The Radeon HD 5850 had a scaled-back version with two of the SIMDs disabled, just as the new Radeon HD 6850 has two of the Barts GPU’s SIMD units disabled. There were 20 SIMDs in the Cypress chip, for a total of 1600 processing units. There are 14 of these SIMD units in the chip, for a total of 1120 processing units. Each SIMD has 16 blocks of five-way vector units, for a total of 80 processing units. The texture and shader engine is arranged in much the same way, with a thread dispatch processor and scheduler connected to an array of SIMD shader units. This has been tweaked in the case of the Barts GPU to offer somewhat improved tessellation performance, but it is otherwise extremely similar. There’s a command processor on the front end, connected to a set of graphics engine features (the tesselator, geometry setup, rasterizer, and so on). The Barts GPU that powers the Radeon HD 68 is very similar in design to the Cypress GPU that powers the Radeon HD 58.
#AMD RADEON HD 6700 BENCHMARK SERIES#
Last, the 5800 series may not be long for this world: The next GPU in the 6000 series that AMD will release should displace those cards on the high end.īe sure to read our individual reviews of the Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870. Second, the new cards are coming in at a price that AMD has historically put the x800 models at (the Radeon 38 models fell between $200 and $300 when they were introduced, while the 5800 series was a high-priced anomaly).
Having both the 5700 and a new 6700 series on the market at the same time would be confusing. First, the Radeon 5700 series will continue to be produced and sold for some time, occupying the sub-$150 price bracket. So why the confusing 6800-series moniker, rather than calling these cards the 67? The naming makes sense when you consider three things. What’s more, you’ll still be able to buy 5800-series graphics cards for a while, as they occupy shelves alongside less-expensive 6800-series cards. Usually, cards of a new generation in the same series are faster, not slower, than their predecessors. The 6870 will be slower than the 5870, and the 6850 will be slower than the 5850. If all that is Greek to you, here’s the takeaway: On paper, the new Radeon HD 6850 looks as though it’s going to be a lot faster than the 5770, and the 6870 will nearly equal the performance of somewhat more expensive 5850.Īt first, the naming of these new Barts-based graphics cards seemed odd to us. Though there are fewer shader units and texture units, the clock speeds are a lot higher, so actual performance isn’t too negatively affected.
#AMD RADEON HD 6700 BENCHMARK FULL#
The GPU still has a full 256-bit memory interface and 32 render back-ends. A quick glance at the numbers shows that the new cards use a GPU that is roughly 30 percent smaller than the Cypress GPU found in the Radeon HD 58, and 50 percent larger than the Juniper GPU found in the 5770.