It’s been a year since we reviewed the Radeon HD 5870 Graphics Card, calling it a “real winner, and possibly one the best graphics cards we have ever reviewed in this price point.” Within five months of releasing its first DirectX 11 GPU, AMD launched another eleven graphics cards ranging from affordable to the ultra-expensive.
The Radeon HD 6870 is AMD’s latest DirectX-11 video card, and uses an updated Cypress back-end to offer ‘Barts’ GPU architecture. Built to deliver improved performance to the value-hungry mainstream gaming market, the $200 AMD Radeon HD 6850 and $250 Radeon HD 6870 video cards supplement their 5800-series counterparts. The most notable new feature is Bart’s 3rd-generation Unified Video Decoder with added support for DisplayPort 1.2. AMD’s UVD3 accelerates multimedia playback and transcoding, while introducing AMD HD3D stereoscopic technology with multi-view CODEC (MVC) support for playing 3D Blu-ray over HDMI 1.4a.
The Radeon HD 6800 series offer a new chip architecture, code-named Barts. It’s a modified version of the chip architecture featured in the Radeon HD 5850 and 5870 graphics cards (dubbed Cypress), cutting back on size but still delivering excellent performance. Be sure to check out Jason Cross’ expansive overview of the Radeon HD 6800 GPUs and their architecture, for a deep dive on what’s happening under the hood.
AMD offers a DirectX 11 graphics card which offers 5870 core has filtered down to cheaper cards, with the 5770 currently selling like hot cakes. The 5850were considered to be gen next cards. AMD proffers 25 million DirectX 11 cards in total.
AMD has also finally implemented their answer to Nvidia’s GeForce 3D Vision, with HD3D. Their take on 3D involves support for the Open Stereo 3D Initiative. Instead of creating dedicated hardware, HD3D promises support for a wide variety of methods, ranging from existing active-shutter or polarized glasses, to glasses-free 3D technologies that will eventually work their way to market.
The Radeon HD 6870 is the larger, more capable member of AMD’s new 6800 series lineup. Priced at a respectable US$239 (as of 10/21/2010), this mid-range graphics card manges to outpace its closest relative — the Radeon HD5850 (US$279) — while keeping your bank balance intact. Now you could buy AMD Radeon HD 6870 from Amazon Here.
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