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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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.