You can expect card manufacturers to produce overclocked, non-reference design versions from the get-go too. You'll need a single six-pin power cable for this dual-slot card, and you're good to go. In terms of the core specification then, the AMD Radeon HD 6850 (note that dropping of the ATI branding, it's not a mistake) ships at a core frequency of 775MHz coupled with 1GB of GDDR5 running at 1,000MHz (effectively 4GHz). Subtle improvements then, but improvements all the same. There have been some improvements to the anistropic filtering engine too to smooth the transition between different levels of detail to reduce the effects of stepping.
AMD RADEON HD 6850 FULL
The interesting thing here is that it uses DirectCompute to process the full scene after it has been rendered, to produce results similar to 4x MSAA but faster and at a reduced memory footprint. 34/100 Hardware index based on 4,141 submissions (performance relative to fastest system, more info). Average overclock on air, water, cascade or liquid nitrogen.
AMD RADEON HD 6850 PLUS
You do get the full 32 ROPS mind, plus a slightly overhauled tessellation engine that improves performance at the more reasonable tessellation factors. The fact that AMD can run this core at higher clock speeds is due to a smaller die-size, 255mm2 as opposed to the 334mm2 found on the previous generation. That's two-thirds of the shaders you'll find in the 5850, a difference the 50MHz faster clock speed is ill-equipped to make up. The AMD Radeon HD 6850 doesn't boast a completely new core though, more of a revamped version of the Cypress core, as found in the HD 5850.Ĭodenamed Barts Pro, the 6850's core has 960 stream processors, running at 775MHz. It needs to pull some serious magic out of its svelte silicon to compete there.
The problem is, thanks to Nvidia's shenanigans, it's finding itself squeezed from above and below, trapped (price-wise at least) between the 768MB rendition of Nvidia's GTX 460 (available for as little as £117) and the full 1GB variant. AMD is pitching the Radeon HD 6850 as "the best performing graphics card in the sub-$200 budget." In other words pricing is absolutely key to the very reason for this card.
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