AMD Radeon HD 6850 Pro Reviews

What have we learned by looking at the performance of three Radeon cards from the last three generations? Well, a few things, actually. Taking the Radeon HD 5850, HD 6850 and HD 7850 into account in this same-frequency face-off, the first point to note is that AMD has demoted the x850 line from the best single-GPU silicon to second-best GPU. This fact alone renders this an apples-to-oranges comparison. Radeon HD 5850 is a better card than the name now suggests, and we can empirically prove this by how well it competes against the HD 6850 and HD 7850. Really, a 30-month-old card should be slaughtered by cutting-edge competition, even if the older GPU's clocks are raised, but this isn't generally the case. We feel comfortable in saying that Radeon HD 5850 owners, and there are many, shouldn't feel compelled to 'upgrade' to a Radeon HD 6850 or HD 7850 on the rather large proviso that the majority of their gaming takes place at 1,920x1,080 resolution and below. Meanwhile, Radeon HD 6850 shouldn't really be in the same class as the HD 5850 or HD 7850. Perhaps a better name for it is the already-taken HD 6750? AMD understands its positioning and has reduced the buy-in price of the GPU silicon enough for partners to sell retail cards for £110... and even as low as £99 on special deals. It's a decent-enough card once the price dropped to the present £110, we suppose. And this brings us nicely on to the Radeon HD 7850 2GB card that was paper-launched just the other day. It's a quality card that's the epitome of mainstream gaming - cool, small, and potentially very quiet - but widespread adoption may be stymied by the launch price of close to £200. It's almost guaranteed to drop to around £175 once NVIDIA retaliates with its own mainstream GeForce magic - which is currently wending its way through the manufacturing process and out to retail - and an HD 7850 costing £150, if it should come to pass, would represent an excellent investment.

The AMD Radeon HD 6850 is an impressive performer, and its modest price tag will blow you away.

The Radeon HD 6800-series didn't bring a drastic change to the GPU market like the HD 5800 series did; the architectures are just too similar for anything like that to have happened. AMD should be proud of the release though and now that they finally have a solid answer to the $200 question, I am sure product managers there will sleep better at night.

As for the Radeon HD 6850 however, things are much more lopsided in AMD’s favor. It’s give and take depending on the benchmark, but ultimately it’s just as fast as the GTX 460 1GB on average, even though it’s officially $20 cheaper. And at the same time it draws less power and produces less noise than the GTX 460 1GB. In fact unless the GTX 460 1GB was cheaper than the 6850, we really can’t come up with a reason to buy it.

If you need one takeaway from the introduction of the Radeon HD 6850 and HD 6870, it should be this: the new GPUs offer everything the Radeon 5000-series do, and they add the cherry on top with extra features. Folk thinking of the Radeon HD 5850 would do well to investigate the all-new, cheaper, lower-power HD 6850, and prospective owners of the price-reduced GeForce GTX 470 should pay close attention to pre-overclocked HD 6870s that will undoubtedly litter the retail shelves soon.

Radeon HD 6850 scaling is good enough for us to stop recommending the Radeon HD 5850 XF or single-card HD 5970 - unless you only have one PCIe x16 slot in the motherboard. The new GPUs produce near-identical performance to last year's best but do so at a substantially lower price and with lower power-draw. AMD has improved its CrossFireX scaling to match NVIDIA's. Two Radeon HD 6850s, coming in at £300, offer excellent performance with enviable power-draw characteristics. Cayman, over to you.

A great card at a great price, if you held off upgrading to the 5000-series, then this is the card for you.

Any way you slice it, the current Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 offerings are stellar deals. Better performance, lower prices, lower power, lower temps, and just a really good gameplay experience!

A strong entry in the sub-$200 video card arena, the AMD Radeon HD 6850 graphics card provides some real competition for Nvidia's 768MB GTX 460.

The AMD Radeon HD 6850 isn't quite the must-buy card that we expected it to be, especially at its initial pricing. Now that the dust has settled a little on the pricing front it's a much a more interesting prospect, producing playable frame rates at what would have been the sweet spot for most gamers only a few days ago.

The new Radeon HD 6800 series cards performed very well throughout our entire battery of tests. Generally speaking, the Radeon HD 6870 performs about on par with the GeForce GTX 470 and somewhat behind the Radeon HD 5870, but it does so while offering lower power consumption. The Radeon HD 6850 finds itself in a similar situation. Overall, the Radeon HD 6850 trails the older Radeon HD 5850, but hangs with or outruns a stock GeForce GTX 460 1GB, an overclocked 460, however, will trypically be faster.

At this time AMD's Radeon HD 6850 seems to be the most affordable high-performance multi-card setup out there. It offers the possibility of getting one HD 6850 card today: win because it's price/performance king and has enough steam to let you play all the latest games at resolutions up to, including, 1680x1050 well into next year. Should you then require a more capable gaming rig, you can just grab another HD 6850 that should be even cheaper by then and keep on gaming. But at this point your setup will be maxxed out, you can not just add a third or fourth card like the HD 5800 series allowed you to do.

The AMD Radeon HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850 proved to be two very solid performing mainstream video cards from what we saw in our initial testing with them. These cards are officially AMD's second generation DirectX 11 video card series, which is impressive as NVIDIA still has not released all of their first generation cards yet. When AMD designed the Radeon HD 6800 'Barts' series of GPUs they wanted to have Radeon HD 5800-class performance, but optimize the GPU to lower power use and the price tag. The cards do in fact have Radeon HD 5800-class performance in general and we saw much better power efficiency from the cards. This was done by lower the transistor count from 2.15 billion to 1.7 billion and as a result the die size went from 334mm2 to just 255mm2. Since both the Radeon HD 5800 and 6800 series are built by TSMC on the 40nm process we can see that AMD really cleaned things up inside the core and tuned this GPU for efficiency.

Beginning with frame rate performance, the AMD Radeon HD 6850 is meant to fit into the lineup just below the Radeon HD 5850 and above the Radeon HD 5770 video card. In our tests, the 6850 found itself all over the place. There were times when it matched the more expensive Radeon HD 5850, but it always performed well above 5770 levels. It surpassed NVIDIA's 1GB GeForce GTX 460 in Battlefield BC2, Mafia 2, and Metro 2033, and matched performance in Crysis and Aliens vs Predator. 3DMark Vantage, BattleForge, and Unigine Heaven had the 6850 even with the 768MB GeForce GTX 460.

The final piece of AMD’s mid-range puzzle is the price, and it’s the card’s greatest strength. At £127 exc VAT the HD 6850 is the same price yet faster in most tests than the GTX 460. And when compared to AMD’s own HD 6870, the small loss in frame rates is easily made up for by the price saving of nearly £50. It’s a little unusual in that the HD 6850 is slower than its predecessor, but the price means it’s undoubtedly the finest mid-range card available.

One thing most people will have a hard time with is the fact that the 6870 and 6850 are not the replacements for the strong performing HD 5870 and HD 5850. These are cards that are meant to fit into a mid-range performance and price point whose introduction also ushers in support for new technologies such as Stereoscopic 3D, HDMI 1.4a and Display Port 1.2 and that offer up a host of display opportunities. You now have the ability to run Eyefinity setups without expensive adapters with a fairly inexpensive video card. The HD 68XX series are cards that target NVIDIA's GTX 460 and hit the mark on performance and price. The performance of the HD 6870 was actually better than I was expecting and shows that you can get excellent performance for a sub $250 price tag. All-in-all, the two series delivered excellent performance in the game testing by comparison to a stacked field.

Whenever a new or even “refreshed” architecture is released, there are always high expectations for performance and even pricing that usually fizzle out once reality sets in. AMD’s HD 6870 and HD 6850 are two cards that finally buck this trend and actually managed to exceed our expectations in nearly every conceivable way. The changes between Cypress and Barts can’t necessarily be counted as revolutionary but AMD has shown how small tweaks to an existing architecture can result in a family of products that deliver the goods at a reasonable price point.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” It’s obvious that when Shakespeare penned this famous quip, he was foretelling the arrival of AMD’s Radeon HD 6800-series cards. Wherefore art thou, Radeon 6700? All kidding aside, once you accept the outright-confusing naming scheme, the Radeon HD 6870 and 6850 have a lot going for them. These are the cards that lead AMD’s charge into the realm of stereoscopic 3D, the cards that make six-monitor Eyefinity a much more accessible possibility, the cards that add the first post-processing based AA mode, the cards that bring AMD’s tessellation performance much closer to the GeForce-based competition.

A fine option for mainstream gamers, this card offers up the best performance we've seen in a graphics card under $200. Just make sure your power supply can handle the 127-watt power strain.

As you can see the AMD Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 video cards look great, but sadly we can't mention their specifications, show their performance or talk about pricing. You'll have to wait until later this week in order to see that!

No doubt AMD want to achieve a few things with this refresh; offer us more performance, at a cheaper price and with less power draw. Friday we’ll tell you if they have managed to achieve this. Plus we’ll answer the gun things like overclocking performance and whether or not Crossfire scaling has improved come the hours and days after launch.