AMD unveils Radeon HD 6870 & 6850 graphics cards
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It's not like we didn't know they were coming, but here they are anyway - AMD's brand new Radeon HD 6870 & 6850 graphics cards.
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Codenamed "Barts" (no, not after the yellow haired member of the Simpson's family, but after the St. Barts trade winds of the Caribbean), the 6800 series isn't as follow-on to the Radeon 5870 series, but according to AMD it's closer in heritage the 5850, but with the performance amped.
AMD's goal with the 6800 series was to create a graphics card line that offered the best performance/watt and performance/mm2 and the fastest sub 150W card in the market. With the Radeon HD 6870 coming in with a MSRP of $239 and the Radeon HD 6850 at $179, AMD might well have pulled off this trick.
As well as better performance/watt and performance/mm2, AMD has also included new image quality features such as Anti-Aliasing modes and higher quality Anisotropic Filtering (this is a post-process filtering technique, so may be available to users of other GPUs via a Catalyst update)..
Here's the full spec of the cards.
6870:
- Compute power: 2.0 TFLOPs
- Core clock: 900MHz
- Stream processors: 1120
- ROPs: 32
- Frame buffer: 1GB GDDR5
- Memory width/speed: 256bit, 4.2Gbps
- Load/idle power: 151W/19W
- Power connector: Dual 6-pin
- Outputs: 2 x DVI, 2x mDP, HDMI
6850:
- Compute power: 1.5 TFLOPs
- Core clock: 775MHz
- Stream processors: 960
- ROPs: 32
- Frame buffer: 1GB GDDR5
- Memory width/speed: 256bit, 4.0Gbps
- Load/idle power: 127W/19W
- Power connector: Single 6-pin
- Outputs: 2 x DVI, 2 x mDP, HDMI
Common features:
- GDDR5 memory interface
- PCI Express® 2.1 x16 bus interface
- "Eye-Definition" graphics
- Second generation graphics with full DirectX® 11 support
- Shader Model 5.0
- DirectCompute 11
- Programmable hardware tessellation unit
- Accelerated multi-threading
- HDR texture compression
- Order-independent transparency
- Image quality enhancement technology
- Second generation graphics with full DirectX® 11 support
- AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology
- AMD EyeSpeed visual acceleration
- AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) technology
- OpenCLSupport
- DirectCompute 11
- Accelerated video encoding, transcoding, and upscaling
- AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) technology
- UVD 3 dedicated video playback accelerator
- Enhanced Video Quality features
- Advanced post-processing and scaling
- Dynamic contrast enhancement and color correction
- Brighter whites processing (Blue Stretch)
- Independent video gamma control
- Dynamic video range control
- AMD HD3D technology
- Stereoscopic 3D display/glasses support
- Blu-ray 3D support
- Stereoscopic 3D gaming
- 3rd party Stereoscopic 3D middleware software support
- AMD CrossFireX™ multi-GPU technology
- Dual GPU scaling
- Cutting-edge integrated display support
- Integrated dual-link DVI output with HDCP
- Integrated DisplayPort 1.2 output
- Integrated HDMI 1.4a with support for stereoscopic 3D
- Integrated VGA output
- Integrated HD audio controller
- Output protected high bit rate 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI with no additional cables required
- Supports AC-3, AAC, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio formats
- AMD PowerPlay™ power management technology
- Dynamic power management with low power idle state
- Ultra-low power state support for multi-GPU configurations
- AMD Catalyst™ graphics and HD video configuration software
- Certified drivers for Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP
- AMD Catalyst™ Control Center - AMD Catalyst™ software application and user interface for setup, configuration, and accessing features of ATI Radeon products
- Unified Graphics display driver - AMD Catalyst™ software enabling other PC programs and devices to use advanced graphics, video, and features of AMD Radeon™ products
MSRP: Radeon HD 6870 - $239 / Radeon HD 6850 - $179