AMD Radeon 6850 Performance Test

Introduction

This article will kick off a series of articles devoted to the Radeon 6850, starting with an examination of its performance. It will be tested against a Radeon 5770 and a GTX470. While the GTX470 is not in the same performance or price category, it is the slowest nVidia card I have in my possession.

Barts (6800 series) represents a refined version of the Cypress (5800) architecture, and it replaces that series by introducing a new performance level into AMD’s mid-range. It also competes with nVidia’s GTX460/GTX470, and is the first Radeon series to drop the ATi moniker.

Aside from a tweaked design, Barts is largely unchanged from Juniper/Cypress. Improvements to anisotropic filtering and tessellation have been made, but double precision support is missing like in the 5700 series and lower. This feature is not needed for games in any way, so a leaner transistor budget can be achieved as a result. I personally think “trimming the fat” like this is a good approach to gaming oriented hardware.

Hardware

• Intel Core i7 870 (3.2 GHz, turbo on, HT off).
• 4 GB DDR3-1333 RAM (2×2 GB, dual-channel).
• Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3 (Intel P55 chipset, F6 BIOS).
• nVidia GeForce GTX470 (1.28 GB, reference clocks).
• AMD Radeon 5770 (1 GB) & 6850 (1 GB), reference clocks.
• Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic.
• 30” HP LP3065.

Software

• Windows 7 (64 bit).
• nVidia driver 260.99, high quality filtering, all optimizations off, LOD clamp enabled.
• AMD Catalyst 10.12, high quality filtering, surface optimization disabled (setting only available on 6850).
• DirectX June 2010.
• All games patched to their latest versions.

Settings

• 16xAF forced in the driver, vsync forced off in the driver.
• AA forced either through the driver or enabled in-game, whichever works better.
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
• All results show an average framerate.