Introducing AMD’s “Turks” – HD 6670 and HD 6570
Today AMD is introducing the HD 6670 and the HD 6570, their mainstream video cards. These video cards are budget solutions as the HD 6670 etails for $99 and the 512MB version of the HD 6570 is expected to sell at $79. They come into some very stiff competition from Nvidia’s GTS 450 which sells for around $80 to $100 for the stock and overclocked versions. Even AMD’s own HD 5770 is known to sell for close to $100 after rebate. We are here to help you to determine what these new video cards bring as we especially focus on gaming performance.
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 originally 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. In April of last 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. It appears that AMD actually believed that Fermi was unfixable.
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 then DX11 90% marketshare. To combat the GTX 460, AMD released their HD 6000 series codenamed “Barts” with HD 6870 and HD 6850 this past October. Since these AMD and Nvidia GPUs are relatively complex and expensive to make, it stands to reason that lower-cost similarly-performing GPUs would be introduced to improve their margins and to improve on the performance of the older series.
AMD designed the HD 6970/6950 (“Cayman”) to combat Nvidia’s brand-new reworked GF110 which debuted since the HD 68×0 launch as thermally tamed and quiet-running GTX 580 and GTX 570 video cards which significantly surpass the HD 58×0 series’ performance. And of course Nvidia has upped the GTX 460 ante by releasing their GTX 560 TI a couple of months ago. Finally, just over two weeks ago, Nvidia aimed for AMD’s bread and butter market, the HD 5770 with their $150 “soft priced” GTX 550 Ti.
Exactly two weeks ago, we saw another ‘Barts’, the HD 6790, which is AMD’s cut-down GPU basically replacing their HD 5830; at least as a “spiritual successor” as it fills the same hole in AMD’s lineup between the HD 5770 and the HD 6850. This card was designed to completely crush the GTX 550 Ti’s performance. It succeeded more-or-less performance-wise against the GTX 550 Ti, but failed to convince us pricewise when compared to the similarly priced and faster GTX 460 or even AMD’s own faster HD 6850.
Of course, AMD points out the advantages of their Eyefinity which now allows more displays to be driven off of a single card – up to six displays now with a hub adapter – rather than with Nvidia’s competing Surround solutions which require two similar video cards running in SLI to power 3 displays.
A rose by any other name …
Today, AMD Graphics is proud to introduce two new “mainstream” cards, the HD 6670 and the HD 6570, still on the same 40 nm process as the 5000 series. With the release of the HD 6670, evidently AMD wants to tackle light 1920×1080 gaming with a $99 video card. These cards by virtue of their low-power characteristics would make excellent home theater PC (HTPC) video cards.
The HD 6670
This 6570 appears more suited for light 1680×1050 gaming.
The HD 6570
Below is a chart of AMD’s video card strategy. And now the new HD 6670/6570 (“Turks”) fits below the HD 5700 series and replaces the HD 5670/5570 respectively:
“Turks”
Until recently, we only saw changes to the upper midrange and at the high end. AMD continued the HD 5700 series until now; unchanged, as they evidently felt unchallenged by Nvidia’s GTS 450 which we reviewed here against HD 5750. In the above chart, 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” as HD 6970 and HD 6950 which is using AMD’s fastest single GPU to succeed to surpass the Cypress HD 5870. And we see Barts represented by the HD 6850/6870 and recently joined by the severely cut down HD 6790 which we reviewed two weeks ago here.
Here is the updated product strategy since AMD responded to the newly released GTX 550 Ti which is faster than the HD 5770 and which we reviewed a few weeks ago here. AMD’s partners have already renamed the OEM HD 5750/5770 into HD 6750/6770, so the “6790” choice of a name is logical as it positions the new card as shown below. Logically the new HD 6670 and 6570 – codenamed Turks – would sit below the HD 5750 performance wise and replace the aging “Redwood” HD 5670 and 5570 cards.
“Turks” – to sit below the HD 5750
Now we have “Turks” GPU-powered video cards which are set below the HD 5750 – set to replace the aging HD 5570 and 5670 video cards. These new GPUs are designed for the mainstream – for end users who want low power video cards and light DX11 1080 gaming – including Eyefinity – and a solid upgrade over Sandy Bridge DX10 integrated graphics.
What’s new in HD 6670/6570?
Since “seeing is believing” is still AMD’s theme for the 6000 series launch and it is all about the 3 “eyes”, we shall briefly cover them here:
- Eyedefinition
- Eyefinity
- Eyespeed
Under Eyedefinition, we see a further subdivision with more efficient tesselation and we also see mention of enhanced architecture for efficiently using GPU compute and for improvement in gaming performance. We also note improvements in Anisotropic Filtering (AF) and new Anti-Aliasing modes – morphological AA and EQAA.
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 quality video processing and playback; and of course, UVD 3 accelerated decoding for 3D BluRay playback.
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.
Anisotropic Filtering (AF)
With the HD 5000 series, AMD brought genuine angle-independent filtering to gaming by putting an end to angle-dependent deficiencies. The AMD Radeon HD 6000 series continues to support fully angle invariant anisotropic filtering, and incorporates further improvements in LOD precision relative to the ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series. These image quality benefits come with no additional performance cost and remain enabled at all Texture Filtering Quality settings.
Architectural improvements
Like Redwood and Cypress, all Turks, Barts, Cayman and Antilles GPUs are produced with the 40 nm process. AMD’s reference HD 6670 has 8 ROPs and 480 Stream Processors with its core operating at 800 MHz using 1GB of GDDR5 at 4.0GHz (800/1000 MHz) on a 128-bit bus. There are only 24 Texture units which means it was severely cut down from the Barts GPU so as not to compete with it performance-wise.
The HD 6670’s maximum load board power is 66 watts and its idle is 12 watts and it uses only the PCIe slot to provide power to the card. Here is the specification chart for the HD 6670.
AMD’s reference HD 6570 also has 8 ROPs and 480 Stream Processors but with its core operating at 650 MHz and with 512MB of DDR3 (at 900MHz) or 1GB of GDDR5 (at 900MHz to 1000MHz) on a 128-bit bus. There are also only 24 Texture units. The HD 6670’s maximum load board power is 44W (60W with DDR5) and its idle is 11 or 12 watts depending on if it uses DDR3 or DDR5. It also uses only the PCIe slot to provide power to the card. Here is the specification chart for the HD 6670.
We put all of our Radeon cards through their paces this week with the very latest latest preview drivers 11.4beta. This driver brought some good performance increases over the 11-2 WHQL drivers. We used the release driver for the GTX 550 Ti (267.59) and the latest WHQL 266.58 for the other Nvidia video cards except for the GT 430 and GTS 450 which used the new 270.71 preview drivers from Nvidia which brought some decent increases for DX11 games..
Is AMD’s HD 6570/6670 worth the same price as the GTS 450?
We naturally want to know if the new AMD HD 6570/6670 card is worth the same approximately $80 to $100 of the stock and overclocked GTS 450 now regularly in the same price range. We also note that you can get a HD 5770 for about $100 after a small mail in rebate. We will do the testing and then you can answer these questions for yourself together with us in our conclusion.
Overclocking & CrossFire-X
The overclock on our HD 6670 can best be described as decent – from 800/1000 MHz to 900/1150MHz. Unfortunately, we only used Catalyst Control Center to set our Radeon overclocks and we really don’t know what our maximum overclock could be as we pushed the sliders all the way to the right – CCC’s maximum – and benched with complete stability.
The overclock on the HD 6570 was held back by the Catalyst Control Center to only +25MHz on the core – so we didn’t bother to test it. We only ran Vantage scores which suggested a small performance gain.
Neither of these cards are set up to use the CrossFire Interconnect Bridge since they can be paired together in CrossFire-X without it. In fact, we were able to pair our HD 6670 with our HD 6570 for a substantial performance increase in gaming.
We used our Intel Core i7-920 at 3.8 GHz for this evaluation with turbo on (one core will hit 3.99GHz) so there was zero chance of any CPU bottlenecking. Read on to see our test bed and the games we used.
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great review mark! Huge piles of data, thats what i love about the abt. I totally agree with your conclusion which is spot on. Given the gts450 and hd5770 may not be around for much longer these cards should be a great option in the future but for now there are some really nice price/performance options in the same bracket and they just dont shine through them. In time they may fall in place when some of these killer deals from the last generation slowly slip out of the picture.