HD 6870 and HD 6850 Reviews

Tridam's article at Hardware.fr: http://www.hardware.fr/articles/804-1/dossier-amd-radeon-hd-6870-6850.html

Did anyone who read it catch if he used Quality or HQ for ATI or NV cards? I didn't see him mention it in the "test system" page (9). I guess that means default--Quality, right?--for both.

 

What 24" panels go above 19x12?

 

5700 is a going concern, partners and OEM's still want it; Barts is not a replacement for Juniper so you can't give it a name that would indicate that. Not every product stack is nicely going to align to everyone's worldview of how things ar supposed to be and you have to make choices based on that; there was never going to be a clean solution no matter what you do. When you look back at the history of the series, though, this is actually the most consistent, it unfortuante that the inconsistency was the 5800, but that decision had already been made when the roadmap changes for NI were underway.

And there is nothing about making it look attractive to 5800 users, I simply do not see how that works. Absolutely this is a good path for 4800 users - it sits in the same bracket of products and makes a great upgrade for this users holding out on the first gen of DX11 and looking for something in a similar price bracket.

 

It's not a bad card the naming is a bit wonky and other then the execution of not having MLAA in the main branch of drivers at launch and the questionable lowering of default AF quality it looks like a very nice card.

 

I think the unhappy folk will simmer once more of the lineup is available. I don't really see what the big deal is though....

They are really going to have a boatload of products to choose from once the 6000 series is filled out.

One of these days I am going to have to replace my 8800GTX lol but I just don't have enough of a reason to right now. Need moar gamez.

 

Well in CrossFire the 68XX are definitely attractive to 5800 users. Maybe not so much as Cayman, but impressive performance for sure. As for the naming scheme, graphics cards have been "buyer beware" for quite some time now. If you buy based on numbers alone go find a 9800XT and have fun with it.

 

I have a PC which would love to have a card like this inserted into its dirty place. My other PC I think will wait for the full 28nm refresh even though im an itchy guy that likes to upgrade as much as possible!

 

Good cards and I don't see why some people are making such a big fuss over the cards' naming. And it absolutely doesn't make sense to call it renaming because the cards are brand new.

About the reviews, damn they give a blurry picture. Ananadtech, Hexus and others who included the 460 OC cards paint a completely different picture than the sites who only use vanilla cards (like HardOCP and Muropaketti).

 

Comparing overclocked to stock is silly and i doubt the reviewers had the time to benchmark thier whole suite of games with over clocked 68x0 parts to get the review out.

 

I don't get the rage about naming either. It's a new product line-up, they can name it whatever they want. It's not like they renamed Juniper to 6870... And you have reviews, benchmarks, which tell you which card is best for you.

Anyhow, it's a nice card, quite often staying close to 5870, definitely worth considering when upgrading to DX11. Now, where are those Cayman leaks ?

 

In pure tesselation tests for example the 6850 is already quite faster than 5870. Now if it will show in real games is another story.

 

Hardware.info tests 2 factory overclocked 6850's:

Asus EAH6850 DC/2DIS/1GD5 (790/1000 == 2%/0%)
XFX Radeon HD 6850 Black Edition 1GB (820/1100 == 6%/10%)

The Asus is hardly overclocked at all, and the XFX is obviously the most interesting. You can find a table with the test results here:

http://nl.hardware.info/reviews/1881/4/radeon-hd-6850-asus-vs-sapphire-vs-xfx-testresultaten

It's in Dutch, but the numbers speak for themselves.

 

1120SPs HD 6850 vs the 960SPs HD 6850: http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/...te-2/22/#abschnitt_performancerating_mit_aaaf

 

Sucks for you, or not since you've stated that you're not interested in the first place. Which again should speak to the fact that the market occupied the people owning two or more non-DP 30" monitors who would also be in the market for a mid-range gaming GPU must be microscopically small. Bitching about AMD not catering to them with this one particular product (at the expense of other features appreciated by a larger market) is just silly.

 

Something like a single link DVI port isn't likely to be changed for Cayman...

 

I don't see why it couldn't? A larger die should have lots more space for I/O. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

 

So in that scenario 17% extra ALU/TEX delivers ~7% extra performance as a broad average.

Also, why is Metro 2033 causing a total collapse for ATI 1GB cards at 2560x1600 with 4xMSAA but not for NVidia 1GB cards?

 

Quality settings for both.

I wrote however that Cypress and Barts default quality setting was slightly different. A complete and proper quality analysis couldn't be done in time but I noticed some slight differences in games (the new Cat AI texture setting wasn't available for Cypress with the press driver).

I'm not very happy with the way AMD presented this new feature to the press. Imho they've been intentionally misleading so that the press thought Barts default quality setting was the same as previously + the quality fix.

I noticed the difference very late in the process and quickly checked performances in HQ. They’re very close in most games, less than 1% difference. Some games however, such as Far Cry 2 can show 5-6% difference. With very small differences in games and small performance drop, without time for a proper quality analysis, I went for the status quo. Could change for future reviews based on a deeper analysis. In any case reviewers now have to be very careful and can’t trust AMD on filtering quality.

Btw some people at AMD strongly disagreed with this move.

 

Damien one quick question - how come you had time to bench every single game with an OCed GTX460 yet it's missing from power, noise and thermal charts?
(sorry I don't speak french so may be it's mentioned in the review that they will come at a later time)

 

Yeah, as a potential consumer, this is the type of thing that turned me off of nVidia for years. It's not as bad as what nVidia did in the FX year/s(nothing compares to the 3D Mark scandal. Nothing), but... It's same type of thinking.

And it's completely pointless. AMD's hardware is good enough. Why the hell do they even have those presets? It's been years since people needed to really turn down texturing, even on the slowest cards. I had an 8500 GT, and turning down the texturing quality never netted me more than a 2 FPS increase.