News - AMD Radeon HD 6870, 6850 benchmarked ahead of schedule

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The leaks keep on coming and early benchmarks suggest that the HD 6870 and HD 6850 could be mid-range parts.

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whats the point... seriously?

Get more fed up with manufacturers naming schemes by the day!

6850 slower than 5850? I feel better about my purchases

agreed biscuit, silly naming scheme if they have indeed gone with it! If they did this when they first changed to the current naming scheme i.e 1000/2000/3000 then it would be ok, but now they have established that a 4850 is say better than a 3850 and a 5850 is better than a 4850 then changing that to a totally different one is stupid.

On the other hand... it makes it easier for the mainstream i.e people who dont follow computing to easily grasp that a 5770 is worse than a 6850 but i still see the problem anyways... most people see the first number being the most important like oo my 5450 is better than your 4890 because its higher!

Again, silly silly mistake... almost as bad as nvidia's re branding but i guess at least AMD have actually expanded on their design and changed the name not just the latter!.

this will be especially bad if they dont release the flagship top-end card straight off the bat!

Nvidia have done well to persaude people theres a problem with name changes.

The problem being, theres no change, theres a range of new cores and the NEW RANGE is named appropriately, a 6970 will be faster than a 6950, faster than a 6870, etc, etc, etc.

Intel/AMD change CPU names for new gens constantly, theres no issue there.

Its not fantastic naming by any means, it would make FAR more sense to separate the current very badly named 5670 and 5570, both 400 shader parts, that till now no one had an issue with, which for me, is far worse naming, and a bigger change from the previous series.

Likewise a 4770 from last gen was almost as fast as a 4850, it was well over 3/4 of the speed of the 4850.

While a 5770 is only half the speed of its big brother 5870 and much much less than 3/4 the speed of a 5850. No one minded the change then.

The only thing that mattered was the 4770 name when that appeared, fitted in with the 4xxx line up, from the name you knew exactly how fast it was, faster than a 4670, slower than a 4850.


The MOST important thing is, a 5870 is £300, a 6870(IF its called that, theres still not a shred of evidence thats the case) will be £200, maybe significantly less.

The point, completely ignoring names, is more performance for your money, the 6870, or if its called a 6770, or a ubermegatron, or a cleveland steamer(if they go with that naming, thats when I'll really worry). As long as the cards offer one of two things, more performance for the same money, or the same performance for less money, we get better value. Stuck on 40nm, with basically little room to manouvre, and with nothing new from Nvidia for at least 6 months and most likely till 28nm, so a year from now, better performance/price ratio is good news. Infact, thats never been bad news.

Interesting results in 3DMark 06 though: the 6870 scoring slightly higher than the 5870. So which bit of the architecture does 06 stress more?

I was originally a bit sad until I found this post:

"Can I just say that the 6850 ISN'T the replacement for the 5850? In most of the roadmaps given so far it's a replacement for the 5750, meant to be put in direct contention with the 460 768mb version. And as for the 6870, that is the replacement for the 5770, and put in direct contention with the 460 1gb version. They are the Barts Pro and Barts XT parts, NOT the Cayman Pro and Cayman XT parts that, on their arrival as the 6950 and the 6970, will be the the direct replacements for the 5850 and 5870. And judging by the performance increase over the lower level cards here (these cards should be released in the same price segments) these cards are going to be WOWZOMG fast =]."

For me personally these days the real numbers that count are:

performance per watt
performance per £

or some combination of those.

It's easy for a company to make the card twice as long with twice as many bits and twice as expensive, to yield the top results in the benchmarking tables. But it's not really the consumer's champion product.

So I will be interested to see how much power this card uses (and how much heat it produces), and at what price point. If those are good, I can see myself buying a 68xx series card. If they are silly, then I'll just hold on or maybe get a 5770 or something along those lines.

this looks like ATI scrambling to get a better footing in the mid range. Look at the 460, that thing is a beast, has CUDA support and full 3D support and doesn't have the fermi drawbacks of doubling as a space heater when under load.

ATI did well with the 5 series and held onto the lead for a long time but it seems nvidia's time is here again, and ATI are going to have to do something very special to uproot them..video cards now are overcrowded and you need to drop a grand on a monitor just to get the most out of them, so it's sectors like HPC who need wooing and nvidia are doing that very well with CUDA

ATI releasing their midrange cards first is a good thing for anyone waiting on the high end cards. Prices will drop significantly across the board before the 6970 eventually hits the shelves. If released now, ATI could justify charging a whopping £399 for it based on expected performance.

Anybody know where the GTX470 fits into the results?:undecided