News AMD Radeon HD 6800-series benchmarked

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2010/10/12/amd-radeon-hd-6800-benchmark/1

 

I'll wait for official benchmarks, with final drivers etc.

 

Um what are you comparing it to here?


Assuming you mean the 5870 then it comes as no suprise that this '960sp' card would be slower than the 850 mhz 1600 shader 5870 (architecture improvements included).

 

I'll wait for the official bit-tech numbers (because bit-tech is official).

 

There's rumours going around in the last couple of days that the 69XX series are the replacements for the 58XX series, which provides more options for mid-range cards.

If we're looking at shader counts only, the 6870 sits right between the 5770 and 5830. So the performance increase for a card at that point is quite nice.

 

Yeah, i think you need to wait until all this confusion regarding the naming scheme has been cleared up....

From what i've been reading over the last week, the 6850 will be AMD's response to the 460....

The 5850/5870 replacements will now be called the 6950/6970....

AMD are doing an Nvidia stylee name rebranding...doh!!!

 

now, where's my salt bottle.......

AMD marketing guy 1: "i don't think we'll sell this generation very well, without major performance changes"
marketing guy 2: "why don't we change the naming scheme we've had for all previous generation cards, and make x8xx the mid-range"
1: "doh..... great idea"

or they've recently hired nVidia's card naming guy.

 

I hardly think a 5-10% distance between 68XX and the flagship 58XX relegates it to mid-range...

 

8800GTX - flagship --> gtx250 to gtx260 - midrange.
4870 - flagship --> 5770 - midrange

the flagship card of current generation should be the speed of mid-range cards in next generation

 

There's a 9-series missing there...

 

In short for Gareth - HD6870 is not the single chip highend of HD6xxx series.

 

Hm.

It's a new architecture; you're not telling me that they've dropped the shader count from 1600 to 960 without it being rather different. And new architectures always take time to grow into their performance - Fermi wasn't looking too good at release, but after several driver releases its in much better shape.

 

All depends on who you ask
I count all this as speculation

http://www.hardware-infos.com/news.php?news=3692
These guys note that chinese "PCINLIFE" tested the card as 30% faster than the 5780.
Though they reach very different numbers in 3DMark Vantage.
HD6870 11.963points (in extreme mode)
HD5870 ~9000points

Check the specifications in the table or in the CPU-z picture

 

good spot. suppose the 6 series of AMD will be similar to the 9 series of nVidia 2 years ago.

at least they didn't simply rename 5870 to 6870.

 

Its not rebranding, its making a proper line of cards, spaced out equally this time.
There was a large gap where the GF104 is now, and this generation will have no gaps.

Other than that, you are probably right that the 5850/5870 successors are to be the 69xx series.
The 68xx series is filling the gap there was between the 57xx and 58xx series.

 

Why test it on Vantage, It would be better to test it on real games imo, anyhow, hope they are just preliminary reports

 

waiting for BT's benchmarks

 

Now, please chastise me if I am being wrong here, but I was almost 100% sure that the first cards to be released this generation from ati (whether they be named similarly to previous generations or not) were based on the Southern Islands core, using old-school (5800 and older) shader cores with the new improved memory and off chip improvements meant to be released in Northern islands, the "actual" successor to the 5800 series and that will be a few months ahead of the launch of the mid range southern islands parts.

That means that, assuming shader counts remain roughly the same as current gen (or even a slight drop), performance scaling even for southern islands (the "mid range" parts) is phenomenal, akin to pentium 4 vs core. I am extremely excited about this generation, not least of all because again ATI will have managed to usurp the green team with a proper gaming-oriented gpu and not some hpc monstrosity that happens to play games, but because it'll be just in time to capitalise on my upgrade to Sandy Bridge in February.

 

lol @ the naming scheme. If the 6870 isn't better than the 5870 because they chose a stupid new naming system then someone at AMD needs sacking for incompetence!

 

I still dont see the need to upgrade. But if i am in the market and wanted a AMD gpu, i wouldnt target anything else other then a 6 series.
My advice would be to hang on and allow the market to rev up and cool down, question is how long until Nvidia reply ? I predict 6-7 months from now at least.