AMD Radeon HD 6870 & 6850 Graphics Cards Debut
3DMark Vantage Performance
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The latest version of Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark Vantage, is specifically bound to Windows Vista-based systems because it uses some advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 10, which y isn't available on previous versions of Windows. 3DMark Vantage isn't simply a port of 3DMark06 to DirectX 10 though. With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, in addition to support for the latest PC hardware. We tested the graphics cards here with 3DMark Vantage's Extreme preset option, which uses a resolution of 1920x1200 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering. |
The new Radeon HD 6800 series cards trail their 5800 series namesakes in 3DMark Vantage and land somewhere in between the stock GeForce GTX 470 and 460. The Radeon HD 5870 has a clear lead over the 6870, as does the 5850 over the new 6850. The Radeon HD 6870, however, is able to pull ahead of the stock GTX 460 and just misses the mark set by the overclocked GTX 460 and GTX 470. The Radeon HD 6850 trails both of NVIDIA's competitive offerings.
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6870 |
6850 |
5870 |
5850 |
GTX 470 |
GTX 460 |
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% Increase |
88.0% |
90.9% |
74.8% |
76.4% |
90.2% |
91.3% |
The performance trend we witnessed in the single-card testing, plays out again in the dual-card CrossFire and SLI tests. Interestingly, the Radeon HD 6800 series parts scaled better moving from one card to two than the 5800 series models did. The GeForces both scaled very well when running in SLI mode.
