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!

[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!

[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!

[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: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: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...