The settings for this game were 1920x1080, DX 11 and everything to maximum. We ran the test at 1920x1080 with Enthusiast settings.įor Just Cause 2, we disabled Bokeh Filter and GPU water effects as they are exclusive to NVIDIA cards thanks to CUDA processing. Each game contains a variety of different effects which can push GPUs to their limits.Ĭrysis Warhead is one of the most demanding games out there (probably the most demanding) and has the ability to bring any graphic card out there to its knees. So we tried out three benchmarks to test the 6850 - Crysis Warhead, Just Cause 2 and Dirt 2. The most important criteria for anyone who wants to buy a new Graphic Card is its FPS score in Games. Having racked up pretty impressive scores in the synthetic benchmarks, lets move on the Gaming Scores. At 1680x1050, we used the performance settings and achieved a score of 13,500, which is quite close to the HD 5830. We also ran everyone's favourite 3DMark Vantage to see how well the 6850 stacks up. Overall though, the GPU performed quite well even when the settings were maxed out. We ran the test again, but this time with Tessellation set to Extreme. The 6850 scored an impressive 31.4 FPS at the end of the test. We ran the Unigine 2.1 benchmark tool with the following settings: 3DMark Vantage is a DirectX 10 benchmark tool and is an overall measure of your system’s 3D gaming capabilities, based on comprehensive real-time 3D graphics and processor tests. For those who aren’t familiar with these tests, Ungine Heaven 2.1 is a DirectX 11 benchmark tool which makes use of Tessellation, SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion) and algorithmically correct volumetric cumulonimbus clouds. To test out the 6850, we used Unigine Heaven 2.1 and 3DMark Vantage for our Synthetic tests. Now that we're done with all the spec talk, let's get to the benchmarks. It uses a 256-bit interface and has a bandwidth of 128GB/sec.
Now let’s take a complete look at this model from XFX.As you can see by the screenshot above, the HD 6850 packs in 960 Unified shaders as well as an ROP count of 32. You can compare the specs of these video cards with other video cards by taking a look at our AMD ATI Chips Comparison Table and NVIDIA Chips Comparison Table tutorials.
XFX also has a factory-overclocked version of this video card, called “Black Edition.” In this card the graphics processor runs at 820 MHz and memory runs at 4.4 GHz. All graphics chip listed above are DirectX 11 parts. Prices were researched at on the day we published this review. The Radeon HD 5850 is between USD 60 and USD 80 more expensive than the Radeon HD 6850.
After this price reduction, the new Radeon HD 6850 competes directly with the GeForce GTX 460 with 768 MB. To compete with the new 6800 family, NVIDIA has reduced the price of their GPUs. This makes members of the 6800 family to be actually slower – but more affordable – than members of the 5800 family.
As you can see in the table below, while members of the 6800 family run at a higher clock rate, they have a lower number of internal processors (shaders). Since 6800 is a number higher than 5800, users may think that the two members of this new family are faster than their counterparts from the Radeon HD 5800 family, namely the Radeon HD 5850 and HD 5870, which is not the case. The name given by AMD to this new GPU family is misleading. Let’s review the standard Radeon HD 6850 from XFX (HD-685X-ZNFC), which follows the AMD reference design. AMD has released their new Radeon HD 6800 family, so far comprised of the Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 models.