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!

[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: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...