AMD Radeon HD 6870 And 6850: Is Barts A Step Forward?

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I think the new 6870 is quite impressive! Even though it does not out-perform 5870, it did well against NVidia's cards, as well as AMD's. It's not a power sucking monster. The price is right, although only for 3 weeks. This will be my only complaint about it.
 
iZ3D dirvers have free 3D DLP settings for ATi users for years now!!! So no 50$ price there.
And for Anaglyphic it's free for everyone.

I personally used anaglyphic from iZ3D on nVidia as it was better than nVidias anaglyphic.
It has much more functions and options to modiffy color balance of red and cyan to reduce and nearly eliminate ghosting.
Same goes for parael settings where you can fine tune 3D profile for each game.

To compare:
game/nVidia3D/iZ3D/ (where max is 10 points)
Half-Life 2/ 7/ 10/ (bad flashlight till update september 2010 on iZ3D, nVidia still bad)
Killing Floor/ 8/ 9/
Lost Planet 2/ 8/ 10/
Gears of War/ 7/ 9/
Dead Space/ 6/ 6/ (some parts of monsters looks same for both eyes = no 3D hands)
Prototype/ 7/ 8/ (assimilation effects are not completelly 3D)
 
Well based on what I understood, Morphological Anti-Aliasing is not anti-aliasing. It's only smoothing. And for sure it's not a chip feature, it's only a driver feature which AMD decided to keep for 6xxx series for marketing reasons. Which is in line with AMD's "Go buy a new card" - I'm unfortunately reminded constantly about this by absence of Windows 7 drivers for my quite recent ATI cards.
BTW it looks blurry (and it has to, it's the only thing it does). Very probably NVIDIA could implement it too by shaders if it was useful. Sorry for my rant :)
 
I wonder if they did the naming scheme like they did so that when the 7xxx series comes out the improvements will be even more dramatic.
a 7770 would look more impressive if it performed better than a 6870 rather than a 6770. it seems like the 7xxx was always going to be the true successor to the 5xxx series, the 6xxx series is just a stepping stone. maybe they had trouble with yields or something or realized a long time ago that they'd need another year with the new architecture, i dunno. but it would explain why they're aligning the performance with the x8xx number. the 69xx will (roughly)replace the 5970 in performance, but at a lower price point and at a much cheaper cost to make
 
Well based on what I understood, Morphological Anti-Aliasing is not anti-aliasing. It's only smoothing.
Click to expand...

a·li·as·ing ( l - -s ng, l y -). n. 1. The appearance of jagged distortions in curves and diagonal lines in computer graphics

anti-aliasing is the smoothing of these jagged distortions.

No mater how you do it, anti-aliasing = smoothing of jagged distortions.
 
[citation][nom]Shin-san[/nom]The 6870 is a very good price, but it really should have been the 6770[/citation]

Radeon x7xx Cards have only 128-bit memory-bus

[citation][nom]dragonsqrrl[/nom]Some leaked HD6970 benchmarks have surfaced, and at least in synthetic benchmarks it seems to perform about 10% better then the stock GTX480. It's looking pretty impressive, especially the Heaven results.The card is scoring X12000 in 3D Mark Vantage, with a P score of P24499. Unigine Heaven results (1920 x 1200, 4xAA, 16xAF) giving a result of 36.6 fps. * a HD5870 scores P19337 in 3D Mark Vantage, and 17.3 fps in Heaven * a GTX480 scores P21106 in 3D Mark Vantage, and 29.5 fps in Heavenhttp://guru3d.com/news/amd-radeon- [...] s-surface/[/citation]

Which is not really impressing if you look just at the 6870 CF Benchmarks the whole 6970 could be a simple dual GPU Card and still beat the gtx480.
 
Agreed that an ill-informed gamer can get confused with the naming and would expect 6870 to be the successor of 5870. But how is an ill-informed gamer/buyer in the first place would exist and buy these expensive non-mainstream cards? Is this probable?
 
Not impressed with the name convention used at all. It really confuses consumers the same way Nvidia did with their 8800 Series cards. I guess it is a business marketing scheme to catch people to buy more of their products.

When will the 6970's and the GTX500's line ups appear?
 


The graph is relative to the Radeon 5830's min and avg frame rates.

If another card gets 110% min and 105% avg, that means the results are 110% of the 5830's avg minimum frame rate, and 105% of the 5830's avg frame rate.

It's two separate variables.
 


There's no law that dictates that the last three numbers must correlate to the memory bus. It has always meant performance placement.

The 2900 had a 512-bit bus, and the 5970 has two-256-bit busses. And if you're arguing that two 256-bit busses equal a 512-bit bus, if that is the case the 4870 has a 256-bit bus, and the 4870x2 has a 512-bit bus.

In any case, AMD is free to rename as they see fit. But it'll be interesting to see if your theory holds true with the 6900 series.
 
What prevents these 68XX cards from using 8 screens?
If you can do 3 form each of the MiniDP to get 6 or 2 form each MiniDP + DVI + HDMI to get 6, what prevents you from going 3 from each MiniDP + DVI and HDMI to get 8?
 
Also id like to add that the Eyefinity Edition cards are not dead, potentially, assuming my next assumption is right. AMD could make an "Eyefinity Unlimited Edition" with 6 DP/MiniDP ports + 2/3 GB of ram.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3987/amds-radeon-6870-6850-renewing-competition-in-the-midrange-market/3
In this anandtech review they mention that the DP 1.2 interface has enough bandwidth "to drive 2 2560 monitors or 4 1920 monitors at 60Hz." which potentially means 12 2560 or 24 1920 monitors from just ONE card, mind blowing.
 
I have already been to a few online tech stores that have posted cons regarding the naming convention. If this card was designed to compete in a certain price bracket (with the GT460) it should have been named as such...something like 6550 and 6570)

And now that the 6850 and 6870 names are taken...what are they going to name the flagship? The 6950 and 6970 has always been the dual GPU solution. If they bring out the flagship under those names and it is a single chip solution that would be even more rediculous.

AMD has seriously failed with branding this card with the flagship naming convention. I wonder if it was because the ATI people who know the video card industry were displaced in the renaming and rebranding from ATI to AMD? Seriously...why that name change even?
 
So we all know this new cards from AMD can do eyefinity on 6 screens with hubs(which is amazing by itself).But how far back do one need to sit to really take the advantage.Let's say for 3 screens you need to sit back at least 2 meters and with 6 screens maybe 3 meters.So wireless keyboard and mouse must be used(if you want to do away with long usb extentions).Then there is the bezels.Where is that ultra thin transperent bezels samsung promise to make.Did not see them yet! Downside for Nvidia is you need two cards.gtx 460 = $180 times two = $360.
 


You misunderstand. We mean that the vast majority of cards out there are factory overclocked. Their BIOS is already overclocked compared to reference.

It's difficult to find a card with reference clocks.
 
The minimum framerate for Radeon 5850 is greater than the average one! It should be the other way around! That's odd, don't you think?
 


Not if you think about it! Detailed answer about 11 posts above yours. :)
 
[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]You misunderstand. We mean that the vast majority of cards out there are factory overclocked. Their BIOS is already overclocked compared to reference. It's difficult to find a card with reference clocks.[/citation]
Those not overclocked card are not THAT hard to get especially from a regular (not online ) shop . I just wanted to mention that Nvidia is not consistent. For me the only way to overclock it under linux will be bios reflash (with all risks involved).
 
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