AMD Radeon HD 6870 & 6850 Graphics Cards Debut

There is little question that tessellation is a key feature of DirectX 11 and forward-looking DX11-based game titles.  Though like any other relatively new rendering technique, due largely to the fact that game developers need to support a broad legacy install base of older hardware, it is currently utilized sparingly in a only a few of the most leading-edge game titles.  That said, tessellation performance of a GPU will no doubt become more and more significant as next gen game engines increasingly make use of more advanced DX11 features. As a benchmarking tool, Unigine is a tessellation yard stick of sorts, with the ability to force tessellation workloads on the GPU that aren't really typical, in even the few titles currently on the market that make use of the feature.

Here we see the new Radeon HD 6870 beefed-up tessellation engine offers up to a 27% boost in performance, according to Unigine, versus the previous generation of Radeon 5000 series products.  The Radeon HD 6870 actually just edges out NVIDIA's strong tessellation engine in the GeForce GTX 460 but falls behind the more expensive GeForce GTX 470 by about 23% or so.  The Radeon HD 6850 offers roughly a 7% performance increase over the Radeon HD 5850 but can't keep pace with the GeForce GTX 460 and trails it by about 16% or so.