- AMD radeon hd 6800 series

Pros: no

Cons: none

Radeon HD 6800 is unleashed worldwide. This new line of video cards from AMD consists of the Radeon HD 6870 and 6850. Retail prices for these cards range from 12,000 to 16,000 rubles, respectively.

However, despite the names and what their prices say, these cards are not designed to replace the Radeon HD 5870 and 5850. Replacements for these cards will be available at a later date and will be reviewed at this time. This marks a change in both product nomenclature and product positioning for AMD, which will be explained later in this article.

The addition of the 6800 series is Barts' new core, an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) from the Evergreen family, running on the entire Radeon HD 5000 line, but with some new tricks. This Barts core belongs to the Northern Island graphics processing unit (GPU) family. Among these new tricks, tessellation performance has been improved, thanks to a new tessellation dubbed "Generation 7". Filtering quality has also been improved, and a new Anti-Aliasing (AA) mode is introduced after processing labeled Morphological AA (MLAA). This new AA method is designed to be compatible with all DirectX applications, allowing gamers to enable AA in all games. Also new to the 6800 series is stereoscopic 3d support, dubbed "HD3D". This applies to both 3D games and 3D Blu-ray movies. Support for 3D gaming was also included for the 5000 series cards, but 3D Blu-ray support is currently exclusive to the 6800 series. Video decoding is getting a good boost with the new edition of Unified Video Decode (UVD) 3. What is unique to this version is Entropy decoding for various popular video formats, and Blu-ray support.

Note: One test bench was used for all tests and no overclocking was performed. The I7 970 was used in an attempt to minimize CPU limits, but it is not guaranteed that there are no CPU limits. Built-in time tests in the timedemo style were used.

Architecture:

I mentioned earlier that Barts is AMD's new ASIC, descended from the previous generation Evergreen architecture. The bars have been bundled in support of two SKUs, the Radeon HD 6870 and 6850, internally named "XT" and "Pro". Physically, these chips are identical. The difference lies in the function unit count and clock speeds. Pre-launch speculation included a reorganization of the ALUs giving away a fifth processor, known as the "T" block, however Barts has the same ALU organization as its predecessor. Barts also has the previously mentioned 7th generation tessellation unit which greatly improves performance tessellation due to changes in flow control and buffering.

Specifications:

As mentioned earlier, both 6800 series SKUs share the same Barts GPU, but their differences aren't all that different. Physically, Bars has an area of ​​about 255 mm and consists of 1.7 billion transistors. Above, we can see what makes the Radeon 6870 different from the 6850. The 6870 has a healthy clock boost built in, as well as two additional Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) modules that account for a 160 ALU increase. Accompanying these SIMDs are two more blocks with four textures (TMU). The 5% increase in frequencies over the 6850 is also shown in the 6870.

The biggest difference between the 6870 and 6850 comes in the form of its texturing and math capabilities, with clocking at just over 35% thanks to the extra feature blocks and the 6870's increased clock speed. The rest of the differences in padding - delta tuning speed and bandwidth - are solely due to their respective clock speeds. about 16% and 5%.

6870 is the largest of the cards in 10.5, 11.0 with a fan shroud. The profile of the 6850 is much shorter at just 9.0 and the regular 6850 Sapphire is even shorter at 8.5. The cooler does not extend beyond the PCB for any of the 6850s. The 6870 is unsurprisingly the heaviest of the cards compared to the reference 6850, which is somewhat smaller due to the smaller heatsink and shorter PCB dimensions. The Sapphire 6850 is significantly lighter than the reference variant despite using a much larger cooler. This is due to the use of a large metal bracket that cools the RAM chips and voltage regulators, which Sapphire opted for without using their 6850s. This seemed to negatively impact board temperatures or Sapphire's board stability.

On closer inspection, you can see that Sapphire has decided to move the power phases to the rear of the card, away from the GDDR5 chips. This was probably a wise move on the part of the engineering team at Sapphire, since GDDR5 chips are not connected to heatsinks, and power phase components are some of the hottest components on any graphics card.

As with Sapphire's custom design, the 6870's power phase components are located at the back of the card, away from the GDDR5 chips.

Both the 6870 and 6850 offer a variety of connection options that allow the user to connect multiple monitors at the same time. The reference design for the 6870 and 6850 has two Mini Display Port 1.2 (DP) connectors, each of which can support up to three monitors when used in conjunction with a DP 1.2 hub. However, none of the 6850's partners used mini-DP connectors, but instead had a single full-size DP connector that provides three monitor connections in the same manner as mini-DP connectors. Also common to both the 6870 and 6850 are two DVI ports, only one of which is dual link. In addition, both cards show an HDMI 1.4a port. The Sapphire 6850 even has an HDMI cable.

The HD 6800 series provides some image quality (IQ) improvements from the HD 5000 line. Anisotropic filtering (AF) quality has been improved with an advanced algorithm designed to reduce noise within textures and smooth transitions between filter levels. Another important new IQ enhancer is MLAA, a post-processing filter that runs through the shader core through the DirectCompute core. MLAA is supposedly compatible with all DirectX 9/10/11 applications. of war 3.

These new IQ boosters are available in the 3d section of the redesigned control panel in the Catalyst Control Center (CCC). Added a new slider for Catalyst AI filtering quality, which allows the user to choose between different levels of AF quality, high quality, quality, and performance. The High Quality setting disables all texture optimizations that may cause visual artifacts. Both quality and performance options optimize performance-enhancing anisotropic and trilinear filtering, with little to no degradation in IQ for Quality and little impact on IQ in performance tuning.

The AI ​​filtering quality slider is the "Enable Surface Format Optimization" checkbox. This feature is intended to improve the performance of some textures in games that use 16-bit HDR rendering, and is said to have "no measurable impact on image quality."

With these quality settings, if you look at the center of the image, you will see that as the quality increases, the textures become sharper in the center. Some "flickering" texture was observed in both the reference filtering implementation and the AMD TMU filtering implementation during this test, more so in the AMD TMU implementation. However, this flicker becomes less noticeable as you increase the filtering quality.

AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series graphics cards are a series of graphics chips from AMD that were quite popular in their time. Today, these video cards can be used in legacy systems and are low-performance by today's standards. However, the characteristics of the AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series make it possible to use these chips in ordinary stationary computers, which are not tasked with running modern game releases.

Series appearance

People who follow related news know that AMD regularly upgrades its graphics chip series. 2010 was no exception, and then the AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series series of video cards appeared, the characteristics of which were impressive. Models in this series were designed to replace the then flagship Radeon HD 5870 graphics card.

On October 22, the first model from this series was presented. Then during the presentation, she collected positive reviews. Note that it was on this line that the rebranding was completed. Starting from this series, the manufacturer's video cards were called AMD, not ATI.

Let's see what are the characteristics of the AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series and what's new in this line? Recall that there are 2 video cards in the series - HD6850 and HD6870. According to the developers, the number 8 in the name has ceased to denote the flagship ambitions of this series of video cards since the 6900 line appeared.

AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series Specifications

Let's start with the obvious changes. The line used the new Barts processor. Already from the presentation it was clear that AMD is on a different path of development, which differs from the path chosen by Nvidia. If Nvidia developers are chasing the power and performance of their platforms, then AMD prefers a balance between cost and performance.

If earlier ATI set trends in terms of the development of graphic chips, then under the wing of AMD the developer took a step back. The Barts GPU is definitely weaker than its predecessor - both in specs and on paper. The fact is that the developers chose the path of simplifying the architecture to ensure reliability and create a balance between performance, price and speed. Thanks to the simplification of the architecture, Barts has become smaller and simpler in structure, and its performance allows it to be classified only in the low class of AMD video cards. It is the state employees that include video cards with a memory capacity of 1 GB AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series. Their characteristics are as follows:

1. Support for DirectX 11 and shader version 5.
2. The amount of memory on both models of the series is 1 GB.
3. HD6850 and HD6870 GPU clocks: 775MHz and 900MHz respectively.
4. Memory frequency HD6850 and HD6870: 1000 MHz and 1050 MHz respectively.
5. Memory bus width: 256 Bit for both models.

At the time of their introduction, the cards cost $180 and $240 for the 6850 and 6870 models, respectively. Today, these video cards are not manufactured, so their cost is much lower. Yes, and you can buy these chips only with your hands.

Differences between HD6850 and HD6870

In this line, the AMD Radeon HD6850 is the youngest. Here, the characteristics are reduced compared to the older card. And everything is weaker here, including even the cooling system. Given the lower performance and weak cooling system, the temperature of the AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series under load, in particular the HD6850 model, remains the same. And this is an obvious shortcoming of this model.

If we compare the test result of this chip in the 3DMark program with the HD6870 chip, then the result of the latter will be 2-3 thousand points higher. The FPS difference in demanding games like Crysis or Far Cry 2 will be 10-15 FPS, which is quite a big gap. Hence the difference in price between these cards, which averages $60.

The older model HD6870 is a worthy competitor to the flagship of that time - the top video card HD5870. The advantage of this solution is the low price compared to the competitor from Nvidia and the ability to use DirectX11 functionality to the fullest. However, we will tell about the test results of this card and its comparison with the GTX 460 competitor below.

Competitors

Given the cost at the time of release and characteristics, the main competitors of the line can be represented by models from Nvidia - these are the GTX460 and GTX470 video cards. Their performance is slightly better compared to AMD models. For example, the GTX460 and GTX470 have cores that run at 675 and 607 MHz respectively, but the memory clock is higher at 1800 MHz for the GTX460 and 1674 MHz for the GTX470. But the key feature of the GTX470 is the memory bus width - 320-bit GDDR 5, which puts this video card head and shoulders above the competitive 256-bit bus from AMD. However, the difference in performance is minimal. Indirectly, this confirms the excellent optimization of AMD video card components and good software for it.

Testing video cards AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series 1024 MB

The following hardware was used for testing:

1. CPU Core i7 3.3 GHz.
2. 6 GB RAM.
3. Windows 7 64-bit OS.

In the first game we tested, Battlefield Bad Company 2, AMD's solution turned out better. The HD 6800 video card scored 30 FPS at the maximum graphics settings, and the GeForce 460 card showed a result of only 22 FPS. And if 30 FPS can still be called a "playable" result, then at 22 frames per second it will no longer be possible to play comfortably.

However, in Aliens vs. Predator, the situation is in favor of GeForce. Here the graphics from GeForce showed 30 FPS at maximum resolution. And when testing the game on the AMD HD6800 video card, the resolution had to be reduced to 1600x900 to get the same 30 FPS.

The rather demanding game Crysis Warhead ran on both maps only at low screen resolutions. Testing in games gives only an indirect understanding of which video card is better. In this case, there is no clear winner, and both models are worthy options. True, the solution from Nvidia will cost a little more. The characteristics of the AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series in any case allow you to run games released in 2010-2013 at high graphics settings. But modern new video cards of this line will not pull.

Disadvantages of the line

The obvious disadvantage of both boards is the noise during operation, which is associated with an insufficiently efficient cooling system. After all, getting the fan to spin at full power is easy. This allows us to conclude that the developers did not pay enough attention to the cooling system, because when both chips are heavily loaded, the fan makes a lot of noise and barely copes with heat removal. At the same time, you don’t want to load the chip to the fullest, and when the user hears a hum from the system unit, he intuitively tries to reset the graphics settings to an acceptable level.

Conclusion

The new HD 6800 Series turned out to be worthy and ambiguous in its time. Both video cards successfully entered the market and collected positive reviews, as they occupied niches between flagship chips and cheap video cards. Compared to more expensive solutions from Nvidia, samples from AMD looked better than that, and their growth in popularity can be explained. And, of course, it's about the price. Admittedly, AMD has made the best decision to match the price and performance of their products.

Considering not the best cooling system, it is also better to forget about the possible overclocking of these chips. After all, even at peak loads, it is difficult for the fan to remove heat. However, for experiments with overclocking, it is best to use chips from Nvidia - they almost always turn out to be quieter and colder.

Released last autumn, the ATI Radeon HD 5800 video cards had a strong impact on the market, securing AMD for almost half a year as the supplier of the fastest solutions for gaming PCs. The release of NVIDIA Fermi in the spring of 2010 forced the company to make some room, and now AMD is again playing the trump card, playing on the ratio of price and performance.

Reference AMD Radeon HD 6850

HIS Radeon HD 6870

The ATI Cypress graphics architecture underlying the Radeon HD 5000 was undoubtedly a new milestone in the evolution of the Canadian developer's video cards: the performance gain compared to the previous generation turned out to be so significant that the company triumphantly returned with top models to the price niche “above $300”. However, GPU developers do not receive the main income from high-end products that are the prerogative of enthusiasts, but from mid-range video cards available to the mass buyer. It was on this niche that AMD paid the most attention, developing a new generation, code-named Northern Islands. Its first representatives were the AMD Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6850, also referred to as "Barts" (please note that these accelerators were the first to bear the name AMD, not ATI - the corporation is trying to strengthen the consumer perception of its brand as a representative of an integral platform with processors, chipsets and GPU).

Note that the priority for video cards for the price range “under $250” does not mean at all that AMD does not plan to upgrade the top segment: the most productive Radeon HD 6900 products with one processor (Cayman) and two (Antilles) will be released later, but for now the company is concentrating in a problematic niche. The fact is that the Radeon HD 5870 and HD 5850 are based on the rather complex Cypress GPU, which is expensive to manufacture, and as a result of the price confrontation with NVIDIA, it no longer brings enough profit to AMD. The lower positioned Radeon HD 5770, on the other hand, is beneficial for the company, but not very attractive to the consumer: the GeForce GTX 460 has a painfully high performance at an affordable price. AMD solves this problem by replacing the older single-chip Radeon HD 5800 models with a new generation at a reduced price. , intensifying competition in the mainstream segment. NVIDIA, in turn, has already made certain sacrifices in order to remain competitive: the price of the GeForce GTX 460 with 1 GB of memory, which is the main competitor of AMD's new products, has been reduced from $229 to $199, and the most surprising is the price of the GeForce GTX 470 with expensive top GPU GF100 also fell from $349 to $259. And the reasons for concern of this vendor are quite serious.

The architecture of AMD Barts clearly traces the legacy of Cypress, these GPUs inherited the structure of computational and texture units from it. In fact, in terms of stream processors, TMUs, and rasterizers, they are identical to the previous generation, and the main work of AMD engineers was to optimize the core and eliminate Cypress weaknesses discovered over the year. One of them was tessellation blocks: during this time, several games have appeared that actively use this technology, there is a tendency to increase their number, and therefore the frankly low performance of Cypress in this task has been corrected: according to AMD, Barts in optimal modes is twice as superior to Radeon HD 5870 for this indicator.

At the same time, the characteristics of the Radeon HD 6800 are clearly inferior to their predecessors: if the Radeon HD 5870 had 1600 processors and 80 texture units, then the HD 6870 had only 1120 and 56. The ratio between the younger models is similar: the Radeon HD 6850 boasts only 960 SP and 48 TMUs versus 1440 and 72 for the Radeon HD 5850. The number of ROPs and the capacity of the built-in caches remained unchanged, and AMD tries to level the weakening of the GPU shader domain by increasing the frequency and internal optimizations. Also note that Barts uses a GDDR5 controller from the Redwood core (Radeon HD 5600), which takes up half the space than the one used in Cypress. As a result, the number of transistors in the new GPU decreased from 2.15 billion to 1.7 billion, and the core area - from 334 mm2 to 255 mm2, which, in turn, affected the TDP: for the Radeon HD 6870 it is 151 W, for the HD 6850 - 127 W, and in idle time, both models consume and emit only 19 W. Barts is produced according to TSMC's 40nm process technology - its long debugging forced AMD to abandon the design of these GPUs for 32nm, the next generation will be produced according to 28nm standards.

Unlike the computing part of the GPU, other blocks have undergone a much more serious upgrade. Firstly, the video processing module has been significantly improved: the third generation of the UVD engine - UVD3 - has received the ability to decode several new codecs in hardware. First, the ability to play MVC (Multiview Video Coding) has been added - another addition to the H.264 / AVC standard, which describes the transmission of two frames with different angles in one data stream, which are necessary for stereoscopy. As a result, Northern Islands fully supports hardware playback of Blu-ray 3D and other 3D video compressed with this codec. The second major innovation was the introduction of full support for MPEG-4 ASP decoding and processing, the most common representatives of which are the DivX and XviD codecs. On the one hand, they are already perfectly reproduced by software and do not require serious resource costs, on the other hand, now even HTPCs with a weak CPU and a new AMD video card (here we are talking more about future budget models of the new generation) will be able to play video in this format, and portable PCs will also save battery power. Finally, UVD3 now fully supports MPEG-2, including entropy encoding algorithms, which was not available to previous Radeon models.

Serious changes have also taken place among the supported graphical interfaces. First, the Radeon HD 6800 is equipped with HDMI 1.4a, bringing support for stereoscopic video in FullHD (1080p24) format. Secondly, support for DisplayPort 1.2 has been introduced, which now looks more advantageous than HDMI and DVI, for several reasons. Firstly, the new version of the interface has a double bandwidth (21.6 Gb / s), which makes it possible to transmit a signal over one channel to 2 monitors with a resolution of 2560 × 1600 or 4 with 1920 × 1200 and a frequency of 60 Hz. If this is not important for video, then for games in 3D this means that now you can connect an output device not only via Dual-Link DVI (HDMI is not suitable for this use, since it has a limit on the frequency of the transmitted signal: either 2x1080p at 24 Hz , or 2x720p at 120Hz). Also, it becomes possible to transmit a high-resolution signal with a greater color depth (up to 30 bits). HD video playback capabilities have also been improved: full uncompressed eight-channel audio in LPCM format can now be transmitted via DisplayPort simultaneously with FullHD video, as well as lossless streaming in DTS Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD codecs (previously they lacked bandwidth) .

Also, the fact that DisplayPort does not require a clock generator for synchronization and is packet-based, made it possible, with increasing bus width, to realize the possibility of connecting multiple monitors to a single output of a video card, either by serial connection or via a hub. The packets simply indicate which of the connected devices a particular frame is intended for, and the hub "parses" the stream into its components, sending each monitor its proper signal. For AMD, this means a significant simplification of the Eyefinity infrastructure: now, connecting six displays to one video card does not require the rare and expensive Eyefinity6 model. The Radeon HD 6800 implements the possibility of building such a configuration using only two mini-DisplayPorts (three monitors to each via hubs). Unfortunately, neither DP 1.2 capable displays nor hubs are currently on the market - in this case, AMD is playing "ahead of the curve" - ​​but they should be presented soon (most likely at CES 2011 in January).

Also with the release of Barts video cards, AMD finally introduced its own version of the stereoscopic image output technology, called HD3D. However, in this case, the solution is purely software and has nothing to do with the architecture of new products. Moreover, it is implemented through additional drivers from third-party developers - TriDef and iZ3D. Among other improvements, we note the corrected anisotropic filtering, which now does not depend on either the angle or the nature of the textures, and the appearance of the Morphological Anti-Aliasing mode, which allows you to smooth the edges of contrasting objects with less performance loss than with conventional supersampling (in fact, this is just DirectCompute- the filter, which is superimposed on the scene that has already been rasterized, finds the contrast zones characteristic of the edges of objects and smoothes them).

As you can see, the first models of the new generation of AMD video cards are a kind of compromise: on the one hand, they are much simpler and obviously weaker than the previous ones, on the other hand, they are much cheaper. Whether the balancing turned out to be successful - the test results will show.

The reference AMD Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6850 look very similar to their predecessors: they use similar cooling systems with a turbine fan and a plastic casing that completely covers the boards. The visual differences are in the video interface connectors: now two DVI and one HDMI complement not a single full-sized DisplayPort, but two mini-DisplayPort. In addition, the Radeon HD 6850 has only one six-pin power connector, not two, besides, AMD got rid of the decorative protrusions on the casing, which sometimes interfered with connecting connectors to them. It should be noted that the older modification will initially be available only as copies of the reference version (apparently, the percentage of good crystals produced by TSMC is not too high yet), but the younger novelty already exists in many versions with coolers and printed circuit boards modified by several vendors.

First of all, we checked how much the performance of the new AMD video cards in tessellation is increased. The test in Unigine Heaven shows that with increasing complexity, Radeon HD 6800 really turn out to be noticeably more productive than their predecessors: already at the Normal level, the Radeon HD 6870 is ahead of the formally faster HD 5870, and at Extreme, the HD 6850 also takes the lead. NVIDIA is out of the question in this case: firstly, the Unigine engine is clearly faster on video cards of this vendor (as can be seen from the disabled tessellation mode), and secondly, Fermi with its Polymorph Engine blocks is in any case much faster than Barts and Cypress in this task.

As for more real tests, here we see that AMD really turned out to be very successful products. In various applications, the balance of power changes somewhat, but in general, the following trend can be noted: the maximum gap between the Radeon HD 6870 and HD 5870 does not exceed 15% and sometimes comes down to a few percent. On average, among our measurements, the top-end video card of the previous generation is only 7% ahead of the new product, with a formal superiority in the number of execution units and a real price difference of almost one and a half times. We see similar success when compared with NVIDIA's direct competitor - the GeForce GTX 460 with 1 GB of memory: the Radeon HD 6870 is 4-27% faster, depending on the test. We also note that the more expensive GeForce GTX 470 is not much ahead of AMD's new product, and its prices in Ukrainian retail will not come close to NVIDIA's recommended ones after $260 reduction. True, there are also overclocked versions of the GeForce GTX 460 on the market, and the user himself can easily add performance to this video card, but at best it will only be possible to talk about parity.

As for the AMD Radeon HD 6850, this model also looks more than convincing in its niche: with a price difference of about $50, it is only 15% inferior to the Radeon HD 5850, and about the same is ahead of the cheaper NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 by just $10. with 768 MB of memory. Here, obviously, there will be more intense competition than between older modifications: both the balance of power and prices are quite close, besides, PhysX, CUDA and 3D Vision support play on NVIDIA's side.

conclusions

The new, or, more precisely, the updated AMD graphics architecture is a pronounced manifestation of not revolutionary, but evolutionary development. The company did not continue the trend of yearly leaps in productivity, instead it is making existing capabilities closer to the average consumer. The main trump card of the Radeon HD 6800 is not speed, but its price-to-price ratio, and in this factor, the new products are completely ahead of their predecessors and are in sharp competition with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460, which we called the “kings” of the middle segment back in the summer.

With the release of these accelerators, AMD satisfies the needs of the majority of consumers demanding video card performance, and the company will please their most prestigious (and smallest) category very soon by releasing the Radeon HD 6900.

I am glad that every year, without changing traditions, there is an update of the series of AMD Radeon video accelerators. Usually, each subsequent series of ATI video cards surpassed their predecessors by an order of magnitude, demonstrating a new level of performance, capabilities and quality. It can be recalled that at one time the "top" accelerators of the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series were head and shoulders ahead of their predecessors ATI Radeon HD 3800. The same picture was in the case of the appearance of ATI Radeon HD 5800 video cards. The new AMD Radeon HD 6800 graphics cards must have the capabilities to at least outperform the single-chip flagship ATI Radeon HD 5870, which by today's standards has a very high performance. Unfortunately, this year there was not a very strong breakthrough. Due to the problems associated with the transition to a thinner 32nm process technology, new graphics chips had to be produced at 40nm, like the models of the ATI Radeon HD 5000 line.

And now, October 22 has come, and we can get acquainted with the final specifications of AMD Radeon HD 6800 video cards, which became known during AMD's presentation dedicated to a new series of graphics accelerators.

It should be noted right away that from now on, new Radeon video cards will be referred to as AMD Radeon, not ATI. AMD has been the owner of ATI for quite a long time, but until that moment it produced video cards with the ATI prefix, fulfilling the terms of the agreement concluded during the merger. But now we have to forget about ATI. Perhaps, in this way, AMD is trying to raise the popularity of its processors.

The new AMD Radeon HD 6800 series of graphics cards is based on a core called "Barts". The first good news is that the AMD Radeon HD 6870 and AMD Radeon HD 6850 graphics cards should cost less than their predecessors, the ATI Radeon HD 5870 and ATI Radeon HD 5850, respectively. The recommended cost of the first will be in the range from $150 to $250. Immediately, drawing a parallel with video cards based on NVIDIA GPUs, we note that after the last price cut, the recommended price for the GeForce GTX 460 1 GB is $189, and the GeForce GTX 470 is $279. Apparently, it is with these video accelerators that the new AMD Radeon HD 6800 video cards will have to compete in the future.

The AMD Radeon HD 6870 video accelerator will not be a single-chip flagship of the lines, as it was before. The new 6th series of AMD Radeon video cards will have two more older, “top-end” models AMD Radeon HD 6950 and AMD Radeon HD 6970, based on the Cayman graphics chip. The most productive video card will be the dual-chip accelerator AMD Radeon HD 6990, based on two Antilles GPUs. At the moment, no official information about the characteristics of "Cayman" and "Antilles" is known.

The above slide may cause some confusion for many users. It shows that the performance of the new AMD Radeon HD 6870 and AMD Radeon HD 6850 video cards is not higher, but even slightly lower than that of the ATI Radeon HD 5870 and ATI Radeon HD 5850. Radeon HD 6950 and AMD Radeon HD 6970, which will be able to support the dual-chip flagship ATI Radeon HD 5970. Graphics cards based on lower-class ATI Radeon HD 5770 and ATI Radeon HD 5750 graphics processors will remain "indispensable" until the end of this year. Perhaps after some time their value will decrease.

With each subsequent release of a new series of video cards, the cost of their "performance", which is expressed in GFLOPs, gradually decreased. New video accelerators usually had a higher performance and, replacing the old generation, they replaced them in the corresponding price category. Such tendencies are not surprising, they are well seen in the microprocessor segment as well. Looking ahead, the conclusion suggests itself that the AMD Radeon HD 6870 video accelerator has the best price-to-performance ratio, primarily due to the initially lower recommended cost. The AMD Radeon HD 6870 has an estimated performance of 2,016 GFLOPs at a suggested price of $229.

In addition to a better performance-to-cost ratio, the Barts series should outperform the Cypress in terms of performance per watt of power consumed and performance per mm2 of chip surface. These achievements are due to the optimization of the graphics chip architecture.

The architecture of the graphics core "Barts" has undergone some changes compared to "Cypress". Firstly, the tessellation block, which was considered the most vulnerable point of the ATI Radeon HD 5000 series, has been improved. And, secondly, the processing speed of primitives has been doubled due to the doubling of the Rasterizer blocks. These two changes can be considered the most significant in the hardware part of the graphics core. The number of SIMD blocks in the Barts graphics core has decreased compared to Cypress from 20 to 14 pieces. Each SIMD block includes 80 stream processors. Therefore, AMD Radeon HD 6800 video accelerators have a smaller number of unified pipelines in total, but operate at a slightly higher frequency, which we will discuss below.

The ability to process the tessellation of the Barts graphics core compared to Cypress should theoretically double. The tessellation unit of AMD Radeon HD 6800 series video cards belongs to the seventh generation of tessellators. The older series of AMD Radeon HD 6800 video cards will have an eighth generation tessellation block.

AMD representatives note a significant increase in the number of games with support for DirectX 11. Although, it must be admitted that for the whole year a large number of very exciting 3D games did not appear. But AMD is working closely with a large number of 3D game developers in this direction. Already now you can count 15 games that have already appeared or will appear in the near future.

To display an image, the AMD Radeon HD 6800 series of video cards has five ports at once, which allows you to connect six monitors to one accelerator at once. And for the first time, ports corresponding to the new DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 1.4a specifications appeared on it.

The DisplayPort 1.2 port allows you to display an image on multiple monitors at once using a special hub, and a different resolution can be set for each monitor.

The HDMI 1.4a port is primarily distinguished by its support for the transmission of 3D stereo images, which is necessary for connecting 3D monitors.

AMD Radeon HD 6800 series graphics cards, like the previous generation, support AMD Eyefinity technology, which allows you to combine multiple monitors into a single gaming space. We wrote about this feature and its configurations earlier in the GIGABYTE Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity x6 Edition review.

According to AMD, its AMD Eyefinity technology has a number of advantages over similar technology from competitors NVIDIA Surround. First, NVIDIA Surround technology is limited to three monitors, while AMD Eyefinity allows you to connect up to six. Another significant disadvantage of NVIDIA Surround is the need to use two video cards, not one. Because of this, the number of disadvantages immediately increases, such as the total high cost, greater power consumption and heat dissipation, as well as the need to use a special motherboard to create an SLI system.

AMD could not ignore the possibility of creating 3D images. The new technology is called AMD HD3D. With the help of converter programs from DDD and iZ3D, it became possible to automatically convert content to stereo format. Thus, in stereo format, you can view photos, videos and play about four hundred games. 3D games specifically designed to reproduce 3D stereo effects should appear in 2011.

AMD Eyespeed technology is designed to offload the processor by performing video and data processing using the GPU. AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing technology using OpenCL and DirectCompute 11 standards is capable of performing various calculations, and the new UVD 3.0 module is used for hardware processing of video streams.

AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) parallel computing technology is nothing more than a renamed ATI Stream technology.

The Barts graphics core received a new Unified Video Decoder 3 video data processing unit. The new unit received improved MPEG-4 (DivX/XviD) and MPEG-2 decoding capabilities, as well as the ability to decode Blu-ray 3D into multiple streams.

The performance of the AMD Radeon HD 6870 video accelerator is 2.0 TFLOPs, which is significantly less than the 2.72 TFLOPs of the ATI Radeon HD 5870. In other parameters, such as the number of stream processors, the single-chip flagship of the previous series also outperforms the new solution.

The "reference" video card AMD Radeon HD 6870 is equipped with two additional power connectors. But the maximum power consumption level is not very high - only 151 watts. Idle power consumption is slightly lower than that of the ATI Radeon HD 5800. The cooling system uses a turbine-type cooler that cools the graphics processor and memory chips.

Manufacturers often make very interesting comparisons in which they strive to show their product in a more favorable light. It seems to us that comparing the performance of the AMD Radeon HD 6870 graphics card with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1 GB cannot be called correct. First of all, because their recommended cost is significantly different - $239 versus $189, respectively. It would be much more interesting to evaluate the capabilities of the new and previous generation of Radeon among themselves. And so, the superiority of AMD Radeon HD 6870 over NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1 GB averages 25%, which, in fact, corresponds to the difference in their cost.

The AMD Radeon HD 6850 video card turned out to be, relatively speaking, 25% “weaker” than the AMD Radeon HD 6870. Its power consumption at maximum load is only 127 W, so the engineers managed to install only one 6-pin power connector to power the video card. The number of ports on the interface panel is exactly the same as that of the AMD Radeon HD 6870.

AMD decided to compare the AMD Radeon HD 6850 video card with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768 MB, against which the former looked more than convincing, demonstrating an average of 30% superiority.

Also, the manufacturer was not too lazy to provide test results in a multi-display configuration consisting of three monitors. Testing was carried out at a resolution of 5760 x 1080. Judging by the indicators, the frame rate is more than playable. So advanced gamers may well try to get by with installing just one AMD Radeon HD 6870 video card.

Finally, let's evaluate the specifications of the new and previous series of AMD GPUs:

	AMD Radeon HD 6870	AMD Radeon HD 6850	ATI Radeon HD 5870	ATI Radeon HD 5850	ATI Radeon HD 4870
codename	Barts XT
Number of transistors	1,7 billion	1,7 billion
Number of stream processors
Performance, TFLOPs
texture blocks
Texture filtering, GTexels/s
Number of ROPs
Pixel filtering, GPixels/s
Z/Stencil, GSamples/s
Core frequency, MHz
Memory frequency, GHz	1.05 (4.2 GHz effective) GDDR5	1.0 (4.0 GHz effective) GDDR5	1.2 (4.8 GHz effective) GDDR5	1.0 (4.0 GHz effective) GDDR5	900 MHz (3.6 GHz effective) GDDR5
Memory bus width	256 bit	256 bit
Memory bandwidth, GB/s
framebuffer
Process technology	TSMC 40 nm	TSMC 40 nm
Maximum / minimum power consumption, W

Video accelerators on AMD Radeon HD 6870 and ATI Radeon HD 5850 are similar in many respects. Similar parameters include computational performance, texture filtering speed, and even maximum power consumption along with cost. Comparing these technical characteristics and the cost of video cards of the new and previous generations, the conclusion suggests itself that AMD decided to slightly lower the class of the new series of video cards with index 8. In this light, the release a little later of the older AMD Radeon HD 6900 video accelerators looks quite logical.

As a result

I would like to argue a little with AMD marketers, who announced the AMD Radeon HD 6800 video cards under the motto: "Today, the best just got better" which can be translated as "Now the best is even better." AMD Radeon HD 6800 video cards have become a bit more technologically advanced and theoretically have improved tessellation capabilities, which can only appear in games with DirectX 11 support. The Radeon HD 6800 is even slightly inferior to the previous AMD Radeon HD 5800 series. So we can only look forward to the flagships.

However, from the point of view of perspective and balance, the video cards of the AMD Radeon HD 6800 series definitely look more advanced. Perhaps, in the near future, good 3D games with DirectX 11 support will appear, and new video cards will be in full demand.

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AMD Radeon HD 6800 a popular series of video cards, which at one time was quite popular with gamers and fully met all user requirements. For the video card to work, you need to install the driver on the computer, after which the system will be able to detect the board and bring it into working condition. The driver installation process is quite simple and almost any computer user can handle it. WITHdownload driver for video card AMD Radeon HD 6800 series and the entire line for free at the link below.

Driver installation order:

1. Run the installation file;
2. Choose if you want let;
3. We agree with the user rules;
4. We are waiting for the end of the installation.

The link below provides the following drivers for the Windows operating system:

• driver for x32bit and x64bit operating system Windows 10 / Windows 8.1 / Windows 7;
• driver and additional software Catalyst x32bit and x64bit operating system Windows 7 / Windows 8 / Windows 8.1 / Windows Vista;
• Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 Libraries Component;
• driver for operating system Windows XP x32bit and x64bit.

Download AMD Radeon HD 6800 series driver:

Windows 10 x32bit:
Windows 10 x64bit:
Windows 8 x32bit:
Windows 8 x64bit:
Windows 7 x32bit: