Introducing AMD’s new HD 6870 and HD 6850 vs. GTX 460

AMD Graphics and Nvidia are locked in a perpetual battle to one up each other in what can only be described as a “graphics war”.  Nvidia had issues with introducing their Fermi DX11 architecture and video cards and AMD beat them to the market by over six months with the first DX11 video cards about this time last year.  In April of this year, Nvidia launched their GTX 470 and GTX 480 which were criticized for being hot-running, power-hungry and loud although they offered somewhat higher performance than AMD’s HD 5870 and HD 5850. However, a few months later, Nvidia’s midrange GTX 460 turned out to be a very successful reworking of GF100 Fermi into GF104 that scaled well, ran cool, had good thermal characteristics, overclocked well and no doubt ate into AMD’s DX11 90% marketshare.

To combat GTX 460, AMD is releasing HD 6000 series with HD 6870 and HD 6850 being debuted this week.  This is not AMD’s high end which is to come later on this year, but rather their upper-midrange which is renamed from HD 58×0 series and it is designed to take on and surpass Nvidia’s most successful Fermi card, their “sniper”, the GTX 460 in all of its variants. We also say goodbye to the ATi brand name and logo; the new cards are branded AMD Radeon.

ABT was represented by this editor at AMD’s Press Day at the famous LA Exchange, just a week ago, Thursday and saw AMD’s vision unfold further for us. Since we are going to focus on the HD 6870 and the HD 6850’s performance in 22 games, we will only give you the barest outline of their 5 hour presentation. We do see that the reason that they chose downtown Los Angeles is symbolic of their increasing commitment to the movie industry and they have partnered up with several Hollywood movie studios to increase productivity by using AMD hardware and know how.  They also used the presentation to introduce their support for 3D in PC gaming and 3D for video playback.

AMD’s Press Event was called “Believe Your Eyes” and they laid out their vision for the world’s press. AMD feels that Fusion is uniquely suited to conquer the world and they stress the “firsts” they have accomplished, including being first to bring DX11 GPUs to market very quickly and successfully. They are quite proud of their marketshare and do not intend to allow Nvidia to make inroads – especially with the GTX 460.  AMD points out the advantages of their Eyefinity which now allows more displays to be driven off of a single card rather than Nvidia’s competing 2D Surround solutions which require two similar video cards running in SLI to power it.

A rose by any other name …

Today, AMD Graphics is proud to introduce an improved version of their successful HD 58×0 series with similar performance, but now as the new HD 68×0 series and on the same 40 nm process as the 5000 series.  The advantage is higher performance at lower prices. AMD appears intent to go after Nvidia’s GTX 460 by offering more performance at a similar price. This is a strategy that has worked for AMD in the past and they call it “aiming for the sweet spot”. The HD 68×0 series will also support a more flexible form of Eyefinity and it is also going to support 3D PC gaming and 3D video playback.  What may be confusing to many is that HD 6870 and HD 6850 are slower than HD 5870 and HD 5850 respectively and yet are replacing them.  AMD’s goal is to give more gamers the ability to experience HD 58×0-type performance in a less expensive, smaller and even less power-hungry video card.

The codename for AMD’s new HD 58×0 cards is “Barts”.  AMD has not forgotten the high end gamer as they will be releasing “Cayman” – HD 6900 series – which will have a further set of improvements and refinements over the Barts HD 68×0 video cards that we shall be evaluating in this review.  And HD 5700 series will remain unchanged for now.  In many ways, a picture is worth 1,000 words and here is AMD’s continuation of their video card strategy:

We see changes only to the upper midrange and at the high end. AMD is continuing the HD 5700 series for now unchanged as they evidently feel unchallenged by Nvidia’s new offering, the GTS 450 which we reviewed here against HD 5750. We see the HD 5800 series diverge into 3 streams – the “Antilles”, an “X2” video card at the highest end as a successor to the current dual-GPU HD 5970; the “Cayman”, which will use AMD’s fastest single GPU to succeed and surpass the Cypress HD 5870 and we would expect that it would take on Nvidia’s GTX 480 video card directly.

Here is the latest round of our testing HD 5870 versus GTX 480 in our reviews here (overclocked versus super-overclocked).  You can follow the links backward through several other of our GTX 480 vs. HD 5870 testing, back to our first testing of these cards in April.  We can see that the GTX 480 is consistently faster than even the overclocked HD 5870 PCS+ and there is some need for AMD to address this with a faster and also more efficient GPU.  There will also be a Cayman video card to likely beat Nvidia’s second fastest video card, the GTX 470.

With this launch, AMD is directly targeting Nvidia’s GTX 460.  The HD 6870 (SEP $239.00) will take on GTX 460-1GB and the HD 6850 (SEP $179.00) will take on GTX 460-768MB video cards.   In a preemptive move, Nvidia lowered the prices of their GTX 460-1GB to $199 and their GTX 460-768MB to $169.  Even the GTX 470 was reduced to $259 so we can see that AMD’s launch has got a strong reaction from Nvidia.

What’s new in HD 68×0?

Since “seeing is believing” is AMD’s theme for this launch and it is all about the 3 “eyes”, we shall briefly cover them:

• Eyedefinition
• Eyefinity
• Eyespeed

Under Eyedefinition, we see a further subdivision with more efficient tesselation; there is mention of a tweaked engine, offering up to 2x the tessellation performance of the HD 58×0 GPUs – an area where AMD was perceived weak in comparison to Nvidia’s Fermi GPUs in heavily tessellated benchmarks and games. We also see mention of enhanced architecture for efficiently using GPU compute and for improvement and performance in games. We also note improvements in Anisotropic Filtering (AF) and a new Anti-Aliasing mode – morphological AA.

The HD 5870 is pictured (below) in the middle of the two HD 68×0 cards. There are 2x DVI ports and one HDMI port plus two mini-DisplayPorts which are DP version 1.2.  This is important because of the new Eyefinity features that now allow for daisy chaining of displays and for using a new hub, much like using a USB hub, to output to multiple displays

Eyespeed refers to GPU compute and to AMD’s “open initiative” approach to (everything and especially) to OpenCL, in contrast to Nvidia’s use of their own proprietary GPU language, CUDA. We see AMD partnering with Cyberlink, Arcsoft, Viewdle, Adobe, Microsoft and more companies (some of which are also Nvidia’s partners) to bring you, the end consumer, quality video processing and playback; and of course, UVD 3 accelerated decoding for 3D BluRay playback.

We are especially going to be evaluating performance and AMD’s claim of 35% better performance per mm over HD 58×0.  That means that the HD 6870 should be about equal in performance to HD 5850 overall.  Not really too much has changed from Cypress but we understand that Barts has up to 2x the performance of the tessellator in the HD 58×0 GPU. And of course we shall watch for this in our performance testing. Here is the Barts GPU from AMD’s own presentation slide.

To see what it brings new, we note that the UVD engine has been updated; HDMI 1.4a is available for 3D Blu-ray and we see an improved Tesselator Engine.   Although there are fewer SIMD Engines than the Radeon HD 5800 series, AMD now uses a second Ultra Threaded Dispatch Processor and an improved engine logic.  We have noted in previous reviews, that Nvidia’s Fermi GPUs are faster in heavily tessellated scenes than competitive AMD Cypress GPUs.  Well, now AMD claims a solid tessellation improvement over Cypress and HD 58×0 series and calls their method “tessellating the right way”.

Tessellating the Right Way

• Focus on most efficient tessellation usage models
• Ideally want ~16 pixels per polygon
• Best balance of image quality and performance
• Adaptive tessellation helps achieve this
• Use high levels only for objects close to viewer, on silhouette edges, or in areas with fine detail
• Use low levels for distant or simple objects to improve performance and avoid geometry aliasing problems

Of course, Nvidia will take issue with the above and argue that high levels of AA require per pixel application of tessellation beyond what AMD’s solution is tuned for. We shall see what happens in the long run with game developers. Nvidia’s argument will probably be that AMD is focusing on triangle size and “ideals” to cover that their tessellator is a bottleneck for the rest of their GPU, compared to Fermi. That is why Nvidia chose to do a fully parallelized implementation in Fermi.  In contrast, AMD has decided to stick with improving their original design and counting on the assumption that games will not be so heavily tessellated so as to make any practical difference to the gaming experience for the next two or three years – and certainly not before they move to their own more completely redesigned Northern Islands GPU architecture on the 28 nm process which is due next year.

Morphological Adaptive AA

AMD’s new morphological anti-aliasing technique works as a post process effect. In other words, the GPU finishes rendering each frame as usual – but before presenting it to the display, it runs it through another shader pass to perform the filtering. This differs from traditional multi-sample and super-sample AA techniques where the filtering occurs during the rendering of each frame. In fact, this technique can eliminate aliasing for still images, though it’s intended to work better when in motion.

The filter works by first detecting high contrast edges with various pixel-sized patterns that are normally associated with aliasing, and assumes they should actually be straight lines that are not aligned to pixel edges. It then estimates the length and angle of the ideal line for each edge, and determines the proportional coverage by the lighter and darker color for each pixel along the edge. Finally it uses this coverage information to blend the colors for each pixel.  All of this is actually being accomplished by the Catalyst drivers through a DirectCompute shader while the Local Data Share is used to keep adjacent pixels in memory for a low overall overhead.  It will be interesting to see if AMD chooses to extend this morphological adaptive AA to the 5000 series as there is no reason it cannot be done, except perhaps to differentiate HD 6000 series from the current one.

AMD’s diagrams (below) should help to illustrate how this is accomplished.

Since the edge detection step requires frequent sampling and re-sampling of adjacent pixel colors, it offers a lot of opportunities for data re-use by using the LDS (Local Data Share) hardware to avoid redundant data fetches and to significantly improve performance.  AMD sent us a driver very late in our testing and we are unable to evaluate it as yet.  We simply cannot comment on what we have not yet evaluated.

Anisotropic Filtering (AF)

With the HD 5000 series, AMD brought genuine angle-independent filtering to gaming by putting an end to angle-dependent deficiencies.  However, our own Senior Editor BFG10K pointed out the flaws in AMD’s Anisotropic filtering with the transitions, here, here and here. AMD listened to us and the enthusiast community and they have improved the transitions between filter levels. Well, examining these improvements are beyond the scope of this performance evaluation, but rest assured that BFG10K will again provide the definitive answers in a future review right here at ABT.

Architectural improvements

Like Cypress, all Barts GPUs are produced with the 40 nm process.  AMD’s new reference Radeon HD 6870 has 1120 Stream Processors with its core operating at 900 MHz with 1GB of GDDR5 at 4.2 GHz on a 256-bit bus. There are 32 ROPs and 56 Texture units on a smaller die than that of the Radeon HD 5850 GPU and there are also fewer transistors. Yet, even with this reduction in die size and transistor count, the Radeon HD 6870 should perform similarly to the Radeon HD 5850 due to architectural refinements and fine-tuning.  The HD 6870’s maximum load board power is 151 watts and its idle is 19 watts which is an improvement in idle wattage compared to the HD 5850, and also matching the HD 5850’s load wattage.  The HD 6870 requires two 6-pin PCIe power connectors (bottom card).  The reference HD 6870 is 9.5 inches long.

The new AMD Radeon HD 6850 is clocked at 775 MHz with 1GB of GDDR5 at 4 GHz on a 256-bit bus and features 960 Stream Processors. There are also 32 ROPs. Maximum load board power is 127 watts and the idle is at 19 watts, just like the 6870.  The reference HD 6850 is 9 inches long and only requires one single 6-pin PCIe power connector (top card, above).

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To properly bring you this review, we are using our reference Diamond HD 5870 (850/1200 MHz) as our standard and we put all of our Radeon cards through their paces this week with the very latest performance drivers – Catalyst 10-10. AMD should be quite proud of this driver set as it brings sold performance increases over Catalyst 10-9 which we analyzed here recently.  We are comparing the HD 5870, HD 6870 and HD 6850 to the EVGA (super-overclocked) and  Galaxy GTX 460-1GB (at stock clocks), plus the (stock-clocked) Galaxy GTX 460-768MB version.  Remember that we are comparing a HD 5870 with a SEP of $400 with video cards about half its price.  We are using Nvidia’s very latest (“detonator”) WHQL GeForce 260.89 drivers that also give solid performance increases over the previous version, so both vendors are giving us their very best for this review.

Specifically, you will see us pit our HD 5870 against the new HD 6870 and HD 6850 and also against the reference GTX 460-1GB, the EVGA (highly) overclocked version, as well as the GTX 460-768 MB version in 22 modern games and 2 synthetic benchmarks using 1680×1050, 1920×1200 and 2560×1600 resolutions. Since we are using the fastest of the fast upper-midrange video cards, it makes sense to test at the highest resolutions that they can handle and with the most demanding settings.  We shall also overclock our HD 68×0 cards to give you an idea of what AMD’s board partners will soon be bringing you.  In the above picture, the GTX 480 (top) and the non-reference design PowerColor HD 5870 PCS+ (left), are included for a visual size comparison.

Is AMD’s HD 68×0 worth the premium over its rival, Nvidia’s overclocked GTX 460-1GB?

Since Nvidia has signaled their willingness to engage in a price war by dropping their GTX 460’s pricing to a bit below AMD’s new cards, we naturally want to know if the new AMD HD 68×0 cards are worth their new price premium.  They are certainly priced very competitively and we will show you where it comes down to performance and features.  Surprisingly, we received our Galaxy GTX 460-768MB video card on Thursday morning – the same day that our review was due to be published!  Well, we delayed our review so that you could more easily make up your mind by having this card to compare directly to the HD 6850 just as the HD 6870 will compare to the stock and super-overclocked GTX 460.

Overclocking

We had quite a bit of a mix going on in our test bed.  We tested our GTX 460s at their reference clocks and also with the vendor set factory overclocks – in EVGA’s case, it is pretty extreme – from the GTX 460’s stock clocks of 675/1800 MHz to 850/2000 MHz!  Our HD 6850 overclocked like a champion – from 775/1000 MHz to 900/1100 Mhz.  Unfortunately, the overclock on our HD 6870 can best be described as “mild” – from 900/1050 MHz to 950/1075 MHz.  Although the HD 6870’s overclock is perceived as disappointing, it is a blessing in disguise as it will give you an idea of scaling while still keeping your own overclocking expectations realistic.  We only used CCC to set our Radeon overclocks and we did not increase the core voltage nor change the fan profile.

Can you CrossFire-X your HD 6870 with the HD 6850?

Normally, we would not expect a person buying a HD 6850 to consider CrossFiring it with a HD 6870. Quite often a gamer will buy one card and perhaps later on, add a second more powerful one; something you cannot do with SLI. Using CrossFire-X, each dissimilar card can keep its own unique clocks and there is some load-balancing as the weaker card adds to the overall experience.  Well, we wanted to see if it would work; something only a real hardware geek would do.  Read on!

Because of severe time constraints on this article, HD 68×0 CrossFire will be examined in depth in a further article as well as 3-panel Eyefinity (which can be driven off of a single Radeon) verses Nvidia’s competing 2D Surround which requires SLI to make it work.  We used our Intel Core i7-920 at 3.8 GHz for this evaluation so there was no chance of any CPU bottlenecking.  Read on to see our test bed and the games we used.

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Test Configuration

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i7 920 reference 2.66 GHz and overclocked to 3.8 GHz); Turbo is off.
• Gigabyte EX58-UD3R (Intel X58 chipset, latest BIOS, PCIe 2.0 specification; CrossFire/SLI 16x+16x).
• 6 GB OCZ DDR3 PC 1800 Kingston RAM (3×2 GB, tri-channel at PC 1600 speeds; 2×2 GB supplied by Kingston)
• AMD reference Radeon HD 6870, supplied by AMD (at stock 900/1050 and overclocked to 950/1075 MHz )
  
• AMD reference Radeon HD 6850, supplied by AMD (at stock 775/1000 MHz and overclocked to 900/1100 MHz)
• ATi Radeon HD 5870 (1GB, reference clocks, 850/1200 MHz) by Diamond
• Galaxy GTX 460, 1 GB overclocked design and clocks, supplied by Galaxy (at stock 675/1800MHz clocks only)
• Galaxy GTX 460, 758 MB, overclocked version, supplied by Galaxy (at stock 675/1800 MHz and overclocked 700/1848 MHz)
• EVGA GTX 460, 1 GB highly overclocked design and clocks, supplied by Nvidia/EVGA (at stock 675/1800 MHz and overclocked 850/2000 MHz)
• Onboard Realtek Audio
• Two identical 250 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 hard drives configured and set up identically from drive image; one partition for Nvidia GeForce drivers and one for ATI Catalyst drivers
• Thermaltake ToughPower 775 W power supply unit supplied by Thermaltake
• Thermaltake Element G Case supplied by Thermaltake
• Noctua NH-U12P SE2 CPU cooler, supplied by Noctua
• Philips DVD SATA writer
• HP LP3065 2560×1600 thirty inch LCD

Test Configuration – Software

• ATi Catalyst 10-10; highest quality mip-mapping set in the driver, Catalyst AI set to “Standard”; all surface format optimizations ‘off’ for HD 68×0 in CCC.
  
• NVIDIA GeForce 260.89 WHQL drivers for GTX 480; High Quality
• Windows 7 64-bit; very latest updates
• DirectX June 2010
• All games are patched to their latest versions.
• vsync is off in the control panel and is never set in-game.
• Varying AA enabled as noted in games and “forced” in Catalyst Control Center for UT3 ; all in-game settings are specified with 16xAF always applied; 16xAF forced in control panel for Crysis.
• All results show average, minimum and maximum frame rates except as noted.
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
• Windows 7 64, all DX10 titles were run under DX10 render paths; DX11 titles under DX 11 render paths.

The Benchmarks

• Vantage
• Call of Juarez
• Crysis
• Far Cry 2
• Just Cause 2
• X3:Terran Conflict
• Dirt 2
• Lost Planet
• Lost Planet 2
• Grand Theft Auto IV
  
• Unreal Tournament 3
• Resident Evil 5
• STALKER, Call of Pripyat
• Batman: Arkham Asylum
• H.A.W.X.
• Battleforge
• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
• F.E.A.R.
• Call of Duty 4
• Alien vs. Predator
• Serious Sam, Second Encounter HD (2010)
• Metro 2033
• Mafia II
• Heaven 2.1

One important note about settings must be made here.  AMD has listened to enthusiasts and they have finally given us a way to shut off performance optimizations in Catalyst Control Center beginning with Catalyst 10-10 for HD 68×0.  AMD insists that their optimizations never impact image quality (IQ).  However, we have decided to test with them ‘off’ and hold AMD’s new cards to the very highest IQ standards even if it means a very slight performance impact even when compared to HD 5870 which does not have this option in the same Catalyst 10-10 driver (below).  We found in testing that the framerate impact is minimal but we shall explore this in a future article.

You will also generally note that we tested our strongest cards in PC games at the highest resolution and the weaker cards at 1920×1200 and 1680×1050.  We overclocked our cards consistently at resolutions where it might be most helpful to compare performance scaling.

Vantage

Vantage is Futuremark’s latest test. It is really useful for tracking changes in a single system – especially driver changes. There are two mini-game tests, Jane Nash and Calico and also two CPU tests, but we are still focusing on the graphics performance. Here is a scene from Vantage’s second mini-game.

Let’s go right to the graphs and first check the basic tests with the default benchmark score.

We see an interesting lineup. Unfortunately for our purposes, Vantage is a meaningless test with meaningless numbers to attempt to compare one video card’s performance to another – even in the same system. However, the mini games might show a bit more as they are actually benching framerates.

Let’s move on to PC games and to real world situations!  Let’s see if our $200 video cards can keep up in the same performance league as the $400 HD 5870.  It sure looks like it from this vantage point.

Call of Juarez

Call of Juarez is one of the very earliest DX10 games. It is loosely based on Spaghetti Westerns that became popular in the early 1970s. Call of Juarez features its Chrome Engine using Shader Model 4 with DirectX 10. Our benchmark is built into the full-patched retail game of Call of Juarez. It runs a simple flyby of a level that is created to showcase its DX10 effects. It offers good repeatability and it is a good stress test for DX10 features in graphics cards, although it is not quite the same as actual gameplay because the game logic and AI are stripped out of the demo.

Performing Call of Juarez benchmark is easy. You are presented with a simple menu to choose resolution, anti-aliasing, and two choices of shadow quality options. We set the shadow quality on “high” and the shadow map resolution to the maximum, 2048×2048. At the end of the run, the demo presents you with the minimum, maximum, and average frame rate, along with the option to quit or run the benchmark again. We always ran the benchmark at least a second time and recorded that generally higher score.

Here are Call of Juarez DX10 benchmark results, first at 1920×1200; there is no 2560×1600 run available in the benchmark.

Now on to 1680×1050:

HD 5870 takes the lead over both the stock and overclocked HD 6870 and the GTX 460s battle it out pretty evenly with the new HD 68×0 cards.  Of course. HD 5870 is a $400 video card, so the price to performance of the new cards is amazing.  There is no clear winner among the competing cards with some nice scaling with the overclocked versions of all the tested cards translating to real performance increases over the reference versions.  All of our cards offer a similar playing experience.

CRYSIS

Next we move on to Crysis, a science fiction first person shooter by Crytek. It remains one of the most demanding games for any PC and it is also still one of the most beautiful games released to date. Crysis is based in a fictional near-future where an alien spacecraft is discovered buried on an island near the coast of Korea. The single-player campaign has you assume the role of USA Delta Force, ‘Nomad’ who is armed with futuristic weapons and equipment. Crysis uses DirectX10 for graphics rendering.

A standalone but related game, Crysis Warhead was released last year. CryEngine2 is the game engine used to power Crysis and Warhead and it is an extended version of the CryEngine that also powers FarCry. As well as supporting Shader Model 2.0, 3.0, and DirectX10’s 4.0, CryEngine2 is also multi-threaded to take advantage of dual core SMP-aware systems and Crytek has developed their own proprietary physics system, called CryPhysics. However, it is noted that actually playing this game is a bit slower than the demo implies.

GPU Demo, Island

All of our settings are set to in-game’s maximum “very high” including 4xAA and we force 16xAF in the control panels. Here is Crysis’ Island Demo benchmark, first at 2560×1600 resolution with our strongest three video cards:

Now we check 1920×1200 at the same settings.

Finally, on to 1680×1050 with our weaker cards, still using our HD 5870 as the standard to judge performance by.

We see the HD 5870 leading of course.  In the rest of the field, the new HD 5870 and HD 5850 are stronger than their GeForce counterparts.  We also see some very good scaling with our overclocked Radeons, even though we were able to get a strong overclock out of the HD 5850 and a mild overclock out of GTX 6870, the percentage of scaling is very good and generally better than with the Cypress HD 5870 which we have tested before.

All four of our Radeons are playable with Crysis with maxed details at 1680×1050 if you are willing to compromise with AA or lower some detail settings.

FarCry 2

Far Cry 2 uses the name of the original Far Cry but it is not connected to the first game as it brings you a new setting and a new story. Ubisoft created it based on their Dunia Engine. The game setting takes place in an unnamed African country, during an uprising between two rival warring factions. Your mission is to kill “The Jackal”; the Nietzsche-quoting mercenary that arms both sides of the conflict that you are dropped into.

The Far Cry 2 game world is loaded in the background and on the fly to create a completely seamless open world. The Dunia game engine provides good visuals that scale well. The Far Cry 2 design team actually went to Africa to give added realism to this game. One thing to especially note is Far Cry 2’s very realistic fire propagation by their engine that is a far cry from the scripted fire and explosions that we are used to seeing.

First we test Far Cry 2 benchmark at 2560×1600 with AI enabled and we use the Ranch Long benchmark with ultra settings plus 8xAA.

And now at 1920×1200 resolution

Here is 1680×1050 resolution:

We see a very strong performance by the GeForce video cards in Far Cry 2 with the HD 5870 trading blows with the overclocked GTX 460, depending on the resolution.  We also see overclocking play a part in improving framerates in every situation.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is an objective-driven, class-based first person shooter set in the Quake universe. It was developed by id Software and Splash Damage and published by Activision. Quake Wars pits the combined human armies of the Global Defense Force against the technologically superior Strogg, an alien race who has come to earth to use humans for spare parts and food. It allows you to play a part, probably best as an online multi-player experience, in the battles waged around the world in mankind’s desperate war to survive.

Quake Wars is an OpenGL game based on id’s Doom3 game engine with the addition of their MegaTexture technology. It also supports some of the latest 3D effects seen in today’s games, including soft particles, although it is somewhat dated and less demanding on video cards than many DX10 games. id’s MegaTexture technology is designed to provide very large maps without having to reuse the same textures over and over again. For our benchmark we chose the flyby, Salvage Demo. It is one of the most graphically demanding of all the flybys and it is very repeatable and reliable in its results. It is fairly close to what you will experience in-game. All of our settings are set to ‘maximum’ and we also apply 4xAA/16xAF in game.

First we test at 2560×1600 resolution with all settings fully maxed in-game plus 8xAA with our top 4 strongest cards.

Now we test at 1920×1200 where they all offer a playable experience.  There is no need to test at at 1680×1050.

All four card offer a similar excellent experience with the lineup following the card’s individual pricing almost exactly.  There is no need to overclock any of our video cards.  All of our tested video cards have no trouble handling this game fully maxed out.  Both AMD and Nvidia have succeeded in bringing a $400 video card’s performance into the $200 range in this Open GL game.  We eager await Rage to really test our video card’s OGL abilities.

F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R. – First Encounter Armed Assault – is a DX9c game by Monolith Productions that was originally released in October 2005 by Vivendi Universal Production. Later, there were two expansions with the latest, Perseus Mandate, released in 2007. Although the game engine is aging, it still has some of the most spectacular effects of any game. F.E.A.R. showcases a powerful particle system, complete with sparks and smoke for collisions as well as featuring bullet marks and other effects including “soft shadows”. This is highlighted by the built-in performance test, although it was never updated. This performance test will tell you how F.E.A.R. will run, but both of its expansions are progressively more demanding on your PC graphics and will run slower than the demo. We always run at least two sets of tests with all in-game features at ‘maximum’. F.E.A.R. uses the Jupiter Extended Technology engine from Touchdown Entertainment.

We test this game with the most demanding settings. Fully maxed details with 4xAA/16xAF; soft shadows ‘off’, as they do not play well with AA. Let’s start first at 2560×1600:

Now we test at 1920×1200.

The HD 5870 is strongest in this DX9 game followed by the HD 6870 overclocked and reference version. The  HD 6850 also offers a very playable experiences in this game and it even edges out the stock and overclocked GTX 460-1GB video card. Even so, there is not much difference in practically playing F.E.A.R. between the fastest ($400) and the slowest ($169) video cards as the minimums are already sufficiently high even at the highest resolutions.

Batman: Arkham AsylumBatman: Arkham Asylum is an action-adventure/stealth video game based on DC Comics’ Batman. Arkham Asylum is based directly on the long-running comic book’s Dark Knight character. The Joker devised an elaborate plot from inside Arkham Asylum that Batman is personally forced to put a stop to. The game’s primary characters are superbly voiced by the actors Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill and Arleen Sorkin who reprise their roles as Batman, the Joker and Harley Quinn.

The game is played as an over-the-shoulder, third-person perspective action-adventure game with a primary focus on Batman’s combat abilities, stealth, detective skills and complete with an arsenal of gadgets that can be used in both combat and as exploring in “detective mode”.The game uses a “Freeflow” combat system as well as the ability to use Batarangs and the Bat-Claw. The player also has access to progressively stronger counter attacks as well as a special attack that can quickly take down a single foe. Stealth tactics includes silent takedowns by sneaking up on foes including dropping and/or gliding from overhead perches.

Batman: Arkham Asylum uses a highly modified version of the Unreal Engine 3. It does not support AA natively but must be added in and supported by the game’s developer. Unfortunately we cannot compare Batman: Arkham Asylum using our GeForce exactly against the Radeon with PhysX on. In the game’s control panel, the settings are also different, depending if you play with a GeForce or a Radeon.

This time we did something different from our usual testing – we did not set MSAA at all so as to not disadvantage the Radeons as a direct comparison with the GeForce cards. The developer optimized MSAA for GeForce cards in game but you must set non-optimized AA in the Catalyst Control Center. Only the Game of the Year Edition of Batman: Arkham Asylum supports in-game AA settings for both Radeon and GeForce cards.  We begin testing at 2560×1600 with details maxed and with no MSAA applied, except to test 8xAA as brute-forced in Catalyst Control Center to see the performance hit.

Now at 1920×1200:

There is absolutely no problem playing this game fully maxed out with any of our videocard configurations – even with 8xAA forced in CCC at the very highest resolution. You do not need to spend $400 to have an excellent experience playing this game.  This time the stock HD 6850 manages to keep up with the overclocked GTX 460-1GB card.

Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (CoD4) is a first person shooter running on a custom engine. It has nice graphics but the engine is somewhat dated compared to others and it runs well on modern PCs. It is the first Call of Duty installment to take place in a modern setting instead of in World War II. It differs from the previous Call of Duty games by having a more film-like plot that uses intermixed story lines from two perspectives; that of a USMC sergeant and a British SAS sergeant. There is also a variety of short missions where players control other characters in flashback sequences to advance the story. Call of Duty 4’s move to modern warfare introduced a variety of modern conventional weapons and technologies including plastic explosives.

There are currently about 20 multiplayer maps in CoD4. It is very popular and there is a new expansion for it. CoD Modern Warfare 2 was also released with updated visuals but it is also not very demanding on graphics cards. For multiplayer, CoD4 includes five preset classes and introduces the Perks system. Perks are special abilities which allow users to further customize their character to suit their personal style. Our timedemo benchmark was created by ABT’s own Senior Editor and lead reviewer, BFG10K. It is very accurate and totally repeatable.

Here is CoD4, first at 2560×1600 resolution with all in-game settings completely maxed out plus

The HD 5870 and HD 6870 manage to keep their frame rates above 30 FPS whereas the HD 6850 and the GTX 460 are within a framerate of each other.  Now at 1920×1200:

This time the $400 HD 5870 takes the lead followed by the HD 6870 then the GTX 460-1GB and and finally the 768 MB GTX 460. We see results similar to Unreal Tournament 3 and Enemy Territories: Quake Wars. Popular multiplayer gamed are very playable even on midrange graphics cards at 1920×1200.

Aliens vs Predator

Aliens vs. Predator, known to fans as Aliens versus Predator 3 or AVP3 is a video game developed by Rebellion Developments, and published by Sega in February 2010. It is the sixth game of the Aliens versus Predator game series. There are three campaigns in the game, one for each race or faction (the Predators, the Aliens and the Colonial Marines), that form one main storyline although they differ in objectives depending on your choice of campaign.

Alien vs Predators DX11 benchmark is a stand alone bench that as the name says is only for DX11 cards. First we bench at 2560×1600 with maxed out settings plus 4xAA:

The Radeons are faster at the top resolution although none of them offer playable framerates. Now we test at 1920×1200:

Again, our settings are too much for our video cards and we would suggest lowering settings.  However, we see the HD 6870 and the HD 6850 meeting their targets almost exactly.  The HD 6850 manages to match the 1GB version of of GTX 460 although the strongly overclocked GeForce even pulls ahead of the mildly overclocked HD 6870.

Only the HD 5870 offers playable settings at 1680×1050 considering that the AvP benchmark is much more demanding than the actual gameplay.  The stock-clocked HD 6850 catches the GTX 460-1GB version and beats the slower GeForce. AMD again met their target.

Serious Sam Second Encounter HD (2010)

Serious Sam is the title of a series of first-person shooters created by the Croatian development team Croteam. It follows the adventures of its hero Sam “Serious” Stone and his fight against the forces of the extraterrestrial overlord Mental who seeks to destroy the human race. It’s gameplay is a throwback to early first-person shooters like Quake and Doom, with the twist of being set in wide-open environments with large groups of enemies attacking at any time, and there are many hidden areas and treasures to find and puzzles to solve. Serious Sam features cooperative gameplay and allows for split screen action supporting up to 4 players.

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter was remade as “HD” using Serious Engine 3. It was released in April, 2010 for PC. Besides updated visuals, new game modes including “Co-op Tournament” and “Survival” for single player, were introduced in this remake. Serious Sam 3 is currently in development by Croteam and is expected to debut at E3, 2011.

We use the basic 3 “ultra” presets for benching Serious Sam: The Second Encounter HD. There are possible further fine-tuning which will make the game even more demanding, but we chose the “ultra” presets with one extra setting allowing for 1920×1200 plus settings. We test first at 2560×1600 resolution:

Now we bench at 1920×1080 with the same ultra presets.

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter HD on the Serious 3 engine is quite demanding and yet all of our tested configurations play it satisfactorily at 1920×1200 using the game’s built-in “ultra” presets with the GTX 460 lagging in the minimums; we would want to overclock it at our chosen setings.  The $400 HD 5870 is the fastest but the newest AMD cards put in a good showing.

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Mafia II

Mafia II is a third-person action-adventure video game which is the sequel to Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven. It is developed by 2K Czech and is published by 2K Games and was released last month. Mafia II is set from 1943 to 1951 in Empire Bay which is a fictional city based mostly on San Francisco and New York City along with some influences from Chicago and also Detroit.

Mafia II is a gritty drama which chronicles the rise of World War II veteran Vito Scaletta who joins the Falcone Crime Family and becomes a ‘made’ man. There are 15 chapters in the game and over two hours of game engine generated cutscenes.

Mafia II makes extensive use of Nvidia’s PhysX whose full effects are seen smoothly only by playing on a PhysX-enabled GeForce and preferably with a second video card dedicated to it.   ABT has recently got a copy of Mafia II and you can expect a review of this game by at least two Senior Editors, including a performance review. For this article, we used the full game Mafia II‘s built-in benchmark with the highest settings for 2560×1600 and 1920×1200 – without PhysX – and this time we will reserve comment until after both benches.

Now at 1920×1200:

All of our video cards will give a satisfactory playing experience despite the benchmark’s suggestion that the framerates drop too low playing at 2560×1600.  In all cases, the HD 5870 is the fastest and the new HD 6870 follows, solidly beating even the highly overclocked GTX 460-1GB.  The HD 6850’s performance is in between the stock and overclocked GTX 460-1GB cards and the GTX 460-768MB brings up the rear.

Metro 2033

Metro 2033 is the “Crysis” of 2010. It is a very demanding game on any PC with the very latest DX11 visuals. Metro 2033 is an action-oriented video game with a combination of survival horror, and first-person shooter elements. The game is based on the novel “Metro 2033” by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. It was developed by 4A Games and released in March 2010. The game utilizes the multi-platform 4A Engine and there is some doubt if the game’s engine is related to the original XRay engine used in S.T.A.L.K.E.R..

The Metro 2033 story takes place mostly in post-apocalyptic Moscow’s metro system but occasionally the player has to go above ground on some missions and to search for valuables. Metro 2033‘s locations reflect the dark atmosphere of real metro tunnels but in a much more dangerous and lethal manner. Strange phenomena and noises are frequent, and mostly the player has to rely only on a flashlight to find their way around in otherwise total darkness. Even more deadly is the surface as it is severely irradiated and a gas mask must be worn at all times due to the toxic air.

THQ released an official benchmark for Metro 2033 which is available when Steam automatically updates the game and it includes a quality benchmark that provides minimum/maximum/average framerates, and you can adjust many graphics settings including PhysX, AA, DOF and tessellation, and the number of runs. Our presets are set to maximum with 1xAA and no PhysX and no DOF.:

Here is our first chart at 2560×1600:

Unplayable. Now we test 1920×1200.

Even at 1920×1200 you will want to lower detail settings to medium and/or turn off tessellation.  We note that in this game that turning on 4xAA affects performance very negatively.

Both new cards present a slideshow at the highest resolution with all cards chugging from frame-to-frame. All of our cards struggle with Metro 2033 with the aggressive settings that we used.  We again see the HD 68x0s meeting their target with the HD 6850 puting in a strong showing against the more expensive GTX 460-1GB card.  We would lower settings further if we played at 1920×1200 or 1680×1050; probably turning off tessellation also.  Although Metro 2033 is tessellation-heavy, the new Radeon 68×0’s improved tessellator cannot catch the performance of HD 5870.

X3: Terran Conflict

X3:Terran Conflict (X3:TC) is another beautiful stand-alone benchmark that runs multiple tests and will really strain a lot of video cards. X3:TC is a space trading and combat simulator from Egosoft and is the most recent of their X-series of computer games. X3:TC is a standalone expansion of X3: Reunion, based in the same universe and on the same engine. It complements the story of previous games in the X-Universe and especially continues the events after the end of X3: Reunion.

Compared to Reunion, Terran Conflict features a larger universe, more ships, and of course, new missions. The X-Universe is huge. The Terran faction was added with their own set of technology including powerful ships and stations. Many new weapons systems were developed for the expansion and it has generally received good reviews. It has a rather steep learning curve.

First we note the results at 2560×1600:

We have a similar playable experience with our four top cards.  The HD 6850 manages to equal the GTX 460-1GB card.  Now we test at 1920×1200; there is no need to look at 1680×1050.

Except for HD 5870, all of our cards run close together in a fairly tight grouping. However, all of our video cards perform well and all of them experience similar minimum framerates and a similar playing experience.  AMD’s new 68×0 cards have again met their targets in this DX9 game.

DiRT 2

Colin McRae: DiRT 2 is a racing game that was released in September 2009, and is the sequel to Colin McRae: Dirt. It includes many new race-events, including stadium events as your RV travels from one event to another in many real-world environments across four continents. Dirt 2 includes five different event types even allowing you to compete at new locations. It also includes a new multiplayer mode. DiRT 2 is powered by an updated version of the EGO engine which was featured in Race Driver: Grid. This updated EGO engine also features an updated physics engine.

We are using the DiRT 2 full retail game’s built-in benchmark at the highest “ultra” DX11 setting with 8xAA applied. First we test our top cards at 2560×1600:

Only the stock GTX 460-1GB card falls behind in the minimums and overclocking it fixes this issue.  GTX 460-768MB is a bit weak at these settings and we test it next at 1920×1200 resolution.

The HD 5870 (naturally) pulls ahead in a (surprisingly) fairly tight race. The HD 6870s lead the GeForce cards and the HD 6850’s performance sits between the stock and overclocked 1GB version of GTX 460, and the 768 MB version trails the pack while still providing a very playable experience at 1920×1200 at maxed-out settings and plus 8xAA.  Not bad for the $200 and sub-$200 price range, once the domain of $400 cards.

Just Cause 2

Just Cause 2 is a 2010 sandbox-style action video game by Swedish developer Avalanche Studios and Eidos Interactive and is the sequel to the 2006 video game, Just Cause. Just Cause 2 employs the Avalanche Engine 2.0 which an updated version of the engine used in the original and there are impressive visuals as it is made just for DX10. It is set on the fictional tropical island of Panau in Southeast Asia. Rico Rodriguez returns as the protagonist who aims to overthrow the evil dictator “Baby” Panay and also to confront his former boss, rogue agent Tom Sheldon. The game play is similar to that of its predecessor in that the player is free to roam the huge open world without a need to focus on the storyline.

The Just Cause 2 AI has been rewritten to use a planning system which enables the in-game enemies to do more and there is also more vertical game play as well as a manual aiming system that allows the player to target enemy NPC’s specific limbs. Just Cause 2 also includes an adaptive difficulty system which scales as the player progresses. There are also new weapons in Just Cause 2 which include launching laser-controlled rockets as well as several new vehicles including a Boeing 737. Just Cause 2 now includes dual-grappling hooks which give players the ability to tether unlimited objects to each other including the tethering of enemies to vehicles and to each other which works very well as one of your goals is to cause maximum chaos.

Here are the maximum settings available to a GeForce card; the bottom two, the Bokeh Filter and GPU water simulation, are unavailable to Radeons and they are left ‘off’ for all runs to give solid apples-to-apples comparisons for all of our tested video cards; we used the Dark Tower benchmark built into the retail game.

First the benches at 2560×1600:

The HD 6850 bheats up on the GTX 460-1GB although none of our tested cards offer really playable settings; we’d lower settings and AA.  Now let’s look at the performance at 1920×1200:

Both of Radeons deliver a nearly-playable experience at 1920×1200 with maxed out details and 8xAA.  Just dropping to 2xAA will make a performance difference that the GeForce cards cannot overcome without overclocking them.  AMD has again met their target.

Lost Planet

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition is a Capcom port of an Xbox 360 game. It takes place on the icy planet of E.D.N. III which is filled with monsters, pirates, big guns, and huge bosses. This frozen world highlights high dynamic range lighting (HDR) as the snow-white environment reflects blinding sunlight as DX10 particle systems toss snow and ice all around. The game looks great in both DirectX 9 and 10 and there isn’t really much of a difference between the two versions except perhaps shadows. Unfortunately, the DX10 version doesn’t look that much better when you’re actually playing the game and it still runs slower than the DX9 version.

We use the in-game performance test from the retail copy of Lost Planet and updated through Steam to the latest version for our runs. This run isn’t completely scripted as the creatures act a little differently each time you run it, requiring multiple runs. Lost Planet’s Snow and Cave demos are run continuously by the performance test and blend into each other.Here are our benchmark results with the more demanding benchmark, Snow. All settings are fully maxed out in-game including 8xAA/16xAF. Let’s start with 2560X160

The fastest GTX 460 chokes at these settings although the Radeons drop off too far in the minimums; we’d drop AA (or play in DX9c) at the highest resolution.  Let’s try 1920×1200.

All of the Radeons offer playability or near-playability at our stressful settings.  The GTX 460 does not and we would suggest playing it in DX9c or else lowering DX10 settings.

Lost Planet 2

Lost Planet 2 is the sequel to Lost Planet: Extreme Condition and is also made by Capcom.  The events take place ten years after the first game’ and on the same EDN III. The PC version was released on October 12, 2010 and it runs on the MT-Framework 2.0, an updated version of the engine used in several Capcom games. Campaign mode can have up to 4 players working together over the Internet.  Lost Planet 2 allows players to create and customize their own characters which will allow them to unlock more things after leveling up and downloading content.  We are using the stand alone benchmark in DX11 with maximum settings plus 4xMSAA.  We also have the full retail game with the identical benchmark that we shall use next time.

Just as in the original game, none of our cards can play Lost Planet 2 at 2560×1600 at the highest settings.  However, we do see the HD 6870 passing its competition, GTX 460 at the highest resolution.  Let’s lower the resolution to 1920×1200 and test again with all of our cards.  We will also see the impact of 8xAA over 4xAA.

In this more tessellation-heavy DX11 game, the HD 6870 catches the HD 5870 (finally)!  That is quite an accomplishment, however,  even the stock-clocked GTX 480-1GB version can beat any of the Radeons at 1920×1200.

This time the GTX 460-1GB is edged by the HD 5870.  The HD 6850 falls behind the GTX 460-768MB although the overclocked version beats it and gains on the GTX 460-1GB.

Grand Theft Auto IV

Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV) is a sandbox-style action-adventure video game released by Rockstar in late 2008. It is the sixth game in the Grand Theft Auto series. Two episodic expansion packs have since been released since then as late as April of this year. The game is set in a redesigned rendition of Liberty City, a fictional city based heavily on modern day New York City. It follows Niko Bellic, a war veteran from Eastern Europe. He comes to the United States in search of the American Dream and enters a world of organized crime, gangs and corruption. GTA IV is mostly composed of elements from driving games and third-person shooters which features free-roaming gameplay. It features an online multiplayer mode, the first of the GTA series to do so.

Here are the settings we used.  Only the GTX 460-786 MB version was unable to run at the chosen settings so we left it out of our evaluation.

First we test at 2560×1600 resolution

Now we test of 1920×1200.

All of our cards are grouped tightly at 1920×1200 and they all give a similar playable experience.  AMD has again met their target with HD 6870/HD 6850.

Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3)

Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3) is the fourth game in the Unreal Tournament series. UT3 is a first-person shooter and online multiplayer video game by Epic Games. Unreal Tournament 3 provides a good balance between image quality and performance, rendering complex scenes well even on lower-end PCs. Of course, on high-end graphics cards you can really turn up the detail. UT3 is primarily an online multiplayer title offering several game modes and it also includes an offline single-player game with a campaign.

For our tests, we used the very latest game patch for Unreal Tournament 3, released after its ‘Titan’ pack. The game doesn’t have a built-in benchmarking tool, so we used FRAPS and did a fly-by of a chosen level. Here we note that performance numbers reported are a bit higher than compared to in-game. The map we use is called “Containment” and it is one of the most demanding of the fly-bys. Our tests were run at resolutions of 2560 x 1600 and 1920 x 1200 with UT3’s in-game graphics options set to their maximum values. One drawback of the way the UT3 engine is designed is that there is no support for anti-aliasing built in so we forced 8xAA in each vendor’s control panel; 8xQ for Nvidia to match AMD Graphics’ 8xMSAA settings.

We record a demo in the game and a set number of frames are saved in a file for playback. When playing back the demo, the game engine then renders the frames as quickly as possible, which is why you will often see it playing it back more quickly than you would actually play the game. Here is Containment Demo, first at 2560×1600.  There are probably issues with the GeForce drivers and GTX 460 with 8xQ AA; it was a sideshow at 2560×1600 with an average of only 8 FPS.

Next we test at 1920 x1200.

There is absolutely no problem playing this game fully maxed out with any of our graphics configurations except for the GTX 460-768MB version at 1920×1200. We suspect driver issues with 8xQ as lower AA settings have no such issues.  The faster GTX 460-1GB had no issues and trades blows with the HD 6870.

Resident Evil 5

Resident Evil 5 is a survival horror third-person shooter developed and published by Capcom that has become the best selling single title in the series. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil series and it was released for Windows in September 2009. Resident Evil 5 revolves around two investigators pulled into a bio-terrorist threat in a fictional town in Africa.

Resident Evil 5 features online co-op play over the internet and also takes advantage of NVIDIA’s new GeForce 3D Vision technology. The PC version comes with exclusive content the consoles do not have. The developer’s emphasis is in optimizing high frame rates but they have implemented HDR, tone mapping, depth of field and motion blur into the game. Re5’s custom game engine, ‘MT Framework’, already supports DX10 to benefit from less memory usage and faster loading. Resident Evil 5 gives you choice as to DX10 or Dx 9 and we naturally ran the DX10 pathway.

There are two benchmarks built-into Resident Evil 5. We chose the variable benchmark as it is best suited for testing video cards. Here it is at 2560×1600 resolution with maxed out in-game setting plus 8xAA.

Next we test with the same maxed out settings at 1920×1200.

Finally we test at 1680×1050.

We have no problem playing this game with any of our video cards at the settings that we used.  The playability experience is similar although the Radeons are the fastest in this benchmark.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Call of Pripyat

S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Call of Pripyat became a new DX11 benchmark for us after GSC Game World released a another story expansion to the original Shadows of Chernobyl. It is the third game in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. All of these games have non-linear storylines which feature role-playing game elements. In both games, the player assumes the identity of a S.T.A.L.K.E.R.; an illegal artifact scavenger in “The Zone” which encompasses about 30 square kilometers. It is the location of an alternate reality story surrounding the Chernobyl Power Plant after another (fictitious) explosion.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Call of Pripyat features “a living breathing world” with highly developed NPC creature AI. Call of Pripyat utilizes the XRAY 1.6 Engine, allowing advanced modern graphical features through the use of DirectX 11 to be fully intregrated. Call of Pripyat is also compatible with DirectX 8, 9, 10 and 10.1. It uses the X-ray 1.6 Engine one outstanding feature being the inclusion of real-time GPU tesselation– a Shader model 3.0 & 4.0 graphics engine featuring HDR, parallax and normal mapping, soft shadows, motion blur, weather effects and day-to-night cycles.

As with other engines using deferred shading, the original DX9c X-ray Engine does not support anti-aliasing with dynamic lighting enabled, although the DX10 and DX 11 versions do. We are using the stand-alone “official” benchmark by Clear Sky’s creators. Call of Pripyat is top-notch and worthy to be part of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R’s universe with even more awesome DX11 effects which help to create and enhance their game’s already incredible atmosphere. As with Clear Sky before it, DX10 and now DX11 comes with steep hardware requirements and this new game still really needs multi-GPU to run at its maximum settings. We picked the most stressful test out of the four, “Sun shafts”. It brings the heaviest penalty due to its extreme use of shaders to create DX10/DX10.1 and DX11 effects. We ran this benchmark fully maxed out in DX11.0 with “ultra” settings plus 4xAA, including applying edge-detect MSAA which chokes performance even further.

Here we present our maxed out DX11 settings for S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Call of Pripyat DX11 benchmark:

Now on to the benchmarks at 2560×1600:

Now at 1920×1200 where the overclocked GTX 460-1GB puts in a particularly good showing:

Finally we test at 1680×1050.

The HD 5870 makes a clean sweep of these benches although we would still lower settings even at 1680×1050 to have a completely smooth playing experience.  The surprise is the strong showing of the GTX 460 when it is highly overclocked.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. is an air combat video game developed by Ubisoft Romania and published by Ubisoft for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It was released in United States on March 6, 2009. You have the opportunity to fly 54 aircraft over real world locations and cities in somewhat realistic environments that are created with satellite data. This game is a more of a take on flying than a real simulation and it has received mixed reviews.The game story takes place during the time of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. H.A.W.X. is set in the year 2014 where private military companies have replaced government-run military in many countries. The player is placed into the cockpit as an elite ex-military pilot who is recruited by one of these corporations to work for them as a mercenary. You later return to the US Air Force with a team as you try to prevent a full scale terrorist attack on the United States which was started by your former employer.

H.A.W.X. runs on DX10.1 faster and with more detail than on the DX10 pathway. All of our video cards can take advantage of DX10.1. Let’s check it out H.A.W.X. with our top cards at 2560×1600 with fully maxed out in-game settings and 8xAA:

The HD 5870 flys away from the pack.  The HD 6870 and it’s mildly overclocked version also clearly beats the reference and highly overclocked GTX 460. Here are our results at 1920×1200 resolution:

Although all of our four cards give a similar playing experience in this game with maxed out settings and 8xAA, the HD 5870 remains top gun while the HD 6870 and the HD 6850 edge out their GeForce counterparts.

BattleForge

BattleForge is an online PC game developed by EA Phenomic and published by Electronic Arts. The full game was released in March 2009. BattleForge is a card-based RTS that revolves around acquiring and winning by means of micro-transactions for buying new cards. By May, 2009, BattleForge became a Play 4 Free game with fewer cards than the retail version. BattleForge supports Directx 11 with full support for hardware tesselation. It is very impressive visually and quite demanding on any system.

First we test with our top cards at 2560×1600 using the BattleForge built-in benchmark with all of its settings completely maxed out and with 4xAA.

Let’s go on to 1920×1200.

Finally we test at 1680×1050.

The HD 5870 is again fastest in BattleForge followed by the the HD 68×0 over their GeForce counterparts with only the highly overclocked GTX 460 making a particularly strong showing..

Heaven 2.1 Unigine

Finally we come to our last benchmark, Heaven 2, on the Unigine engine. We are now using Heaven 2.1 although it only seems to add stereoscopic support for 3D over the 2.0 version.. It uses DX11 and fairly heavy tessellation which will strain any graphics card. At least two DX11 games based on Unigine are expected to be released this year. Here are the settings we used for this benchmark.

As you can see, there is a setting that we used for “extreme tessellation”. We will tell you right now that this test chokes even GTX 480 at the highest setting. However, the visuals are also extraordinary. Here is our benchmark run at 2560×1600

The extreme tessellation and 4xAA slow down the GTX 460 which lead the Radeons. Now at 1920×1200:

For the second time, we see the HD 6870 catch or beat the HD 5870 in a tessellation-heavy benchmark.  However, the GTX 460-1GB pulls ahead of the Radeons.  Let’s back the resolution further down to 1880×1050.

This is a synthetic benchmark and we will withhold judgment until we play PC games using the Unigine engine. However, the highly overclocked GTX 460-1 GB again scores highest in this tessellation-heavy benchmark.

Overclocking

When it first launched, the Cypress HD 58×0 series turned out to be highly overclockable and it only improved as the process got better.  However, the scaling with core speed is less than with Fermi-based video cards.  From looking at our benchmarks, we see that Barts has improved the performance scaling over Cypress.

We were not content to play with our HD 68×0 cards at AMD’sv reference settings even though they have great performance at stock so as to meet their targets, the GTX 460s.  We also note that the reference cooler is up to the job of keeping the Barts GPU cool while running quietly; the HD 6870 being a little nosier than the HD 6850 but very similar to the GeForce cards – very quiet.  However, this editor has his own set of criteria for overclocking the Barts Radeons further.

• Voltage is kept stock. Not many people are willing to boost voltage on a five-hundred dollar video card.
• It must be 100% stable and continue to scale with each increase of any clock.
• The fan must not go over its stock profile. Most users leave the fan on automatic.

Here are our stock and overclocked Radeon clocks:

———- Reference >> HD 6850 >> new OC:

• Graphics Clock – 775 MHz >> 900 MHz
• Memory Clock – 1000 MHz >> 1100 MHz

———- Reference >> HD 6870 >> new OC:

• Graphics Clock – 950 MHz >> 975 MHz
• Memory Clock – 1050 MHz >> 1075 MHz

Our HD 6850 overclocked like a champion – from 775/1000 MHz to 900/1100 Mhz.  Unfortunately the overclock on our HD 6870 can best be described as “mild” – from 900/1050 MHz to 950/1075 MHz.  Although the HD 6870’s overclock is perceived as disappointing, it is a blessing in disguise as it gave us an idea of the scaling while still keeping your own overclocking expectations realistic.  We only used CCC to set our Radeon overclocks and we did not increase the core voltage nor change the fan profile.  In all cases, the percentage of overclock of the core brought us some solid performance increases,

We are quite certain that we could do better with our HD 68×0 overclocks as we had very little time to fine tune it.  We also did not increase the voltage nor alter the cooling fan’s profile.

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Power Usage

This section is still unfinished, but we will tell you that the cards meet their specifications of low-power usage and show improvements over the HD 58×0 series.  ALL of our cards run very cool and quiet and it is hard to hear any of them while playing PC games or using it for other tasks.

CrossFire-X

We were successful in pairing our HD 6870 with our HD 6850 in CrossFire-X (!)  A single HD 6870 scores 17287 in Vantage; paired with HD 6870, it scores 23749. HD 6870 averages 70.83 FPS in Far Cry 2 (2560×1600/ultra/8xAA) and 103.48 FPS when paired with HD 6850 in CrossFire-X. This is good scaling for HD 68×0 and we will explore CrossFire and CrossFire-X in a subsequent review.

Price to Performance

It is pretty clear from our 22 games and two synthetic tests that the AMD HD 6870 and HD 6850 are potent GPUs to put against AMD’s own HD 5870 as well as its direct competition, the GTX 460.  We also expect that some of its success will depend on market pricing and what AMD does with their HD 58×0 pricing. But if you want close to HD 5870/HD 5850 performance, these two new Barts HD 68×0 video cards gives you your performance cake and allows you to eat it also without paying HD 5870/5850 prices.

Clearly Nvidia is confident in its own mature product with GTX 470 and GTX 460 and they are apparently going to counter AMD for now with discounted pricing and it is also clear that they are leaving their partners to use their own judgment. Will this strategy work? How will AMD and Nvidia further respond?  Well for now, it is important that you are up to date on the latest GeForce GTX 400 series pricing versus the AMD Radeon.

Nvidia informed us of new suggested etail pricing (SEP) for one of their most popular GPUs, the GeForce GTX 460 1GB. The new SEP for the GTX 460 1GB is $199.99. As always, the SEP is just a suggestion and you’ll likely find retail boards from Nvidia’s partners at multiple price points. We expect many standard boards to sell in the $180s-$190s, and overclocked boards to sell for $209+ (EVGA’s highly overclocked GTX 460’s SEP is $240 to match the HD 6870’s).  It looks something like this chart:

• HD 6850 1GB – $180
• GTX 460 1GB – $200
• HD 6870 1GB – $240
• GTX 470 1.2MB – $260
• HD 5850 1GB – $280 (market)
• HD 5870 1GB – $350 (market)

AMD is currently positioning the $179.99 Radeon 6850 against the GeForce GTX 460 768MB, which currently has a SEP of $169.99. However, GTX 460 768MB boards can be found for as low as $159.99 online. As a result of Nvidia’s repositioning, it looks like the stock GeForce GTX 460 1GB will ultimately be the Radeon 6850’s closest competitor.  Priced at $240, the HD 6870 will be competing with GTX 460 1GB OC highly overclocked boards like the EVGA GTX 460 that we used as our overclocked example. And for a few dollars more, users may also consider the GeForce GTX 470 or HD 5850.  We also expect pricing on the HD 5870 to drop as we prepare for AMD’s “Cayman” and the 6900 series to take on the GTX 480 and GTX 470.  The next six months are going to be very exciting as the graphics wars heat up and the consumer always benefits from competition.

Conclusion

This has been quite an enjoyable – if physically exhausting –  7 days, hand’s on experience for us in comparing our three GTX 460s versus our two HD 68x0s and the HD 5870. We used all “fresh” testing with the very latest drivers for all of these video cards and we wish that we had more than the very few days that we were allowed to benchmark the new Radeons under NDA to give you our first impressions. Fortunately, we have been gaming for months with our HD 5870, so that we can provide you with a reliable comparison. During that same week, we also had to set up and benchmark three differently clocked and vRAM configured GTX 460s. However, it was certainly worth it and we feel priviliged to bring you our very first benchmarks and performance testing of AMD’s new HD 6870 and HD 6850.

We like the new Barts Radeons a lot and we plan to follow up with this editor’s special areas of interest – multi-GPU CrossFire-X scaling and multi-display’s Eyefinity versus (2D) Surround.  So, expect an ongoing series which will include evaluating SLI versus CrossFire. We also expect GF108 from Nvidia soon to take on HD 5500/5400 series.  Who knows how else Nvidia plans to respond besides pricing?  They do not like to be second place in any category and they have a history of bringing out “+” models to beat the competition.  By Nvidia’s response, it is very clear that they are taking the launch of the new Radeons very seriously.

In the meantime, feel free to comment below, ask questions or have a detailed discussion in our ABT forum. If you have any requests on what you would like for us to focus on for further testing or for any other information, please join our ABT forum or leave a comment.

AMD RADEON HD 6870 and HD 6850

Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• HD 6870 is generally faster than its competition, GTX 460-1GB and offers HD 5850 performance levels for much less money. In the same manner, the HD 6850 beats the GTX 460-768 MB version and competes with the 1GB version in many cases.
• There is further room for overclocking; in our case, a lot with the HD 6850.  Barts scaling with overclocking is improved over Cypress.
• New architecture brings support for GPU computing and a level of performance way beyond the last generation.
• Second generation DX11 and improved support for tessellation and now 3D gaming.
• Eyefinity is improved with chaining of displays now possible.
• Eyefinity only requires one video card – unlike Nvidia’s competing solution, Surround, which requires a SLI motherboard and two matching videocards
• The Barts architecture is more efficient than Cypress so there is less power used for even better performance.
• New enhancements including a new AA mode, improved AF, and the ability to turn off optimizations
• 3D gaming and 3D video playback are now supported by HD 68×0.

Cons:

• The HD 6870/6850 naming is confusing and implies that it might be faster than the HD 5870/5850 video cards.

That’s it. We now wait to see how this plays out in the markets.  We are pleased to offer both of the new Radeons our Editor’s Choice and Great Value awards.  AMD has succeeded in bring a great value to the $200 price-range!

Look for these cards at an etailer this week with good supply.

In this editor’s experience, either the HD 6870 and HD 6850 is a great choice if you game at 1920×1200 or below.  AMD has brought the HD 5850’s performance to a new much lower price point. The competition is hot as the prices on the GTX 470 and the GTX 460 have softened and they offer their own set of great features including PhysX and Nvidia’s own 3D Vision. Stay tuned, there is a lot coming from us at ABT.

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