Radeon HD 6850 & 6870 reviews...

[DilTech]

6850 4% faster than gtx460 at average.
Most review sites used nvidia cheat them overclocked editions vs stock 6850.
6850 and 6870 is now the the new king of the hill at the 230 pricepoint.
Which is what most people buy for price/performance.

At least the small die give amd profit which they need when Nvidia bleeds big time with their die size as they now sell for a loss.

I've said it a million times...

Stock is stock. When you go to the store and buy a product, take it out of the box, install it, turn on your pc, install the driver... Whatever it runs at WITHOUT you tinkering with it is stock.

If companies choose not to make overclocked AMD cards, that's their fault(not AMD's, but the partners). It's practically easier to find overclocked NVidia cards than it is reference ones these days, and roughly the same price too. You almost have to go out of your way to buy a reference clocked(which is what the 675mhz gtx 460 is, REFERENCE clock, not STOCK...STOCK IS OUT THE BOX CLOCKS!) GTX 460 these days, and I guarantee if you find one at your local shop there's 3+ sittin next to it that run at 750mhz+.

Then again, I'm also all for AMD partners to start pumping out some high clocked versions of AMD's cards. Sadly, the few that do it play extremely conservative.

Considering you can walk into the store and buy one of those cards at those exact clocks without having to do anything different then buying any other card, they are fair for comparison...

(basically, if anyone here works for any of AMD's partners, tell your boss to start selling higher clocked AMD cards )

All this said, I don't quite know how I feel about this launch. The key point of calling this a new "generation" was suppose to be improved tessellation, and while it is better in that aspect than the 5870, it falls short when you turn up the heat on it(high tessellation levels) and still loses to the GTX 460 in this department.

Yes, it's nice that it does take less power(of course it does, it's a lot less shaders), but the number scheme really throws me off(why would you release a card numbered as a successor when it's technically slower?), and honestly I'm getting tired of seeing releases with similar performance numbers(even if it is cheaper).

I mean, people are acting like it's so amazing to see it happen, but we've seen it happen more times than I really care to remember. NVidia 6600GT was(for $200ish) equal to the 9800XT(which was the top-o-the-heap before it). 7600GT faster than the 6800ultra before it(which wasn't just a $500 video card, but was practically impossible to find). The 4850 was roughly equal to the 8800gtx(which launched at $649!!!), and finally the GTX 460 is roughly equal to the GTX 285 in performance. Am I the only one who remembers the Geforce Ti 4200 or Radeon 9500/9600? The 8800GT anyone?

Fast forward to now, where we see the trend stop. We see a "next generation" mid range that's named after last generations high-end and can't even match that generation? So, unlike almost every generation that I can remember in the last decade we see a new mid-range that trades blows with a last generation mid-range, and people are actually acting like this is a big deal? Then using the answer "oh, but it's on the same node, no die shrink!"... What does that have to do with you...The consumer? It wouldn't matter if it was 28nm or 110nm to the consumer(well, outside of power usage and heat...) if you wish to get technical.

I'm sure someone will call this biased, but if you truly think it through I know you'll see where I'm coming from on this. I'm trying to find the merit in this, I really am... I mean yes, it's nice they're doing it with less power usage(although, I can bet less than 10% of the people here can actually tell me how many watts their system uses), less die space, but these are things that they are sacrificing performance to succeed in, and at the same time doing so in a matter that will only lead to confuse customers who happen to be less tech savvy than us.

Basically, long story short, I'm not calling it a bad card... I just have higher expectations for a "next generation" part than this.

I see...Ok than lets try Tom's which uses 260.89 WHQL.
BC2 8xAA
Dirt 2 8xAA
Seems to show the same story, 6870 offers better 8xAA performance when compared with the 470

Isn't AMD cards faster in those two titles anyway, or is my memory just bad? I'm not trying to start an argument with you on that one, I'm just curious... Any other numbers from other titles?