AMD today released the Radeon HD 6870 and the Radeon HD 6850, the first two models in its new 6000 series of video cards. These cards, respectively priced at $239 list and $179 list, are aimed at directly challenging Nvidia's GTX 460, which made a splash in both 768MB and 1GB models at similar price points in July.
These 6000-series cards, which were code-named "Barts" during their development, institute a number of improvements designed to both build on innovations from AMD's 5000 series (which launched in fall of 2009) and challenge Nvidia's own technologies. This has not meant a die shrink: The 6000-series cards are still based on 40nm process technology, but they have been rearchitectured to use approximately 25 percent less silicon.
Video quality enhancements in the 6000 series include improved tessellation; a revamped anisotropic filtering algorithm for smoothing out particularly noisy textures; and morphological anti-aliasing, a post-processing filtering technique accelerated with DirectCompute. Unified Video Decoder 3 also boosts acceleration for MPEG-2 bitstream, MPEG-4 Part 2, and Multi-View Codec (MVC). ATI Stream, the 5000 series' GPGPU technology, is not gone, but it has been renamed AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing (or AMD APP for short).
In addition, the cards also offer an updated array of output ports. Whereas the 5000-series cards sported two DVI (though only one of these is dual-link), one HDMI, and DisplayPort, the 6000 series replaces the last with two Mini DisplayPort 1.2 jacks, which will let the user connect multiple monitors to the cards by way of daisy-chaining or specially designed hubs.
Of the two cards released today, the Radeon HD 6870 is the higher-end model, offering 2 teraflops of compute power, a core clock speed of 900 MHz, and 1,120 stream processors; it requires two six-pin power connector, and has a TDP of 151 watts. The Radeon HD 6850, on the other hand, boasts 1.5 teraflops of compute power, a core clock speed of 775 MHz, and 960 stream processors, and with a TDP of 127 watts requires only one extra power connector.