Wow these cards 6870 6850 are really impressive

Sorry to say but ATI's naming scheme really sucks. It is far too confusing with 67870 this 5890 this 6550, etc, etc. I know Nvidia's is not perfect but damn at least there are less numbers for a start off. I think the old X1000XTX type of naming was better.

 

Cause 5890 don't exist maybe ? lol ..

 

I see places saying the 6870 as a replacment for the 5850. If the 6870 with overvolting can blow past 1ghz core then yea i can see that. But if it can't overclock past what a 5850 can than besides the extra features its a less powerful card. Yes not everyone is into overclocking but i don't know. Its only faster cause of the higher clock, everywhere else its less powerful. 56 texture units vs 72 for example and 320 less stream processors. The stream processors on the 6 series are suppose to be a little different and faster so I've read so i don't know. I do know that one of my 5850's @ 900mhz scores higher than a 6870 @ 900 so i don't know if thats the case.

I've seen a few tesselation benchmarks and they don't seem to be twice the performance of the 5870?

 

Because 6870 is not a high end card like 5870.

For 5000 series:
5770 Mid range card.
5850 Lower high end card.
5870 Upper high end card.
5970 Dual high end GPU card.

For 6000 series:
6850 Lower mid range card.
6870 Upper mid range card.
6950 Lower high end card.
6970 Upper high end card.
6990 Dual high end GPU card.

 

I plan on upgrading with 6 series as well.. only problem is that I can't decide whether to grab a $250 6870 (awesome price!) or wait until 69** comes out.

What do some of you gurus reckon the 6970 will be priced at upon release?
Since it is looking to beat out the likes of 480 and company, are we talking $400+?

PS - why do I see people constantly complain about the naming scheme? THIS IS NOT THE 5 SERIES PEOPLE!! Who CARES what numbers they give the 6 series? Why does it matter so much to people what its called, worry about the performance and the price. Sheesh!

 

I thought i saw something where ATI said the 6870 has twice the tesselation performance as a 5870.

 

'Up-to' twice the performance of 5870 depending on the tessellation factor.

As you can see on the graph in the 'legitreview'. Not sure how legit is the graph tho assuming the graph is provided by AMD?

Normal game tessellation probably lie in the 'up-to twice performance' region while tessellation heavy 'benchmark' aka Unigine probably around the end of the graph. (No game will use these kind of extreme tesselation, making extremely bumpy surface from flat surface in real time)

 

I think they only look impressive in benchmarks because they have fairly high stock GPU core frequencies.

Any overclocked 5850 or 5870 will murder them in benchmarks.

After a few months the new naming convention will probably appear a bit better than it does at the moment.
My card won't be going anywhere for at least another 18 months, maybe by then we will have 7950 and 7970 cards.

 

We have yet to see the performance of the 6900 series. But then, I'm too skint to get the 6900 series card and I don't think the 6870 is an upgrade for my card.

 

Well, its fair because no really has a stock GTX460, the majority of cards owned by people are factory overclocked ones, most are still being cheaper than a 6870, but it definitely wouldn't of done any harm to have stock ones in there too.

Think the up to 2x tessellation performance is at driver level rather than being a direct hardware improvement, the adaptive tessellation feature we heard about.
Don't fancy the idea myself, tbh, adapting anti-aliasing isn't as good as actual AA, so i don't imagine this will be either.

 

The best thing about these babies in CF is power consumption: almost as fast as 5870 setup, only 200W less!.. According to review. I wonder about real world specs though.

 

well AMD is on the right track, problem here is, this is the first card I've ever owned that I don't feel the need to upgrade....
it just works, all the time and works perfect, think I'll wait this time.


oh wait tessellation, oh yeah nobody uses it yet.........
3D? don't make me laugh, I can think of much better ways to get a headache.

 

i don't think AMD hope 5850 owner to replace their card with this 6870, it's more like to counter gtx 460.

just wait how cayman perform, maybe you reconsider to uprade :banana:

 

I ordered a 6850 to replace the 8400GS in my HTPC setup. Have a couple games I want to play on my plasma and the price/performance of this card (from the reviews anyway) should fit the bill. That's probably the market the 6850 is going after- light gamer, HD video. For $179 it should hold that computer for a while.

Sam

 

The HD 6870 looks like a terrific mid-range card; on its own it is just about equal to the HD 5870 and in CrossFireX it surpasses it in some benchmarks (Far Cry 2 with 8xAA). Makes me quite excited for the HD 6900 cards really.

That said, while CFX might look great for those games, it remains to be seen just how well it is supported in general because with the HD 5870 it has been a bitter disappointment with more and more games refusing to even work with it. If the HD 6970 offers almost HD 5870 CFX performance then I may be tempted to sell them and buy a single card. That will at least allow *all* games to utilise the full power of a single GPU which is certainly not the case with two HD 5870 as one of my cards is completely wasted in 85% of the games I play.

Tessellation performance looks to be just as underwhelming on these cards as it is on the current crops of ATI cards going by the Metro 2033 benchmarks.

Are the new texture filtering options and morphological AA exclusive to the HD 6000 cards or will the HD 5000 cards be able to use them too? I'm guessing not but I thought I'd ask as it wasn't specifically made clear in the review.

 

Almost forgot... I hope the forthcoming HD 6900 cards have more than 1 GB of video memory as I personally feel that it is too limiting for a high-end graphics card when running games at 1920x1200+ with AA and triple buffering. I would hope that they are all 2 GB cards personally; certainly if they aren't initially then I'll wait until someone releases them like they did with the HD 5870.

I know benchmarks with the HD 5870 showed very little difference between 1 GB and 2 GB video memory with most games but those tests are not done with triple buffering enabled and that is where I believe the extra memory will prove to be indispensable.

 

If they manage to get the same sort of scaling in the 6900 line and have driver profiles on time these cards will be beasts. I mean this was a quite big advantage to nvidia, fermi scaling very good in 2 way sli, curious if they improve further with this 580 (512 sp 480 basically). This will be one exciting Fall in the gpu market.

 

After very long time its time to move on red side...

HD 6870 here i come

 

I still wonder if the 6870s have the kind of headroom the 5870s offer, the performance/price is amazing tho and so is crossfire scaling, not worth the upgrade for me though

 

uhh, dunno about you, but having the second xfire port makes trifire and quadfire useful. although it would end up drawing more power and producing more heat, a trifire 6870 setup wouldnt be too bad.

im hoping the 6900 series are 2gb as well. but im curious about the 6990. if it plans to stay within the 300w power consumption of pcie2.0, it would either have two heavily downclocked 6950/6970s, or two 6870s. im hoping its the former. the latter would be a disappointment.