Specifications AMD Radeon™ HD 6700M/HD 6600M Series Graphics TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture- 480 Stream Processing Units.- 24 Texture Units.- 32 Z/Stencil ROP Units.- 8 Color ROP Units. AMD Radeon HD 6870 & HD 6850 Video Card Review. AMD is launching its new mainstream performance lineup, the Radeon HD 6800 series. The 6800 cards will offer much more performance at the $179 to. AMD Quad Core A10-Series APU for Desktops A10-6800K with Radeon HD 8670D (OEM VER.) (AD680KWOA44HL) with Thermal Paste Bundle.
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AMD is trying something new with its Radeon HD 6900 series of graphics cards. Instead of its usual tactic of addressing the higher end of the market with a graphics card containing two of the GPUs powering the Radeon HD 6870 (a chip code-named Barts), it is using a single, larger, more-powerful new GPU. Code-named Cayman, this new GPU doesn't merely take the architecture of the Radeon HD 6800 series and scale it up; rather, it makes significant architectural changes. AMD has redesigned the shader units for improved efficiency, greatly enhanced geometry performance, and employed a whole new power-management system.
The results are mixed. The Radeon HD 6900 series cards are certainly fast, though the 6970 doesn't always fare better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 against which it is priced to compete. Anyone hoping that AMD would reclaim the absolute speed crown from Nvidia will be disappointed. Both the Radeon HD 6970 and the Radeon HD 6950 are quite long, too, and won't fit in smaller PCs (as is often the case with high-end enthusiast cards). Nevertheless, they offer good power efficiency for their class, as well as lots of other interesting features.
At almost 400 square millimeters, the GPU powering AMD's new graphics cards is the largest the company has produced in a long time, but it's still about 26 percent smaller than the GPU in Nvidia's latest cards. It features a lot of texturing power and high clock speeds, but fewer render back-ends than Nvidia's cards have. Note that the Radeon HD 6950 and 6970 feature 2GB of RAM, a step up from the 1GB we usually see on AMD cards; the extra RAM will help in intensive games running at high resolution.
Note, too, the discrepancy between the numbers of shader units for the AMD and Nvidia cards in the chart above; that discrepancy exists because the numbers are not directly comparable. Due to the different way the Nvidia and AMD chips are designed, a single shader unit from Nvidia is capable of doing more work than one in AMD's chip. An Nvidia shader unit is also larger, and therefore not as many of them are present in the GPU.
Amd Radeon Hd 6800 Manual
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Amd Radeon Hd 6800 Specs
Coupon Codes
Sapphire Amd Radeon Hd 6850 Specs
- Pros
Largely excellent midrange gaming performance. Improved technologies and video quality over previous-generation cards. Competitively priced.
- Cons
Slightly less powerful than same-priced, overclocked competing cards. Only one dual-link DVI port.
- Bottom Line
The AMD Radeon HD 6870 represents some major improvements in the sub-$250 video card space, but Nvidia solutions can provide a bit more performance for the same price.
With its release of the GeForce GTX 460 back in July, Nvidia diverted some of the steam from AMD's full-on approach to video-card supremacy. Nvidia targeted the weakest price range in AMD's 5000 series of cards—around $200—and released a dazzling product with capabilities that belied its cost. So it's not at all surprising that in releasing its 6000 series, AMD has put the GTX 460 first in its sights. The company's attempt to knock off the 1GB version of Nvidia's card comes by way of the AMD Radeon HD 6870. It's competitively priced at $239 (list), but doesn't automatically trump the 1GB GTX 460 as often as you might expect.
- $199.99
- $179.00
What the Radeon HD 6870, like other 6000-series cards, offers immediately is a step up in technology from the 5000 series. AMD remedies one deficit its last-generation cards displayed compared with Nvidia's Fermi releases by nearly doubling tessellation performance, something serious DirectX 11 (DX11) gamers in particular will appreciate. Other changes included refined anisotropic filtering, for smoothing over visible discontinuities in noisy textures; and morphological anti-aliasing, a post-processing filtering technique for covering full scenes using DirectCompute acceleration. The new Unified Video Decoder 3 engine also boosts acceleration for MPEG-2 bitstream, MPEG-4 Part 2, and Multi-View Codec (MVC). AMD is also trying to take on Nvidia's 3D Vision stereoscopic 3D initiative with its own HD3D, though it requires an HDMI 1.4–capable monitor, and those are hard to come by at the moment; whether this will make an impact in the 3D market remains to be seen.
Some notable features carry over from the 5000 series, of course. ATI Stream, AMD's general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) technology (for using the GPU for computations traditionally reserved for the CPU), is still present, but it's been renamed AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing (or AMD APP for short) to cut down confusion about what it is and what it does. Likewise, Eyefinity—AMD's system for easily connecting and configuring up to six displays at a time—hasn't gone anywhere.
In fact, it's become even easier to use, thanks to a major hardware change. The 6870's video outputs comprise two DVI, one HDMI, and two Mini DisplayPort ports—the 5000 series had only one full-size DisplayPort jack. And because AMD has upgraded to DisplayPort 1.2, you can connect to more than one monitor across one connector, either using specially designed hubs or by daisy-chaining displays. Combined with AMD's new $30 active Mini DisplayPort adapter, which was released in late August, this is a major benefit in terms of ease of use. This advance doesn't come without a cost, however: Instead of two dual-link DVI jacks, one of them is now single-link, which does limit your choice of displays just a bit.
AMD has clearly not wanted to restrict most anything else you can do with the card, and has outfitted it with some nice specs. The 6870 is 9.75 inches in length, and will take up two expansion slots in your system. The card marshals two teraflops of compute power, a 900-MHz core clock, and 1,120 stream processors. As far as its frame buffer, it's got 1GB of GDDR5 memory, and a 256-bit memory path operating at 4.2 Gbps. AMD estimates its TDP at 151 watts (19 watts at idle), and the 6870 requires two six-pin power connectors from your PSU. If these specs definitely brand the 6870 as a midrange card, they're in no way bad.
That's reflected in the card's performance, which is consistently a (small) step up from the similarly equipped and priced Radeon HD 5850 from the last generation, but not always an improvement over what we saw when we compared to a 1GB GTX 460 from EVGA. Granted, EVGA's card was significantly overclocked—from 675 MHz to 850 MHz—but as that card and similar models from other companies are available for about the same (or even a little less) as the 6870 lists, we think it's a valid comparison. The 6870 did best the EVGA card a couple of times—Aliens vs. Predator at 1,280 by 1,024 (84.5 fps versus 76) and our SiSoftware Sandra GPGPU Processing test (400.3 megapixels per second as opposed to 291.43). But the overclocked GTX 460 came out ahead in all our other tests, at all resolutions—rarely by a lot, mind you, but always by some.
If all AMD wanted to do by releasing the Radeon HD 6870 was call Nvidia onto the carpet, it succeeded. That the outcome was essentially a draw, albeit one that left AMD just a bit more sore, doesn't call into question AMD's motives or technology, just their ultimate implementation. If Nvidia only comes out ahead, and then only marginally, with an overclocked version of the 1GB GTX 460, the fact stands that a card costing the same as AMD's latest offers enough headroom to make that feat possible. So we're giving just the barest edge to the GTX 460 for now, though the chances are excellent that overclocked 6870s (and maybe even yet-to-be-released 'Cayman' cards) will change the video card landscape even before 2010 is through.
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AMD Radeon HD 6870
Bottom Line: The AMD Radeon HD 6870 represents some major improvements in the sub-$250 video card space, but Nvidia solutions can provide a bit more performance for the same price.