AMD’s Radeon HD 6870 & 6850: Renewing Competition in the Mid-Range Market
by Ryan Smith on October 21, 2010 10:08 PM ESTKicking things off as always is Crysis: Warhead, still the toughest game in our benchmark suite. Even 2 years since the release of the original Crysis, “but can it run Crysis?” is still an important question, and the answer continues to be “no.” One of these years we’ll actually be able to run it with full Enthusiast settings…
For reasons we’ve yet to determine, Crysis continues to do a very good job serving as an overall barometer for video card performance. Much of what we see here will show up later, including the order that cards fall in.
As we’ve been expecting, the 6800 series cannot keep up with the 5800 series – Barts is still a “rebalanced” Cypress after all. The performance gap isn’t too severe, and it certainly couldn’t justify 5870 prices at today’s prices, but the 6870 and 6850 definitely aren’t perfect replacements for their 5800 series counterparts.
Focusing on 1920x1200, we have a 3-way race between the GTX 470, EVGA GTX 460, and the 6870. The 6870 comes out ahead, with the EVGA and then the GTX 470 bringing up the pack at under a frame behind. Meanwhile near the 6850 is the GTX 460 1GB, and it’s 2fps behind; while even farther down the line is the GTX 460 768MB, which officially is only $10 cheaper than the 6850 and yet it’s well behind the pack. As we’ll see, the 6850 will quickly assert itself as the GTX 460 1GB’s peer when it comes to performance.
Meanwhile taking a quick look at Crossfire performance we see an interesting trend: the 6800 series cards are much closer to their 5800 series counterparts than they are in single card mode. Here the 6850CF even manages to top the 5850CF, an act that nearly defies logic. This is something we’ll have to keep an eye on in later results.
Moving on to our minimums, the picture changes slightly in NVIDIA’s favor. The 6870 drops to the bottom of its pack, while the 6850’s lead narrows versus both GTX 460 cards. Meanwhile in CF mode now both 6800 series cards top their 5800 series counterparts. Crysis’ minimum framerate has always been a bit brutal to AMD cards due to how AMD’s drivers manage their memory, a problem compounded by Crossfire mode. Perhaps something has changed?
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
197 Comments
View All Comments
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.