Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Vapor X 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Toxic 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E
Today is the 68th episode, yes, that’s it and not a cent more. Episode 68 of what? - Radeonov, of course. Moreover, 6870 is 3 times larger than 6850. The result? - Four Radeon HD 68xx accelerators will show you everything they are capable of.
By the way, do you see the picture above? This is a very beautiful country, it is also an entire island. Or maybe not an island, but something larger. In short, you need to guess what kind of country it is and understand how it relates to the topic of today's research. That is, to the Sapphire company, whose products we will separately study for the 21st time.
Whoever answers this question first and sends it to my email will receive a gift. I repeat: what is the connection between the country, a piece of which is shown in the picture above, and the Sapphire company. The question is very complex and is intended for old-timers who remember previous IT resources and their representatives, so only very few will be able to answer it. I’ll give you a hint right away: we’re not talking about offices or production.
And we continue our multi-part review of Sapphire products, which, as you know, are based on the diverse and very frequently changing Radeon family.
So, Radeon HD 68xx in four variations, brought up by Sapphire...
Boards
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The card has 1024 MB of GDDR5 SDRAM memory, located in eight chips on the front side of the PCB. It makes sense to say that all cards require additional power, and the 6870 requires two 6-pin connectors. As for the 6850, you need to connect external power to only one 6-pin connector. About cooling systems.
We conducted a temperature study using the MSI Afterburner utility (author A. Nikolaychuk AKA Unwinder) and obtained the following results:
Research has very clearly shown us how much more efficient coolers produced by Sapphire or ordered by Sapphire are, compared to a reference cooler. In three cards with unique COs, the core heating does not exceed 66 degrees, while in the 6870, which has a reference cooler, the heating reached 80 degrees or more, although this is not critical for this kind of card. Now about the configuration. The basic package should include: a user manual, a disk with drivers and utilities, and a CrossFire bridge.
Next up is consideration of the packaging.
Installation and driversTest bench configuration:
VSync is disabled. Test results: performance comparisonWe used the following tools:
Readers who are well versed in 3D graphics cards will be able to draw their own conclusions by looking at the results presented in the charts below. And for beginners and those who have just taken up the issue of choosing a video card, we will make some explanations. It makes sense to familiarize yourself with our short guides to the families of modern video cards and the processors on which they are produced. It should be noted the frequency of operation, support modern technologies(shaders), as well as pipeline architecture. Now let's look at the tests. Of the four cards we examined, only one had increased frequencies works: Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Toxic 1024 MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI-E. Research has shown that the card's performance was such that it fell almost in the middle between 6870 (at standard frequencies) and 6950. Considering that there is already a lot of data in the diagrams below, we did not clutter them with the indicators of the 6870 Toxic, since any a person can easily imagine the speed of a card in a particular application by mentally taking the arithmetic average of the indicators 6870 and 6950. Well, what did you want? - After all, when watching TV series, people think: how many generations were born, or what is the degree of relationship between the heroine and her potential groom...
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And the Radeon HD 6870 were released to replace the solutions of the AMD Radeon HD 57** series, significantly redesigned and more energy efficient, which allowed these products to become a much more profitable purchase than video cards from the competitor NVIDIA GeForce 400 series. Despite the emergence of new NVIDIA video cards GeForce 500, which already more easily competes with AMD Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 video cards, manufacturers continue to release more and more new solutions based on these platforms.
Back in the winter of this year, the HIS Radeon HD 6870 IceQ X TurboX video card was announced, which, in addition to the traditional factory overclocking for the Turbo series, could boast of having unique system IceQ X cooling. This system cooling is not new and is already familiar to our regular readers from our previous reviews of video cards from Hightech Information System Limited (HIS).
Before moving on to a direct review of the HIS Radeon HD 6870 IceQ X TurboX video card, we would like to dwell in more detail on the line of graphics solutions - AMD Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870. This is due to the fact that many users purchasing graphic solutions this series are misleading regarding their level of performance. In particular, AMD made a cunning move. It released mid-price video cards to replace products from the AMD Radeon HD 57** line, and designated it as AMD Radeon HD 68**. This must be taken into account, since it hardly makes sense to replace an AMD Radeon HD 58** series video card with a product of this series. You will either get less performance or similar.
AMD Radeon HD 6800 series video cards, although they belong to the average price segment, in the reference version their length reaches 25 centimeters, so install them in tight ITX cases will not work. Many users, after purchasing a video card of this series, begin to complain about low performance and attribute it to the presence of the PCI-Exp 2.0 bus instead of PCI-Exp 2.1, which the video card supports. In fact, there is no connection here. These interfaces are backward compatible and the use of any of them does not limit the final performance of your video card. Low level performance may be due to the presence of a slow processor that cannot adequately load your video card.
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The second key point when purchasing AMD Radeon HD 6800 series video cards is the power of the power supply. Most sites recommend purchasing a power supply with a power of at least 500 watts in the case of a single video card and 720 watts in the case of two video cards in CrossFire mode. We believe that for one video card, a 450-watt power supply of the ATX 2.xx standard is quite enough, even in overclocking mode. Naturally, a lot still depends on the other components you have - processor, drives, hard drives etc.
The third question that our users ask in the computer components store is deciding between the AMD Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 video cards. Naturally, the older video card costs more, but the key question is how much given cost comparable to performance. We can say with confidence that the difference in the performance levels of these two video cards does not exceed fifteen percent. Most often, this figure fluctuates around 10%. If you overclock the AMD Radeon HD 6850 video card at home, its performance level will be comparable to the performance of an older video card. This will be justified if you come across a successful copy. Since the junior video card has a stripped-down Barts Pro core, and the senior video card has a full-fledged Barts XT core.
Speaking about overclocking video cards of this series, we should focus on the fact that video cards have different frequencies in 2D and 3D mode. Switching from one mode to another can occur without any objective reasons - this is a feature of the video card. Naturally, we do not mean dropping frequencies from the 3D level to 2D.
Experience shows that it makes sense to overclock only low-end AMD Radeon HD 6850 video cards; overclocking the Radeon HD 6870 video card does not provide an adequate performance increase due to its insignificant overclocking potential. However, most Radeon HD 6870 video cards take a core frequency of 1 GHz, but due to the high nominal frequency of 900 MHz, this overclock does not exceed 10% of the nominal values.
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Overclocking video cards of this series should be done either in traditional ways using the OverDrive tab in the driver panel, or through MSI Afterburner. Latest program preferable, since removing the overclocking restriction is quite simple, by setting up the MSIAfterburner.cfg file, where you specify UnofficialOverclockingMode = 1 to disable overclocking control.
Fans of overclocking video cards through official drivers also got the opportunity to remove overclocking restrictions. Most often, it is recommended to flash the video card with a BIOS from MSI Cyclone Power Edition. Naturally, this method is quite risky in terms of the need to restore the video card BIOS “blindly”, so the user assumes all risks when performing this procedure.
The key and most interesting point For an overclocker, there is the ability to softvolt mod on a video card. AMD Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 series video cards support softvolt mode. As a rule, it is performed through tighter MSI program Afterburner. It should be noted that video cards from PowerColor and Gigabyte do not have this feature, so overclockers are better off avoiding them.
When overclocking a video card and implementing a softvolt mod, users have a traditional question: “To what limit can frequencies and voltages be increased?” Regarding increasing frequencies, the answer is quite standard - it is necessary to increase it to the highest possible stable frequencies. Video cards very rarely burn out as a result of setting high frequencies; most often, problems arise as a result of applying high voltage to the core.
So, the nominal voltages of AMD Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 video cards are 1.148 V and 1.172 V, respectively. The second video card works for more high frequencies, therefore operating at a higher operating voltage. The maximum level of voltage set during overclocking should completely depend on your operating conditions of the video card and the specific instance. In most cases, you should limit yourself to 1.275 volts, since further increases rarely lead to a significant increase in operating frequencies. Most often, this will only be observed when overclocking the video card under water cooling conditions or other “sophisticated methods”. You should not go above 1.275 volts in air; on the contrary, it is better to constantly monitor the operating temperatures of your video card.
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When implementing any softvolt mod, whether on AMD Radeon HD 6850/Radeon HD 6870 video cards or other solutions, you should understand the fact that the software voltage values will not always correspond to the real ones. If possible, it is better to control the changed voltages at the voltage measurement points. Our tests showed that setting the voltage to 1.275 volts through software actually produces a voltage of 1.3 volts per core. This does not occur on all video cards, but it does occur and can lead to the so-called “video card degradation”.
The concept of video card degradation is not new in the overclocking world and has been discussed in it for quite a long time. It appears when the video card is overclocked, namely, when excessive voltage is applied to the core. Degradation of a video card leads to a gradual decrease in its overclocking potential. As a rule, the process is irreversible, but it can always be stopped by setting the rated voltages. The question of what causes this phenomenon has been discussed among users for several years. There can only be two reasons here - either the core itself is degrading, or the power system. Naturally, a combined interaction of these factors cannot be ruled out.
Experience among overclockers on previous generations of video cards shows that most often the reason lies in the power supply system of the video card. An excessive increase in voltage leads to increased energy consumption, which the soldered power system is not designed for, which leads to a gradual decrease in the power parameters of the circuit with periodic voltage drops. This is indirectly confirmed by the fact that simply replacing capacitors on a degraded video card with new ones allows you to increase its overclocking potential. Taking all this into account, we do not recommend going beyond the actual 1.275 volts supplied to the core of the video cards of the series under discussion.
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At the same time, I would like to warn owners of video cards from ASUS. The products of this company are popular in our country, so many people first ask the price of it and, if the difference in cost suits them, purchase it. Overclocking of ASUS video cards is carried out using the ASUS Smart Doctor utility, which is included with video cards from this manufacturer. A special feature of this program is that it shows voltage values approximately 0.1 volts lower than actual ones. Thus, by setting the 1.275 volts indicated by us, you risk getting 1.375 volts on the core and safely destroying it during the first test.
Many owners of AMD Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 video cards are starting to return them under warranty due to the inoperability of the lower DVI slot via the DVI-to-VGA adapter. In fact, there is no “crime” here and this occurs on all video cards. The upper DVI-I port is intended for this adapter, and the lower port does not work with these adapters, but is fully functional when connecting a regular DVI cable.
The most real technical malfunction of AMD Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 video cards may be a “black screen” that will accompany the user while playing games. As a rule, only a reboot via the Reset button helps to restore the image. The reasons for this condition can be due to two reasons:
- low voltage on the 12 volt line of the power supply,
- defective voltage controller on the video card.
In the first case, it is necessary to change the power supply, that is, the case for the video card is not under warranty; in the second case, it is necessary to carry the video card under warranty. The main problem is diagnosing the cause of the malfunction.
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To diagnose, you need to perform a simple manipulation. After applying the load to the processor and video card, take a multimeter and measure the voltage along the 12 volt line on the Molex (four-pin connector) of the power supply. 12 volts are supplied to the yellow wire and the black one closest to it. If this figure goes far beyond 11.7 volts, then it is definitely necessary to change the power supply. If the value hangs around 12 volts, then the power controller of the video card is faulty and it must be returned under warranty.
Before submitting, do not forget to remove all signs of modifications, if you have checked the BIOS, etc. The most common problems with the voltage controller are found in Gigabyte GV-R685OC-1GD video cards, but not a single solution is immune from defects.
If the warranty has passed, but there is no money for a new video card, then the solution to the problem is to reduce the frequencies on the problematic component. Practice has shown that if there are problems with the controller, the video memory suffers, and reducing its operating frequency allows you to forget about the “black screen” problem.
In rare cases, users complain of a whistling sound from the video card when playing games. This problem is associated with one reason - low quality your power supply, which draws voltage along the 12 volt line. If, after all, you really have a “not successful” copy, then pick up radio engineering varnish and coat the whistling coil with it - this will solve the problem.
ConclusionAMD Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 series video cards cannot be called problematic. Stable performance over a long period of time is their real characteristic. Some problems may arise when installing drivers for these video cards, but preliminary complete cleaning installed drivers will allow us to solve this problem Once and for all.
“...The performance of the Radeon HD 6870 fully corresponds to the price of 8,500 rubles. The card fits well between the HD 5870 and overclocked versions of the GTX 460, and in some cases even performs at the level of the more expensive GTX 470. If you are willing to spend on video
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Iron shop
In October 2009 we - AMD Radeon HD 5870. Six months later NVIDIA issued a response - GTX 480 And GTX 470, . Today the fight comes to new level: a new series of video cards has appeared on sale AMD - Radeon HD 6000. On this moment There are only two boards in the line - HD 6850 And HD 6870, and we are testing the older version.
Reread
Rumors about the appearance of a new series appeared long before the official release. Naturally, everyone thought that AMD was preparing a chip that would be able to overtake the GTX 480. It turned out to be not entirely true. It would be a stretch to call the series “new.” The video cards are based on a modified version of the old Cypress processors and are positioned as mid-end solutions. So no fps records.
The Radeon HD 6870 is equipped with a Barts crystal, an exact copy of the familiar Cypress with the HD 5870. Oddly enough, the processor turned out to be cut down: compared to its predecessor, the Barts “lacks” 450 million transistors. This means that the number of SIMD clusters has decreased - there are only 14 of them on the new crystal instead of 20. Hence the loss in the number of stream processors (on Barts there are 1120 versus 1600) and texture units (56 instead of 80).
AMD compensated for the losses simply: the processor frequency increased from 850 to 900 MHz. Plus, the card was equipped with an “adult” 256-bit bus and 1 GB of GDDR5 memory with a frequency of 4200 MHz. The rasterization units were not affected either - all 32 ROPs are in place.
Freshness
There are also a number of improvements in Barts. Let's start with tessellation. AMD has two news here. First: tessellation engines work twice as fast. Second: you need to be more careful with the settings. As AMD explains, at extreme levels of tessellation, the model consists of so many polygons that the triangle takes up no more than one pixel on the screen. In this case, the rasterization units begin to slip. The optimal operating mode for them is 16 pixels per polygon, otherwise they are idle. Plus, such small particles have to be rendered several times, which also reduces performance. The conclusion, however, is bleak: we won’t see a better picture, we won’t be able to see new polygons.
The next improvement concerns anti-aliasing. AMD increased its speed and also introduced a new Morphological AA mode. Its essence is that the corners are smoothed after the frame has been rendered. In this case, the reference point for post-processing is not the edges of polygons or alpha textures, but sharp, contrasting transitions. Thus, anti-aliasing is not applied selectively, but to the entire image at once. The advantage of this approach is that the shader does not work with geometry, but with a ready-made scene, in fact with graphic file, so performance increases significantly compared to traditional multisampling (MSAA). Minus - with a low screen resolution, the picture turns out blurry.
AMD has also improved anisotropic filtering: now its quality and performance do not depend on the angle of rotation of the object. Additionally, the video decoding acceleration unit - UVD3 - was also updated. In addition to the VC-1 and H.264 formats, he was taught to work with MPEG-2 (DVD), MVC and MPEG-4 (DivX, xVid).
Pink glasses
Well, and the most important thing for us, players: AMD video cards now work with 3D Stereo. AMD call this feature HD3D, and it is radically different from what NVIDIA offers. Instead of developing its own technologies and launching new hardware, AMD used the help of partners.
To begin with, she found developers of special software that would convert photographs, videos and games into stereo images. Among the selected companies were iZ3D And DDD- they were given access to source codes drivers Catalyst. AMD then signed an agreement with monitor and glasses manufacturers. So if you want to try HD3D, you will need to buy the display from LG, Samsung, CMI or ViewSonic, and the glasses XpanD, RealD And Bit Cauldron. And the funny thing is, a set of the program and active glasses should cost less than a similar offer from NVIDIA. And most importantly, stereo image support is not included in the price of the video card; you won’t have to overpay for extra functionality.
On the table
AMD itself sent the Radeon HD 6870 for testing, so we will talk about the reference version. The video card differs from its predecessor in size (3 cm shorter) and appearance. The cooling system casing has become more angular, the red stripe and “exhaust holes” on the rear end of the video card have disappeared.
The board is cooled using the turbine principle: a 75 mm fan draws air under the casing, circulates it across the card and throws it outside the computer case. On the crystal itself there is an aluminum radiator, composed of 30 plates and penetrated by three copper heat-conducting tubes. During load, the card consumes only 151 W (37 W less than the HD 5870). In 2D mode, the HD 6870 requires 19 W. Power is provided by two 6-pin plugs. Thanks to the low heat dissipation, half the slot on the I/O panel is enough to exhaust hot air, the rest of the space is occupied by new video connectors.
By default, the Radeon HD 6870 is equipped with two DVIs, one HDMI 1.4a and a pair of mini-DisplayPort 1.2. Behind all these numbers lies a bunch of interesting technologies. In DisplayPort 1.2, for example, it increased throughput. Now you can connect two monitors to one connector at once. To do this, you will need either a special splitter or a display with a DisplayPort input and output. Plus, version 1.2 added support for Blu-ray 3D and audio output in Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio quality.
The new version of HDMI has also learned to play Blu-ray 3D and, moreover, output stereo images to 3D TVs. True, the last function is more for show. TV manufacturers have not yet come to a unified stereo image specification, so no one can give a 100% guarantee of compatibility.
| What's in a name? | |
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Radeon HD 6000 is not the first time that an old architecture has been released under a new name. NVIDIA tested this scheme at one time when it released modified GeForce 8000 under the guise of a new series GeForce 9000, and later renamed the older versions altogether to GTS 250. Why is this necessary? The answer is simple - attract the attention of the press and buyers. Well, seriously, the new video cards could have been called Radeon HD 5860 and HD 5840. But in this situation, AMD would not have been able to attract even a tenth of the attention that is now being paid to the new cards. But there’s no point in grieving over the lost line. Very soon AMD will officially announce data on Radeon HD 6950, 6970 And 6990 . Now this will be a real top, on a completely new processor called Cayman. |
Testing
Finding competitors for the new video card turned out to be difficult. At the time of submission of the magazine, the board had not yet gone on sale, so we had to focus on the AMD-recommended price of 8000-8500 rubles. This means that the HD 6870 is cheaper than the HD 5870, but more expensive than the HD 5850. Plus, it falls into the price category of the GTX 460 1 GB and its overclocked versions. The GTX 465 is also sold for the same money, and a little more expensively, for about 10,500 rubles, you can buy a GTX 470. After thinking a little, we decided to take all the video cards at once and compare the results.
To do this, we have put together a powerful test stand based on motherboard Foxconn Renaissance, installed on it Intel Core i7-920 and added 6 GB random access memory, typed with three bars Kingston HyperX DDR3-1666. Unfortunately, the list of tests turned out to be short. Since we tested the Radeon HD 6870 with beta drivers, we were unable to run the benchmark Colin McRaeDiRT 2. So we evaluated DX11 performance only in Aliens vs. Predator and synthetics Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.0. But there were no problems with projects on DX10. Standard Resident Evil 5 And Devil May Cry 4- on the spot. Overall rating performance we carried out using 3DMark Vantage.
Balance
Synthetic test from Futuremark very accurately determined the position of the HD 6870: it falls short of the HD 5870 level by 13%, runs slightly slower than the GTX 470, and outperforms the GTX 460 and GTX 465. In the Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.0, which evaluates performance in DX11, the work done by AMD on tessellation engines is clearly visible. In the synthetic test, the Radeon HD 6870 outperforms the more expensive HD 5870, but still lags behind all NVIDIA competitors.
In real gaming applications, the picture remains the same. The Radeon HD 6870 confidently outperforms not only the HD 5850 and GTX 460, 465, but also the GTX 470. With DX11 such superiority does not occur: the GTX 470 is 19% faster, which is quite logical.
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The performance of the Radeon HD 6870 fully corresponds to the price of 8,500 rubles. The card fits well between the HD 5870 and overclocked versions of the GTX 460, and in some cases even performs at the level of the more expensive GTX 470. If you are willing to spend 8,500 rubles on a video card, then the Radeon HD 6870 is right choice, it has no competitors.
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AMD Radeon HD 6870M(or ATI Mobility Radeon HD 6870) is a high-end mobile video card with support for DirectX 11. Essentially, it is the same ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 adapter with a slower core frequency. So the performance is about the same as legacy cards (UVD2 and primary Eyefinity technology are still supported).
Memory interface ATI Mobility Radeon HD 6870 consists of two 64-bit controllers that lead to a 128-bit memory bus that can access 1024 MB of DDR3 or GDDR5 video memory (512 MB GDDR3). If the laptop uses (G)DDR3 memory, then the performance will not be as good as with GDDR5.
HD 6870M uses 800 MADD cores (so-called stream processors), which are grouped into 160 five-dimensional groups. The cores support all DirectX 11 functions in hardware (tessellation, rendering of transparent and translucent objects, post-processing, shadow rendering, HDR textures). In addition, 16 ROP blocks, 40 TMU blocks and 40 TAU blocks can be found on the chip. As a result, 1040 Mio transistors offer theoretical computing power of up to 1.08 TFLOPS (for example, the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 has this value of 1.12 TFLOPS). By the way, 1 TFLOPS is 1012 floating point operations per second.
The graphics card uses ATI Stream, OpenCL and DirectCompute 11 to perform general computing.
Gaming Performance GPU about the same as HD 5870, that is, quite acceptable for modern games (2010). All games except Metro 2033 and Crysis can be played at high resolution on high settings.
Series 6800M kart Mobility Radeon HD is equipped with an outdated UVD2 video processor, which is used to decode HD video using a graphics adapter. It only works with VC-1, H.264 and MPEG-2, but, unlike UVD3 (used in the 6900M series), it does not support DivX. With the advent of Flash 10.1, 6800M-series cards began to help accelerate Flash HD video (for example, YouTube).
Just like the Radeon HD 5870, the 6870M can transmit HD audio formats (such as Dolby True HD and DTS HD Master Audio) to HDMI 1.3a (8 channels and 192 kHz / 24 bit).
6870M, still supports the first generation of Eyefinity technology (not the improved Eyefinity +), thanks to which you can connect up to 6 monitors to the graphics card simultaneously (as long as the laptop has enough DisplayPorts interfaces). Due to its high power consumption, the Mobility Radeon HD 6870M is installed in large laptops with a good (apparently loud) cooling system.
When comparing the adapter to desktop cards, the Mobility Radeon HD 6870M is between Radeon HD 5750 And 5770 .
| Manufacturer: | AMD |
| Series: | Radeon HD 6870M 800@675MHz |
| Code: | Granville-PRO |
| Streams: | 800 - unified |
| Clock frequency: | 675 MHz* MHz |
| Shader frequency: | 675 MHz* MHz |
| Memory frequency: | 1000* MHz |
| Memory bus width: | 128 Bit |
| Memory type: | DDR3, GDDR3, GDDR5 |
| Maximum memory: | 1024 MB |
| Common memory: | No |
| DirectX: | DirectX 11, Shader 5.0 |
| Transistors: | 1040 million |
| Technology: | 40 nm |
| Additionally: | Eyefinity (up to 6 displays), HD Audio (Dolby True HD, DTS HD), HDMI 1.3a, Avivo HD (UVD2.2) |
| Laptop size: | big |
| Release date: | 04.01.2011 |
*Clock speeds indicated may be subject to change by the manufacturer.
Let's take a closer look at the Radeon HD 6850 and 6870
There were a lot of rumors about the characteristics of cards based on the Barts graphics core, and all sorts of crazy versions were put forward. Now, the time has come to know the truth. Let's look at the sign, comrades, so carefully compiled by Gilbert:
| Specifications | Radeon HD 5770 | Radeon HD 5850 | Radeon HD 6850 | Radeon HD 6870 |
| Graphics core |
Juniper XT | Cypress Pro | Barts Pro | Barts XT |
| Manufacturing process |
40nm | 40nm | 40nm | 40nm |
| Graphics core frequency |
850 MHz | 725 MHz | 775 MHz | 900 MHz |
| Number of stream processors |
800 | 1440 | 960 | 1120 |
| Memory frequency |
4800 MHz | 4000 MHz | 4000 MHz | 4200 MHz |
| Memory size |
128-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Onboard memory capacity |
1 GB GDDR5 | 1 GB GDDR5 | 1 GB GDDR5 | 1 GB GDDR5 |
| Energy consumption |
108 watt | 151 watts | ~ 127 watt | >150 watt |
| Performance |
- | - | Faster 5830 | Faster than 5850 |
Both cards support all the DX11 features (how could it be otherwise?), their graphics chips consist of 1.7 billion transistors. Of the important characteristics not listed in the table, it is worth noting for the 6850 (a competitor to the 768MB version of the GTX460): 12 SIMD units, 48 texture units, 32 ROPs and idle power consumption of ~19 watts. The performance of the solution is 1.5 TFLOPS. As you can see, 5770 is far behind, as it should be.
HD 6870, in turn, has 14 SIMD units, 56 texture units, 32 ROPs. Its task is to show what the GTX460 with 1GB of memory is all about. Power consumption at idle is ~19 watts, performance (in terms of which the new product ranks between 5850 and 5870) is 2 TFLOPS.
Many of the card’s “features” were inherited from its predecessors, but something new appeared, for example, DisplayPort video output version 1.2 and HDMI 1.4a. Added support for HD3D and UVD3 technologies and new method anti-aliasing, called Morphological AA. Add to this improved anisotropic filtering and increased (~ 2 times compared to 5000 series cards) performance with tessellation.
And now you can admire the core of the new product:
What are HD3D and UVD3?
AMD HD3D is an analogue of 3D Vision technology, allows you to play 3D games, watch 3D Blu-ray videos, etc. All this with the help of special glasses. According to Guru3D, this technology has so far been implemented crudely - to watch video in 3D, the obligatory requirement is the presence of those special glasses, a graphics card, a 3D TV or monitor and an HDMI 1.4a cable + software, without which all this is useless. In games, the situation is even worse - there are no kits yet (kits for developers to implement 3D in games) and support for this “feature” in the Catalyst driver settings, in other words, you will have to use third-party solutions, not from AMD, and this is unnecessary expenses and hassles. As an example, the author of the original article talks about software from the company DDD (Dynamic Digital Depth), which costs 50 bucks (but so far - 25, apparently discounts) and allows you to play games in 3D, but with elegance performance and quality, this solution is inferior to a similar one from Nvidia. In other words, the situation is this: software developers will be glad to have the opportunity to profit from the sluggishness of AMD, while users will do the opposite (since few people like to bear additional expenses).
Universal Video Decoder 3.0 - video decoding technology using a graphics card. Useful thing, no doubt. Everyone knows that although a modern PC can easily cope with playing Full HD video in any format, this still creates a certain load on CPU, but UVD 3.0 technology can significantly reduce this load. What's new here, since we saw the same thing in UVD 2.0 and older versions? Here is the list of changes/innovations:
- Supports hardware decoding of two 1080p signals simultaneously
- Compatible with Windows Aero- playback of HD content while Aero is activated (i.e. the latter does not need to be turned off)
- Independent control color range from the Windows desktop
- Brighter white thanks to the use of blue stretch (?!)
- Control the shade of black and white colors during video playback
It also supports automatic color correction, contrast enhancement and support for bitstreaming video in MPEG2 and MPEG4 DiVX/xVID formats and audio, of course.
New family graphics adapters from AMD is in the lead, if this had not happened, they would not have shown us the slide
Eyefinity
I think you've all heard about "Aifinity". This technology allows you to connect from three to 6 monitors to one video card, and with the 6000 line all this becomes even easier, because It is possible to connect six monitors to two ports (DisplayPort version 1.2 helps with this), using an additional rectangular device. Here's the slide:
The most common would be to connect three monitors; for this you will not have to purchase any additional devices.
Otherwise, the Eyefinity technology itself has not changed much since the 5000 series. The author of the article from Guru3D gives an example that you can easily connect three 30" monitors to a video drive, each with a resolution of 2560x1600, and the whole thing will work correctly. A configuration of six monitors shows an image in a resolution of 7680x3200, which is pretty cool. There is also a video:
CrossFireX
Low performance of one card? You can create a CrossfireX tandem from 2 or more videos, which will surely quench your thirst for speed (measured, in our case, by the number of frames per second).
What is needed to build Crossfire? Just a couple of video cards, a bridge to connect them and any motherboard with two (or more) PCIe x8 and PCIe x16 slots.
On Guru3D, the tests used a reference design card produced by HIS. The 6850 is powered by only one 6-pin connector from the power supply, so Crossfire of these cards only needs two of the above-mentioned connectors, and for the 6870 four.
This is what the bridge connecting the cards in CrossfireX looks like:
After installing the connecting bridge on both video cards (pre-installed in the system unit in the corresponding PCIe slots), all that remains is to turn on the PC and in the Catalyst driver settings, check the box that activates the CFX mode:
That's all - now you can enjoy the double power of the new products!
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