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."

Comments

Oh wow! New graphics cards!

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I can't wait to see these things in the store! Graphics cards are so cool. You can of course play graphics on them, but you can also do cool stuff like encryption and supercomputer type of stuff.

Man, I can't get enough of these graphics cards stories! Oh yeah!

Re:Oh wow! New graphics cards!

[Gaygirlie]

Not everyone just gets their kicks out of drooling after graphics cards. Like e.g. I've got HD 4800 and still all the games I play run perfectly well at about 60 fps at max. details. There simply is no benefit in buying yet another card.

But alas, each to their own.

Re:Oh wow! New graphics cards!

[erroneus]

Sarcasm appreciated. (Really, you should get yourself a sarcasm sign)

A co-worker has stated on numerous occasions that it is time for hardware makers to go on vacation for at least a year. Software is not catching up with the advances in hardware. Further, these advances are without any need. Nothing runs slowly on yesterday's hottest new thing.

Microsoft has already updated beyond any need as can be demonstrated by nearly everyone's reluctance to go beyond Windows XP. MS Office demonstrates the same point. No one wants these advancements and upgrades and it has demonstrably harmed Microsoft's image and business model.

People are now beginning to realize that they don't simply need the newest whatever there is. They didn't need Vista and don't presently need Windows 7 and certainly don't appreciate the option to stay where they are eroded away from them.

I predict similar doom on hardware makers who insist on charging even more for the next increment in polygon count. We are reaching a point where a new thing is needed. All we are doing now is updating the old things.

Re:Oh wow! New graphics cards!

[obarthelemy]

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.

Re:Oh wow! New graphics cards!

[Zuriel]

I've got a 4870 and I've been eyeing these cards. Not for performance, but for power consumption. Particularly idle power consumption. I believe the 6870 uses about the same power under full load as my 4870, but 70% less at idle. Should be almost silent when I'm using Firefox and Word.

Re:Oh wow! New graphics cards!

[Dr_Barnowl]

Meh a Ferrari

Well... yes.

I can appreciate the engineering, even be interested in test driving one, but OWNING one? Too much extra cost for too little extra value.

The same goes for graphics cards ; I have an nVidia GTS8800, which is getting pretty long in the tooth, but it plays most of the games I own pretty reasonably (could be a bit faster on Crysis, I suppose ;-) ), largely because I haven't been buying new games with heavy 3D needs recently.

Why not? Well, partly because I'm less interested in playing games as I age ; playing with ideas seems to be more interesting. Partly because the games that do appeal to me are increasingly indie titles that don't need much in the way of graphical grunt. And partly because most of the big titles that do need a powerful GPU are marred by either being a total pile of arse, an MMO game for which I don't have the time, or encumbered with such offensive DRM that I'd rather not let the box near my computer.

A platform only has value so long as it has a killer app - in the case of new GPUs, I don't have a game that I want to play, or a large set of numbers I need to crunch. I'm guessing that some time next year when Deus Ex : Human Revolution comes out, I might feel a small urge to upgrade.

I'm guessing that Slashdot attracts a substantial proportion of engineers who also see no practical reason for getting a new GPU beyond the "OOh, shiny!" factor, so I'm not surprised to see so many "Meh." responses to this article.

Re:Oh wow! New graphics cards!

[WaroDaBeast]

Erm... You do realise that games don't scale well past two GPUs, don't you?

Re:Oh wow! New graphics cards!

[Dr_Barnowl]

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...

Re:Oh wow! New graphics cards!

[Lonewolf666]

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.

Re:Oh wow! New graphics cards!

[Anonymous Coward]

A little snappier!? You ever logged the number of WM_PAINT messages to the client windows when using different compositor? Aero doesn't need to send as many re-paint messages since it knows that the HWND haven't been touched, so it can just blit whatever is cached in the texture. THAT is way more efficient than application re-generating the image just because you expose a few pixels of a window, you see, applications rarely respect the RECT parameter of WMP message.

The "wasteful" part of Aero is that it does blend, which means not-so-good use of the GPU's *internal* memory bandwidth, since it's read-modify-write instead of just write. But this doesn't tax the main CPU, so in my point of view NOT using the GPU is wasting it. The hardware is there, let it do something for ya'. It drains battery faster? That's a good concern.. let's focus on that more; the snappier argument won't fly.

Re:Oh wow! New graphics cards!

[dimeglio]

So you don't buy games, don't use high-end graphic cards and don't particularly see the benefits of improved performance and lower power consumption (and cost), yet admire the engineering. Congratulations, you're now an adult.

Re:Oh wow! New graphics cards!

[ultranova]

Further, these advances are without any need. Nothing runs slowly on yesterday's hottest new thing.

Pov-Ray runs slow on today's hottest new thing. So do various physics simulators. And just try to run a physics simulator and AI on a same machine (to do robot research without having to build actual robots)! In fact, even Dwarf Fortress, and ASCII game, still slows down occasionally!

Simply because you use a modern computer as a glorified typewriter doesn't mean that we all do.

Re:Oh wow! New graphics cards!

[antifoidulus]

I dunno, the ./ crowd seems to follow me wherever I go. It's almost like they represent my current location.

Re:Oh wow! New graphics cards!

[Pojut]

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.

up to six LCDs

[iamhassi]

This is what I'm interested in: "....six display controllers offering six TMDS links. This lets users connect up to six displays to as independent display heads, or span display heads across multiple physical displays using the Eyefinity technology. The new HDMI 1.4a connector standard is made use of, which gives you support for stereoscopic 3D standards such as Blu-ray 3D, the two mini-DisplayPort 1.2 connectors support Multi-Stream technology that let you daisy-chain 3 physical displays per connector, letting you wrap up a 6-display Eyefinity array using just those two connectors."

Sounds great! Tired of selling an old monitor to buy a new one that's 2" larger and a few hundred more pixels, much rather just get a second (or third, or fourth, etc) same-sized LCD and double the pixels.

Re:up to six LCDs

[espiesp]

Actually by the time you get into the 22+" size (non-widescreen) you can fix two A4 side-by side at 1:1 ratio. However, this isn't accounting for tool-bars and the like so my preference is a 20-22" non-widescreen or 22+ widescreen, rotated 90". I've used this in Electronic Document Imaging applications, real world, with a lot of seat time and it's a VERY workable solution. Gives plenty of room for a single A4 page with toolbars on top and side.

The one catch is that some monitors have asymetrical and or narrow vertical viewing angles which with the monitor 90 degrees rotated means that is now your horizontal viewing angle range and in worst case you can't get a clear picture out of both eyes at once. Good monitors don't have this problem and they look identical no matter the orientation.

Re:Does not compute.

[thoughtsatthemoment]

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.

Re:hmmmm

[Surt]

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.

Re:Power consumption and Gbps vs GB/s

[XDirtypunkX]

That's 4Gbps per bus line, apparently. The card has a 256bit bus, which works out at exactly 128GB/s.

Re:Driven Out Costs?

[Neil Boekend]

And they have driven out power consumption! These must be great in netbooks and the sort!

Quick highlights of this 6870 launch

[mykos]

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.

Re:Nice card shame about the price.

[Ecuador]

This seems to be one of the worst reviews out there, looks like it comes directly from the nVidia PR department. The main reason, apart from the benchmark selection and lack of any methodology details, is that it only pits the new cards against an OC card that nVidia strategically priced yesterday and had EVGA send it to the reviewers asking for this to be the AMD competition. Also, I don't see the prices that the article uses, because even the sites that did try out the EVGA card (along with others of course, unlike this site here) stated it is competitive but did not notice a price/perf advantage.
The point is that while the OC cards vary in price and availability (since the good ones use hand picked GPU's, at their introduced price points the AMD cards have the best price/performance, and absolute performance over the regular 460 versions. In fact, all other reviewers seem to say that even at yesterday's price cuts the regular GTX 460 is a bad buy, while interestingly if you can go to the GTX 470 price that is the only point nVidia now leads.
Unless in Great Britain there is some weird pricing going on hence the article...

Status of linux drivers

[TheSunborn]

Does anyone know what the status of the Linux drivers are(Both open and closed). Do I still have to buy a nvidia card if I hard to use OpenGL with Linux, or did Amd finally release drivers with performance as good as the ones on Windows?