AMD’s Radeon HD 6870 & 6850: Renewing Competition in the Mid-Range Market
by Ryan Smith on October 21, 2010 10:08 PM ESTElectronic Arts’ space-faring RPG is our Unreal Engine 3 game. While it doesn’t have a built in benchmark, it does let us force anti-aliasing through driver control panels, giving us a better idea of UE3’s performance at higher quality settings. Since we can’t use a recording/benchmark in ME2, we use FRAPS to record a short run.
Mass Effect 2 ends up being another game that AMD that AMD struggles at. It’s not a game we’d normally classify as being shader-bound, but looking at the 6800 series performance relative to the 5800 series, it’s either that or texture-bound. In any case the 6850 is still competitive with the GTX 460 1GB, but the 6870 falls behind NVIDIA’s competing cards by several frames per second.
Meanwhile it’s interesting to note that this is the only game where the 6800 series doesn’t dig itself out of a hole in CF mode. Both the 6850CF and 6870CF are where we’d expect them to be relative to the 5870CF/5850CF if we took a simple extrapolation of their performance.
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Targon - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
Since the 6870 can not beat the 5870, shouldn't AMD leave the 5870 on the market until they have a true replacement ready? Price vs. Performance is one thing, but dropping their high end parts and replacing them with mid-range cards($200ish) just doesn't have the "Wow!" factor that helps drive sales across the price ranges.Jansen - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
That would be the 6900 series next month:http://www.dailytech.com/Radeon+6800+Series+Launch...
Kyanzes - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Just to be on the safe side I'd like to see minimum FPS results. Although there's very little doubt in my mind that it underperforms.animekenji - Saturday, December 25, 2010 - link
It doesn't underperform. HD6970 replaces HD5870. HD6870 will be replacing HD5770, which it vastly outperforms. What about the new numbering scheme don't you get?Onyx2291 - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
If I had a job and the money, one of these would be on it's way to my house right now.Doctor_Possum - Thursday, November 11, 2010 - link
One of these is on it's way to my house right now. Can't wait.Onyx2291 - Thursday, December 22, 2011 - link
Over a year later, and one is now on it's way to my house right now :DRasterman - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
Ok nVidia, ATI, Intel, enough with the shitty naming of your devices, a 5870 beats a 6870? Really? I mean come on! Really? Create a committee to agree on a group of benchmarks the result of which is what you get to name your card. Score 100, you now have the Radeon 100, score 340, you now have a GeForce 340.Fleeb - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Though I must agree with you, AMD gave a reason why they did that (marketing perspective) - they are not going to drop 5770 and 5750 yet but replace 5870 and 5850 with 6970 and 6950. Perhaps everything will go back to normal again in the 7xxx series.bennyg - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
Maybe if it were something like 6810 and 6830 there wouldn't be so many complaints.But the wider issue is the quasi-quantitative naming schemes in general, they'll never be a perfectly accurate representation of "performance" (or "value for money" or whatever other metric that every individual buyer interprets it to be)
There'll never be any standard like that, marketing needs wiggle-room that independently-derived pure numbers do not provide. So they'll never agree to it.