New rumor about ATI Southern Islands

[tajoh111]

Yes and no. If the 6870 is a slightly faster 5850 with no improvements in power efficiency and higher price then it's a really stupid move. But I don't think the guys over at AMD are that dumb. But I agree, what AMD "needs" is a GTX460-killer which they already have really - just price the 5850 a bit more aggressive and there you have it.

Also I think the X7XX-cards have a very good reputation as being cheap, effective and with good performance. This is what Barts seems to be aiming at too so it would make sense to name it that way.

I think this is entirely about AMD rebranding their line to make more money.

Midrange cards being up priced one more tier and they are changing the 6770 to the 6870 series to justify what may be a 100 dollar price increase. I can see the 6870 being priced at $259-299 and people thinking its a good deal because the naming indicates better performance than the last generation but at the same time the pricing is lower and they think they are getting a better value. This allows cayman pro and xt to be priced at 399 and 499 respectively.

This allows AMD to increase its margins and will help them make big money for once. I can imagine AMD felt they price their last series too low and hence the card selling more than MSRP, so they want to raise the price of their whole lineup.

[Vardant]

On OBR's blog :

A little better translation.

No manufacturer (I asked three of them) has Radeons HD 6800 in their roadmap, they are not going to be available until November (probably not enough cards has been made for the launch), actual launch has been probably delayed until early November (reviews in October)
- Two cards will be launched simultaneously - Radeon HD 68x0
- No cards with the HD 6700 moniker exist
- Performance matches their name, no need to worry, they are the performance successors of HD 5850/70
- Radeons HD 5000 will still be sold, they're going to cover the rest of the portfolio until the end of the year, what's probably going to change are their names and prices
- Many things have changed in the architecture, 3D features, new capabilities when it comes to video coding and handling the output (picture) not sure what the last part is about
- Some slides, that we've seen pop-up on the internet, even though photoshopped, show the whole picture, but you need to combine them and I'm not revealing which and what exactly

PS. I'm gonna show you blurred picture of the card tomorrow (it's from another presentation, which I've just got)

[SKYMTL]

early drivers also, expect a 20% increase over time.
then the naming scheme as far we know fits and works.

Please don't talk about this again.

Single card performance increases are VERY RARE in ATI's drivers. Their performance additions usually concentrate upon dual card / GPU setups.

People always expect magic to happen with driver revisions but for existing games, that almost never happens.

[Oliverda]

Please don't talk about this again.

Single card performance increases are VERY RARE in ATI's drivers. Their performance additions usually concentrate upon dual card / GPU setups.

People always expect magic to happen with driver revisions but for existing games, that almost never happens.

These reviews show something different.

[Calmatory]

Single card performance increases are VERY RARE in Nvidia's drivers..

Fixed the bias. We're even now.

[flopper]

Please don't talk about this again.

Single card performance increases are VERY RARE in ATI's drivers. Their performance additions usually concentrate upon dual card / GPU setups.

People always expect magic to happen with driver revisions but for existing games, that almost never happens.

I guess 50% increase in avp min fps is a coincident then?
Pure luck?
so we see a zero to 50% depending on game from early drivers to mature drivers.

I think you should shut up and stop telling people what to do on forums.

[Zloyd]

I can see the 6870 being priced at $259-299 and people thinking its a good deal because the naming indicates better performance than the last generation but at the same time the pricing is lower and they think they are getting a better value.

Great logic thats probably the best explanation to the naming scheme

[Tim]

These reviews show something different.

Actually that confirms what he said. If you go to high quality AA+AF there is no difference, sometimes even worse performance.

Anyway, AMD's naming scheme just gets more and more confusing.

[Oliverda]

Actually that confirms what he said. If you go to high quality AA+AF there is no difference, sometimes even worse performance.

Anyway, AMD's naming scheme just gets more and more confusing.

link

really?

[Shadov]

Please don't talk about this again.

Single card performance increases are VERY RARE in ATI's drivers. Their performance additions usually concentrate upon dual card / GPU setups.

People always expect magic to happen with driver revisions but for existing games, that almost never happens.

Arent you a bit biased towards ATI with that statement?

I have seen many reviews and AMD official materials which prove otherwise.

[w0mbat]

psssst - dont tell anyone! this one is real!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111111

[marten_larsson]

psssst - dont tell anyone! this one is real!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111111

I call fake! The green background is missing inside the letters. Nice try

[jazkat]

Arent you a bit biased towards ATI with that statement?

I have seen many reviews and AMD official materials which prove otherwise.

thats cos he on nvidia payroll i think jen slips him a few $$$$

[LordEC911]

pressevent is like 14 oct or so, so that with availibility is 2 weeks away, and first likely is a limited number of cards with a lot more in November.
havent seen any offical info otherwise.
if they had postponed anything I bet we see a release from amd.

http://semiaccurate.com/forums/showp...&postcount=621

Last official word I heard was the press event is still on for Oct 12 and with a hard launch on the 18th. Barts has had a little more than 2 months of mass production to get more than enough availability, especially since they pulled the launch UP from the 25th.

Cayman is still expected to launch in mid-late Nov.

[NH|Delph1]

Update for you:

NordicHardware

After weeks of speculations and false rumors we at NordicHardware have managed to dig up the most important details on AMD's new graphics card series, Radeon HD 6800. Targeting the mid-range segment AMD will launch Radeon HD 6850 and HD 6870 on October 18th.

Back in August we could confirm that AMD would stir things up by naming the mid-range series Radeon HD 6800. The GPU "Barts" is the successor to Juniper GPU of the Radeon HD 5700 series, but it is being moved up a notch. The list of specifications that was leaked at several sites last week said that Barts would launch as Radeon HD 6700, which made us wonder about the authenticity of the document. We have had it confirmed that our previous information on Barts and Radeon HD 6800 were correct, which we can now back up with detailed specifications and launch dates.

AMD Radeon HD 6850 (Barts Pro) and HD 6870 (Barts XT) will launch on October 18th (19th in some countries) and the new Northern Islands architecture is tuned and optimized for better performance per watt. We should not expect any revolutionary improvements over current models, but more on that soon.

<table>

Barts will bring at most 960 stream processors, which should be proof enough that this is a mid-range circuit, and not to play with the big boys. Little brother Radeon HD 6850 will settle for 800 stream processors and lower clock frequency, but AMD has also revised the texture units and efficiency of the stream processors, which makes the numbers a bit misleading when compared directly to previous generations.

Radeon HD 6870 will, according to reliable sources, perform better than today's Radeon HD 5850. Not to bad for a card that is intended to replace Radeon HD 5770, but at the same time makes the naming scheme a bit confusing.

Little brother Radeon HD 6850 will in turn be a bit slower than Radeon HD 5830, but consume a lot less power. This isn't all bad, but it will be confusing for buyers as the new mid-range model should outperform the lower ranked cards of the previous generation.

As we mentioned above, AMD has focused on performance/per watt with the new architecture. With the same 40nm technology it has refurnished and tweaked the Evergreen architecture and managed to find a lot of extra performance. The power consumption of Radeon HD 6850 will be well below 150 watt, around 120 watt according to our sources. While Radeon HD 6870 will be sucking well above 150 watt, which puts it on par with Radeon HD 5850, a card it should outperform with margin to spare.

The biggest reason AMD starts off the new family with Barts is the market focus. Radeon HD 6850 and HD 6870 has been trained to hunt down and kill NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460, the graphics card NVIDIA is building its volume sales upon. AMD has no strong competitor for GTX 460 today, but it hopes to change this with the Radeon HD 6800 series.

GeForce GTX 460 is also the reason for the confusing naming scheme. The GeForce GTX 400 series was built upon NVIDIA's GF100 GPU, but when NVIDIA launched GTX 460 with the stripped down GF104 GPU and still put it part of the GTX 400 series AMD saw no other solution but to follow and move up its mid-range cards in the hierarchy. On a positive note the coming Caymen series, to replace Radeon HD 5800 in the performance segment, will also move up the ladder to avoid any confusion within the own ranks.

<table>

AMD Radeon HD 6870 will according to sources to NordicHardware be a pure reference product that will be sold ready-to-ship from AMD to partners. In other words, packaging and stickers on the reference cooler will be the only difference at launch.

AMD Radeon HD 6850 on the other hand will be available in tailored suits from the major partners, which will hopefully result in some unorthodox solutions and cool third-party designs.

We don't have any concrete pricing to offer just yet, but considering AMD is countering GeForce GTX 460 they should appear in the $150-250 segment.

Tables and pictures in the source.

Enjoy.

//Andreas

[Manicdan]

how can perf per watt be better if its slightly better than a 5850, while consuming more power than a 5850?

[RaZz!]

Update for you:

NordicHardware



Tables and pictures in the source.

Enjoy.

//Andreas

 AMD Radeon 	Evergreen 40nm (2009-2010) 	Northern Islands 40nm (2010-2011)
Mid-range 	Radeon HD 5700 (Juniper) 	Radeon HD 6800 (Barts)
Performance 	Radeon HD 5800 (Cypress)	Radeon HD 6900 (Caymen)
High-end 	Radeon HD 5900 (Hemlock) 	Radeon HD 6990 (Antilles)

so the name change is real? this doesn't make any sense, really.

they have so many unused numbers from 1 to 5, why would they even think about shuffle the cards together at the very end of the range... i don't get it

[Calmatory]

I believe that all the talk with efficiency improvements on NI have been about perf/mm² and NOT perf/W. 4+1 -> 4D transition supports this.

Well, for the third time, big fail from AMD's part with the naming.

[MrMojoZ]

I don't see any benefits from the name change once you factor in then inevitable backlash from the core community. I'd rather they skipped to a whole new system vs reworking the current.

[SKYMTL]

I guess 50% increase in avp min fps is a coincident then?
Pure luck?
so we see a zero to 50% depending on game from early drivers to mature drivers.

I think you should shut up and stop telling people what to do on forums.

Bull shyte.

Yes, there are some performance increases that come along every now and then through driver changes but most of these are for games which weren't released yet when the original release drivers were used. Naturally, driver teams can't build in optimizations for games that haven't been released yet which is why there are sometimes large performance jumps soon after a game is released. But in my experience, most of the EXISTING games very rarely see performance bumps through subsequent drivers unless there was something wrong to begin with.

Many performance increases have NEXT TO NOTHING to do with drivers and EVERYTHING to do with the game engine undergoing SIGNIFICANT efficiency changes through patches. Dirt 2 & AVP:

[Manicdan]

a minimum spike could have been a fluke due to hard drive cache. thats why i would rather see a fps line chart like HardOCP does when comparing very little changes that are practically apples to apples.

[SimBy]

I don't see any benefits from the name change once you factor in then inevitable backlash from the core community. I'd rather they skipped to a whole new system vs reworking the current.

Who gives a rats a$$ what name a card has? What maters is performance/features, TDP, price. The rest is just useless mental masturbation.

[Calmatory]

Who gives a rats a$$ what name a card has? What maters is performance/features, TDP, price. The rest is just useless mental masturbation.

Try to thing that from an average consumers perspective. They barely know that HD58xx might be faster than HD 57xx. "Oh sweet new generation, and cheap" -> disappointment.

[tajoh111]

I guess 50% increase in avp min fps is a coincident then?
Pure luck?
so we see a zero to 50% depending on game from early drivers to mature drivers.

I think you should shut up and stop telling people what to do on forums.

20% figure as an average is impossible. Its closed to possible with a brand new architecture. Something like 50% only occurs when their are issues to begin with. Fermi is performing somewhere around 8% better and it is a brand spanking new architecture.

When techpower tested between launch drivers and 10.4 catalyst(the one that almost got wizzard to quit). There was only a 2 percent improvement. A complete average 20% is pretty much crazy impossible. I was saying 20% improvement with drivers for the GTX 480, and people were saying that was too high. I agree now, even with a new architecture, its hard to get that much of an improvement.

Considering that this architecture is all about making the cypress and older architecture and is heavily based on it, it should be really efficient from the get go.

Where did you get this 50% figure from, I would like to see it. I have never heard of such improvements outside crossfire or a freaky issue or a flaw which decreases image quality.

Try to thing that from an average consumers perspective. They barely know that HD58xx might be faster than HD 57xx. "Oh sweet new generation, and cheap" -> disappointment.

Or they pass on a good deal on a 5870 or 5850. Such a crappy naming scheme also really hurts the reselling of used cards. A $259 dollar 6870, makes it look like a 5870 has to be priced around 150 or so to be priced properly, even though it is the faster card.


If they think scheduling

[SKYMTL]

I was saying 15% improvement with drivers for the GTX 480, and people were saying that was too high.

Even that is high IMO. NVIDIA may have packed some increases into their latest driver stack but very few (if any) of them were geared towards the higher end cards. There were some issues with the GTX 460 performance which they addressed but otherwise, things once again stayed pretty much par for the course across the board.

I have yet to see a single driver release from NVIDIA OR ATI bring across-the-board, measurable improvements. The latest one from NVIDIA targeted 1920 / 4x AA performance on the GTX 460 which was admitedly lacking to begin with. The same goes for ATI's Catalyst App Profiles; they usually target very specific categories since overall performance was good to begin with.

20% across the board improvement to performance through drivers for existing games? No way. 20% in games that WEREN'T released when the architecture came out? It's possible.