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AMD's New Radeon HD 6870 and 6850 Cards Debut
MojoKid writes "AMD has officially launched their new Radeon HD 6800 series of graphics cards and the company has managed to drive cost and power consumption out of the product, while increasing performance efficiencies in the architecture. The Radeon HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850 are new midrange cards that offer similar performance to previous generation high-end offerings, but at significantly lower price points and with an enhanced tessellation engine for better support of next generation DX11 game engines. The cards compete well with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 470 and 460 products, besting them in some scenarios but trailing in others. Word is AMD is readying their flagship high-end Radeon 6900 family for release in Q4 as well."
The replacement of 5870 will be the 6900 series, not 6870. This is confusing as the x900 series used to be dual gpu cards, but this time it isn't.
If you actually RTFAd, would realize this is actually an "efficiency" launch for AMD, with quite lower costs (and prices) for only slightly lower performance.
Nice rant, though.
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No, what you probably heard about was that they are dropping the ATI branding of the graphics cards. The cards themselves are alive and well, just AMD branded.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
It's because Aero uses composited textures to draw the screen, so it's reliant on GPU performance. Compiz does much the same thing, so Linux can do a similar resource-eating trick.
Turn off the pretty and Win7 will look a little plainer but run a little snappier. I still do this with WinXP, just because the Fischer-Price theme has really chunky title bars that take up extra screen estate.
I remember when graphics cards sold on their ability to accelerate 2D drawing operations to make Windows go faster...
According to Wikipedia, both use about 150W under full load. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units for a comparison table.
But at the same time, the 6870 is of course faster. So if you don't need the extra performance, what about a 6850?
Should still be an upgrade in performance, have at least the same power advantage as the 6870 at idle, and uses only 127W under load.
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That's 4Gbps per bus line, apparently. The card has a 256bit bus, which works out at exactly 128GB/s.
1. This is a midrange; high end parts come next month
2. $239 for the 6870, $180 for the 6850
3. 5870 > 6870 > GTX 470 > 6850 > 5850 > GTX 460
4. Crossfire scaling (for those who are dual-GPU inclined) is around 90%+ in most games
5. Brand-new Anti-Aliasing filter: ATI has invented some edge-smoothing shader that looks incredible in most games and even works where in games that don't have AA or where AA would give a huge performance hit. This "morphological AA" costs almost nothing in framerate.
ATI hasn't invented MLAA. Intel recently made it popular with a paper, but image-space anti-aliasing techniques have been aroung since at least the early 90s.
Please don't casually use the word "invented".
From what I read at [H]ard|OCP today, the 6850 is an upgrade for a 5830 and below, while a 6870 is an upgrade for a 5850 and below.
source.
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