AMD Radeon 6850 Performance Test

Conclusion

The 6850 is a solid performance upgrade over the 5770 and is a lot faster overall. It’s also a very quiet card without excessive length or power requirements. While it’s generally not a match for the GTX470, it does put on a great show in certain titles and really makes the nVidia card sweat.

Unfortunately driver issues prevent optimal performance in rare situations, to the point that the card is slower than the 5770 in two instances. Also the removal of SSAA in OpenGL is a major blow given the whole point of such a feature is to crank the image quality in older titles.

But anyway, if you’re looking for a performance upgrade for a 5770 (or slower) from a silent mid-range card and you want to stay with the red team, the 6850 easily gets my recommendation.

I have more articles about the 6850 coming soon, so stick around.

Pros

• Much faster than a 5770 across the board.
• Competitive with a GTX470 in some cases.
• Very fast OpenGL performance.
• Cooler is exceptionally quiet.
• Very reasonable physical size and TDP for its performance level.
• Driver control panel includes overclocking and monitoring tools.

Cons

• SSAA doesn’t function in OpenGL or in DX10/DX11.
• Questionable AF quality with visible shimmering in some cases.
• Rare titles are not much faster than the 5770, or are actually slower.

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