today's video review will be somewhat incomplete because I'm going to be
uploading some of the segments as separate videos for example my power
consumption video my heat video as well as my uh heat yeah heat is the same as
temperature so I was going to say Fano video those ones are already up I also
have already been working on a lot of other stuff to do with this card so you're going to see as many as like 8 to
10 videos about the Radeon 6870 on my two channels but this is meant to be a
general overview of the performance I will have boring graphs but I'm going to
spoil the surprise a little bit the 6870 is not the highest end single GPU
card now the reason for that is not
known to me but for the last few Generations the 3870 the 4870 and the
5870 have been the fastest single GPU
cards from their Generations now we've had dual GPU cards which are faster so
we've had a 387 X2 4870 X2 and 597
but AMD is changing it with this generation they're changing the
numbering scheme and they're also changing The Branding so instead of an
at radon Graphics we're going to have AMD radon graphics and the numbering is
going to be different so the 6870 is actually the price point replacement for
a 5770 so that means that the 6870 is
actually a little bit slower than the 5870 but that's still impressive because
the 6870 cost a fraction of what the 5870 does it performs almost as well in
many applications and when the tessellation really ramps up for example
in the heaven Benchmark you're going to find out actually you might not see this
but you'll see that the performance of the 6870 is equal to the 5870 and though
I don't think I have the numbers in my graphs the minimum frame rate of the
6870 is actually much better than the
5870 so that's what's cool about it so the new price point the 6870 is an
excellent replacement for the 5770 as long as you understand where it slots
into the new AMD lineup so that means we're going to have 6900 series cards
that are single GPU and are faster than the 6800
Series so for the cards I tested the 6870 5870 5770 because those are the
cards that in terms of performance it's very close to and that it's supposed to
replace and then just for some context on the NVIDIA side I tested the GTX 460
as well as the GTX 480 because the GTX
460 is a bit of a lower-end refresh of a
previous high-end card so it's um in some ways it's going to be the
latest card from NVIDIA even though it's not the fastest so it should be the most
comparable in terms of the architectural changes that they've been able to
implement to get the best performance possible out of it so I used High
graphical settings for all of these tests that means I'm using anti-aliasing
an isotropic filtering and I'm turning all of the details way up in all of
these games so stay tuned for boring charts and graphs and then the conclusion
so for the street price this is one Rockin card because we're looking at
about $249 upon release uh depending which brand you go with the one featured
in my review today is the MSI Radeon
6870 and honestly yeah I just got to say this
thing is if you have $250 you want a direct X11 graphics card
that's got all the latest features remember they've updated a lot of things
from the 5870 feature-wise it's not just a performance boost this is an HDMI 1.4a
port that means you've got support for Blu-ray 3D and we're also expecting a
driver update for 3D gaming on this particular card okay you've got all the
usual stuff which is audio over HDMI ifinity support two-way Crossfire
support all of that cool stuff except you get this big tessellation
performance increase you get 3D that is
both in Blu-ray and in gaming and because of the way the inputs or rather
outputs are spaced
out you get four displays for ifinity so
you can actually hook up two displays to either DVI or HDMI so that's sort of one
group of two displays and then you can do two displays via the mini display
port connectors so that's your clue the fact there's actually five connectors on
the back of this video card that you can actually hook up more displays than you
could on the last generation 5870 so you can see they've
changed the layout somewhat they've replaced that single full-size display
port port with too many DisplayPort ports if you want to see the card more
up close check out my unboxing uh where I really show it from all the different
angles and I talk a lot more about the features but I hope you've enjoyed this video review of the performance of the
Radeon 6870