AMD Radeon HD 6870 & 6850 Graphics Cards Debut

Name: AMD Radeon HD 6870 & 6850 Graphics Cards Debut - Page 13
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta and Dave Altavilla — Thursday, October 21, 2010, 10:00 PM EDT

Alien vs. Predator Performance

Alien vs. Predator

DirectX 11 Gaming Performance

Alien vs. Predator

The Alien vs. Predator benchmark makes use of the advanced Tessellation, screen space ambient occlusion and high-quality shadow features, available with DirectX 11. In addition to enabling all of the aforementioned DirectX 11 related features offered by this benchmark, we also switched on 4X anti-aliasing along with 16X anisotropic filtering to more heavily tax the graphics cards being tested.

With AvP we see that a Radeon HD 6870 performs about on par with a Radeon HD 5850 but drops a few frames per second at the ultra-high resolution of 2560X1600. This is likely due to the 6870's fewer number of Texture Units, since geometry throughput and memory bandwidth are higher for the new architecture. Regardless, the Radeon HD 6870 handily outpaces a stock GeForce GTX 460 but can't quite keep up with a GTX 470 or OC'd 460. The new Radeon HD 6850 tracks the performance of a stock GeForce GTX 460 in this test.

	6870	6850	5870	5850	GTX 470	GTX 460
% Increase	97.7%	97.8%	83.4%	84.8%	89.7%	92.6%

Here we've calculated performance scaling for you in AMD CrossFire and NVIDIA SLI multi-GPU modes again and it's no surprise at point that AMD once again shows better slightly better scaling for their latest generation of GPUs versus NVIDIA's. This theme was prevalent in every multi-GPU test we've shown here. This wasn't the case in the previous generation AMD architecture but it clearly is now. Impressive to say the least.