AMD’s Radeon HD 6870 & 6850: Renewing Competition in the Mid-Range Market
by Ryan Smith on October 21, 2010 10:08 PM ESTThe latest game in the Battlefield series - Bad Company 2 – remains as one of the cornerstone DX11 games in our benchmark suite. As BC2 doesn’t have a built-in benchmark or recording mode, here we take a FRAPS run of the jeep chase in the first act, which as an on-rails portion of the game provides very consistent results and a spectacle of explosions, trees, and more.
Our experience with Bad Company 2 more or less matches our experiences with other shader-heavy games at 1920x1200. The GTX 470, 6870, and EVGA GTX 460 all vie for the top of their pack within a frame of each other, while the 6850 enjoys a clear lead over the GTX 460 1GB. However what’s interesting is that the Radeon 5800 series takes a very obvious lead here, a lead that’s larger than in most other games. If you ever wanted to know just how shader-bound Bad Company 2 is, there’s the answer you’re looking for.
As for the Crossfire situation, once again the 6800 series closes the gap. Even the GTX 470 in SLI can’t quite keep up with the 6850CF, which is much a story of how well the game runs on AMD cards as it is a story of what’s clearly going on with the 6800 series and Crossfire.
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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.