performance. This likely comes down to NVIDIA’s greater geometry capabilities, but we’re not willing to rule out drivers quite yet, particularly when a partially CPU-bound game comes in to play. In any case NVIDIA’s advantage leads to their wiping the floor with AMD here, as even the mere GTX 460 768MB can best a 5870, let alone the 6800 series.
Crossfire changes things up, but only because NVIDIA apparently does not have a SLI profile for Civ 5 at this time.
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GullLars - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
One sollution would be to to move away from pure number based naming, and do something like:AMD/nVidia AG#S# ([Maker]_[Architecture][Generation][# generation of architecture][Market Segment][# of relative performance within segment 1-9]
Or possibly AMD/Nvidia Architecture Gen# S#
Example:
AMD EG1E9 or Evergreen Gen1 E9 = 5970 (Enthusiast)
nVidia FG1E9 = 480
AMD Evergreen Gen2 G5(?) = 6850 (Gamer)
AMD Evergreen Gen1 V7 = 5770 (Value)
AMD Evergreen Gen1 M5 = 5350 (Media)
These are just early floating thoughts, which could be refined by marketing monkeys.
Exelius - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
Marketing monkeys have no intent on making it simple to understand; if you don't know exactly what you're buying, it's easier to sell it to you for more than they would be able to otherwise.It's not an accident that the numbering is confusing; if you don't know what you're looking at then a 6870 at a lower price than a 5870 looks like a great deal.
MonkeyPaw - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Big deal, I say. The card is a few % slower, but is more efficient and is cheaper. People who will actually notice the drop off will probably read reviews first. Besides, if the x900 series is for dual GPU designs, then the naming might not be far off.Also, if I had to pick between the 5800 or the 6800, I'd probably get a 6800.
therealnickdanger - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Don't forget improved image quality!It's only disappointing because with a new moniker, I expect new tech, but then again, how long did NVIDIA push G92? 3 generations as different products? LOL
Rafterman - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
What exactly have NVidia got to do with this, no fanboyism please.morphologia - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
They are a comparable company with comparably ridiculous naming conventions. How do you go from 9000 to 200?Talk about fanboyism...claiming irrelevancy when it's totally relevant reveals your fanboy decoder ring quite clearly.
Alilsneaky - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I hated nvidia for doing it, why should amd now be forgiven for resorting to doing the same bullshit just because nvidia did it before them?I had someone tell me earlier 'that's business'.
WHAT? No it's bloody not, a scam is a scam, when people start equalling questionable practices like these to business then something is really wrong with today's society.
Mr Perfect - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
What Nvidia did was simply rename the 8800 cards to 9800 card. Same exact chip, same exact clocks, same exact board(at least initially). There where owners of 8800GTs who simply edited the name in the BIOS of their card and had a 9800GT!The reason AMD is getting a pass from most people is because this isn't a purely renamed card. It's a redesigned chip on a new PCB with a poor name. If, on the other hand, AMD renames the 5750 and 5770 to the 6750 and 6770 you can expect them to get nailed to the wall right next to Nvidia.
pcfxer - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
It was very clear why he mentioned NVIDIA. You should read his post...snarfbot - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
at least all the iterations of g92 improved performance over their predecessor.compare this launch to the x1xxx series of ati products, the x1800 was replaced by the x1900 which was replaced by the x1950. all of which improved performance over their predecessor. all the while on the same process 90nm.(save for the 1950pro and gt, which were mainstream parts.)
imagine if they named the x1900 the x2900, and somehow it actually performed worse than the x1800.
thats what they did here, and thats why it fails imo.
if they just called it hd5790 and kept it at the same price people wouldve gobbled it up anyway, without sacrificing their integrity.
just a bunch of numbers, but what it means in mindshare is important, and all most people will remember about this generation, is that it was worse than the 5 series and worse than nvidias.
all aboard the fail boat. honk honk.