Reviews - AMD Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6850 cards benchmarked and reviewed

[Jimbo75]

And the Battlefield, Dirt2 and Crysis benchmarks are where? Unless I'm being completely blind...

I think everybody has been pretty stretched to get any kind of benchmarking done, and Tarinder is one of the few who rebenched everything with the most up to date drivers. Overall that's more of a service, and I'm sure we'll see these games benched soon, maybe with some OC edition 6850's.

[Tarinder]

Different benchmarks this time around.

BC2 was becoming inconsistent as time wore on. Auto-updating of the build did us no favours. Medal of Honor will be its replacement.
F1 2010 will replace DiRT2 in due course.
Crysis is actually about as synthetic as 3DMark these days. Badly-coded engine isn't indicative of DX10 performance.

[Tarinder]

Update: because you asked for it, we've benchmarked a Radeon HD 4870 card this morning and added the results to the review. The power-draw and temps are surprising.

[Terbinator]

But now we're left with games no one plays :|

I guess your waiting for the DX11 patch for F1 2010 ?

[Tarinder]

Just Cause 2 is great fun; been playing this. Mafia II is also recent and decent.

In an ideal world we'd benchmark 20 titles and run every possible GPU configuration. As it is, given the timeframe, we've done the best job we can.

Will look into the games listed above this weekend. Plenty of time before Cayman.

[Percy1983]

Looks impressive for the price, I wonder for a pair of 6850 vs my 5850 wil fair. Just thinking in worse case dropping back to 1 card would give slightly less performance will corssfire could be amazing.

I suppose this means my brothers 4850 is now worth £5

[GheeTsar]

Any chance of CF 6870s to be added to the review? Rumour has it they scale better than CF 5870s. Thanks!

[bear jesus]

Update: because you asked for it, we've benchmarked a Radeon HD 4870 card this morning and added the results to the review. The power-draw and temps are surprising.

You read my mind
I was just wondering how far my old 512mb 4870 was behind the 6870 and now i know, thank you
Although i'm waiting for the 6970 with the hope of acceptable fps while using eyefinity at 5760x1200

[scaryjim]

Any chance of CF 6870s to be added to the review? Rumour has it they scale better than CF 5870s. Thanks!

I suspect that will be a later review: they'll need to get 2 6870s in for a start I have faith in Hexus though, I'm sure the numbers will come Although frankly 2 6850s would be a lot more interesting, IMNSHO

[Jimbo75]

It should be easy enough to get 6850 crossfire results - just use the 6870 as the 2nd card.

[TooNice]

So, a welcome refresh rather than new gen, perhaps aimed for people upgrading from DX10 cards. Sufficient to challenge the Green team's existing line up busy at the target segment, but it doesn't buy much margin IF nVidia manage to improve their refresh a tad more.

[GheeTsar]

I suspect that will be a later review: they'll need to get 2 6870s in for a start I have faith in Hexus though, I'm sure the numbers will come Although frankly 2 6850s would be a lot more interesting, IMNSHO

Nicked from Anandtech for your interest:



http://www.anandtech.com/show/3987/a...range-market/6

[Jimbo75]

I'm very interested in the morphological AA feature. Any chance of seeing some of that in action?

[GheeTsar]

Just Cause 2 is great fun; been playing this.

Slightly off topic, but I have to agree - it's mostly really good fun. Especially reigning destruction on a military base with a gunship.

[Tarinder]

I'm very interested in the morphological AA feature. Any chance of seeing some of that in action?

Yup, looking into this right now, as a matter of fact.

[HalloweenJack]

from all accounts CF scaling is now fixed properly , and again 2 thumbs up for rebenching with the latest drivers - theres a good few reviews who just used old numbers and declared `AMD stomped nvidia`

the question is - with this being a refresh , just how much more can they get from drivers alone? damn good mid range fight though!!