The Official HD 6000 Series Review thread

[Viral]

Kinda like the 9800GTX vs 8800GTX. Less power, price, almost as much performance. On the up side, the 9800GTX was the fastest single chip card offered for that gen, this time, we have 6900 series to properly improve on last gen in performance as well. Should be good, can't wait for next month.

[Redeemed]

Think there might be a price drop with the intro of the 6900 series?

Obviously, the prices are great where they're at... however, if I can get 'em cheaper by waiting a bit what's wrong with that?

[Madpistol]

Tessellation performance is better than 5850 or 5870.







And it consumes less power than a GTX 460




No wonder Nvidia is lowering their prices on the GTX 470 and GTX 460. The 6870 beats the pants off of the 460 in normal performance, and ties it in Tessellation performance.


So, the 6870 falls squarely between the HD 5850 and 5870 EXCEPT for tessellation performance, where the 6870 runs away with the win.

This is getting juicy. I can't wait to see the 69xx cards!

[wishiknew]

I really like the first couple pages of the Anandtech article that talks about the decisions made for Barts.

[NoWayDude]

What's up with the AF filtering?

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread...55313&page=157

Quote:
Uns fiel zu Beginn der Tests auf, dass der anisotrope Filter der HD-6800-Karten im Vergleich mit einer Radeon HD 5870 stärker flimmert. Nach Rücksprache mit AMD teilte man uns mit, dass die Standardeinstellung "Qualität" aggressiver filtert als der bisherige Treiberstandard (A.I. Standard; dort seien die Texturfilteroptimierungen bei der HD-5800-Reihe bereits deaktiviert)
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,79...e/Test/?page=4

They recognized that the new standard "quality" setting has more shimmering than the old AI standard setting. AMD confirmed that optimizations are more aggressive in the new quality setting.

So AMD fixed the banding problem, but increased sample optimizations in the driver default setting, which is used by the most reviewers. This probably gives a significant performance gain over GeForce and the old Radeon HD 5000 @ Cat 10.9.

[Bman212121]

Originally Posted by Viral

Kinda like the 9800GTX vs 8800GTX. Less power, price, almost as much performance. On the up side, the 9800GTX was the fastest single chip card offered for that gen, this time, we have 6900 series to properly improve on last gen in performance as well. Should be good, can't wait for next month.

Yes, except this time it looks like the HD6870 isn't an inferior card. The 9800GTX was weak in memory bandwidth, so in higher resolutions the 8800GTX had a sizable lead.

Can't wait to see the prices on these cards though, should be a great purchase for anyone looking for a mid range upgrade.


Can anyone find any info on multimonitor support? Curious if these cards are able to do 3+ monitors without the active DP splitter.

[tornadog]

Went ahead and ordered the HD 6850 from newegg. Should be here Monday. Now who wants my GTX 470???

[Maverick123w]

mmmm 2 6850's in xfire look goooood. Gotta dump this 470 somehow

[wishiknew]

How come you're going from 470 to 6850 tornadog.

[red777star]

Not sure what to tell you guys. I have Crossfire HD5870 setup since it was released and i had nothing but bad experience with it. When it works it works good but lack of AA, sucky Crossfire performance and numerous drivers problems is enough for me not ever to look at ATI/AMD cards. 6000 series looks good on paper but i am afraid they are just promises. Remember ATI Stream, i guess that is gone...not even sure what was it.

It's just stupid.

[Maverick123w]

Originally Posted by red777star

Not sure what to tell you guys. I have Crossfire HD5870 setup since it was released and i had nothing but bad experience with it. When it works it works good but lack of AA, sucky Crossfire performance and numerous drivers problems is enough for me not ever to look at ATI/AMD cards. 6000 series looks good on paper but i am afraid they are just promises. Remember ATI Stream, i guess that is gone...not even sure what was it.

It's just stupid.

Join an Nvidia fan site to post 2 negative posts in ati threads?

[Maverick123w]

Originally Posted by slaWter

Well, a normal refresh launch - nothing spectacular.

But I really like two aspects of those new cards:

• much improved Crossfire scaling
• awesome default display outputs including daisy-chainable 2 mini-DPs!

The 6850 is great card, mostly due to it's aggressive pricing (as usual with AMD products).
The 6870 is not as attractive IMO plus it really confuses customer with the new stupid naming scheme


I wouldn't mind if Apple would replace the 5770 in the Mac Pro with a 6850. That way I don't need to get a second 5770 to drive four displays Knowing Apple, that probably won't happen But as far as performance goes, the 5770 is ok for my Mac tasks.

When was the last time that a refresh had a midrange card within 10% of the previous high end chip? This is pretty damn good for a refresh. The 69xx is going to be killer.