AMD’s Radeon HD 6870 & 6850: Renewing Competition in the Mid-Range Market
by Ryan Smith on October 21, 2010 10:08 PM ESTThe 3rd game in the STALKER series continues to build on GSC Game World’s X-Ray Engine by adding DX11 support, tessellation, and more. This also makes it another one of the highly demanding games in our benchmark suite.
STALKER is a game that seems to have gone back and forth some with driver optimizations. In the latest round if anything the NVIDIA cards seem to have a slight edge against the 6870. Here the 6870 is competitive with the EVGA GTX 460, however it’s nearly 10% behind the GTX 470. Meanwhile the 6850 is far more normal, more or less tying with the GTX 460 1GB and enjoying the usual lead over the 768MB version. Meanwhile compared to the 5800 series the 6800 series does rather poorly here, as Stalker is another game that’s shader-bound; the 6870 only takes a slight lead over the 5850, and is several frames per second behind the 5870.
As for our Crossfire cards, they have once again performed another miracle. Being shader bound doesn’t stop the 6870CF from beating the 5870CF while the 6850CF ties the 5850CF.
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Ryan Smith - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
In case it isn't obvious from the slipshod organization of the article, we didn't quite get it done on time. We had less than a week to put this article together when normally for an article of this size it takes 2 weeks. Check back in the morning, everything on Eyefinity, DP1.2, etc will be up by then.counter03 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
i am quite interested in that 'mst hub'.is there any available product now?well,i just find nothing with google.wolrah - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
The card still has two TMDS clock generators. This means only two DVI/HDMI displays can be driven off the card at one time, no matter what connection. With that in mind, I wouldn't be surprised if the card doesn't even support passive adapters as there is literally no good reason to ever use them. You already have two native ports, so with a maximum of two DVI displays that's that.Regardless of if passive adapters are supported, you'll still need active adapters or native DisplayPort on your display to run three or four monitors off this card.
Supposedly it also supports DisplayPort daisy chaining, so possibly when monitors arrive that have an out port it may handle more than four displays, but again only a maximum of two can be DVI/HDMI without active adapters.
ninjaquick - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
DP support shouldn't be a problem since I've seen quite a few monitors coming out with DP in and some with I/O.Abot13 - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
With the 6800 series the cards can support up to 6 monitors in Eyefinity. The DP ports can use a DP hub or the monitors can be chained with DP. Either way the max is 6 monitors per card.ol1bit - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
The naming stinks, but I can see how these cards will be a big Christmas season for AMD.So people that don't the new naming scheme will rush out an buy the bigger names. Smooth Marketing Move.
Well, if the 6900's launch next month, that will be fun to see.
Zokudu - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
You removed Left 4 Dead from your benchmarks. Does this mean you won't be replacing it with another Source game (ie L4D2 or maybe Portal 2 when that releases)?I know its not 100% perfect but 3 of the top 10 selling games on steam right now are run on the Source engine and the only other ones that share and engine are BF:BC2 and MoH both using Frostbite. I would think that having some form of a Source game in there would be a good idea considering the vast amount of popular games that run on it. I always used the L4D benchmark to compare performance for TF2 and CS:S. in the past.
Otherwise good review and I'm excited for the HD6900 launch next month.
Ryan Smith - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
By the time Portal 2 comes out, it'll be about the time we refresh our suite anyhow. For the time being the existing Source games run on anything (even the GT 430 got L4D playable at 1680 with 4xAA) so it's not a useful benchmark, especially since there's no guarantee Portal will run that well.AmdInside - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
In the 3DTV Play article, you mentioned AMD's 6000 series would challenge NVIDIA in 3D with the 6000 series but I didn't read any info on it in this article. What gives?StevoLincolnite - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Also didn't see any mention of the improved crossfire performance either...