AMD's New Radeon HD 6870 and 6850 Cards Debut 153
MojoKid writes "AMD has officially launched their new Radeon HD 6800 series of graphics cards and the company has managed to drive cost and power consumption out of the product, while increasing performance efficiencies in the architecture. The Radeon HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850 are new midrange cards that offer similar performance to previous generation high-end offerings, but at significantly lower price points and with an enhanced tessellation engine for better support of next generation DX11 game engines. The cards compete well with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 470 and 460 products, besting them in some scenarios but trailing in others. Word is AMD is readying their flagship high-end Radeon 6900 family for release in Q4 as well."
up to six LCDs (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds great! Tired of selling an old monitor to buy a new one that's 2" larger and a few hundred more pixels, much rather just get a second (or third, or fourth, etc) same-sized LCD and double the pixels.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh wow! New graphics cards! (Score:3, Insightful)
Sarcasm appreciated. (Really, you should get yourself a sarcasm sign)
A co-worker has stated on numerous occasions that it is time for hardware makers to go on vacation for at least a year. Software is not catching up with the advances in hardware. Further, these advances are without any need. Nothing runs slowly on yesterday's hottest new thing.
Microsoft has already updated beyond any need as can be demonstrated by nearly everyone's reluctance to go beyond Windows XP. MS Office demonstrates the same point. No one wants these advancements and upgrades and it has demonstrably harmed Microsoft's image and business model.
People are now beginning to realize that they don't simply need the newest whatever there is. They didn't need Vista and don't presently need Windows 7 and certainly don't appreciate the option to stay where they are eroded away from them.
I predict similar doom on hardware makers who insist on charging even more for the next increment in polygon count. We are reaching a point where a new thing is needed. All we are doing now is updating the old things.
Re:Oh wow! New graphics cards! (Score:1, Insightful)
You must not have played Final Fantasy XIV yet then. :)
(not that it's actually worth playing...)
Re:up to six LCDs (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually by the time you get into the 22+" size (non-widescreen) you can fix two A4 side-by side at 1:1 ratio. However, this isn't accounting for tool-bars and the like so my preference is a 20-22" non-widescreen or 22+ widescreen, rotated 90". I've used this in Electronic Document Imaging applications, real world, with a lot of seat time and it's a VERY workable solution. Gives plenty of room for a single A4 page with toolbars on top and side.
The one catch is that some monitors have asymetrical and or narrow vertical viewing angles which with the monitor 90 degrees rotated means that is now your horizontal viewing angle range and in worst case you can't get a clear picture out of both eyes at once. Good monitors don't have this problem and they look identical no matter the orientation.
Re:Oh wow! New graphics cards! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh wow! New graphics cards! (Score:5, Insightful)
Pov-Ray runs slow on today's hottest new thing. So do various physics simulators. And just try to run a physics simulator and AI on a same machine (to do robot research without having to build actual robots)! In fact, even Dwarf Fortress [bay12games.com], and ASCII game, still slows down occasionally!
Simply because you use a modern computer as a glorified typewriter doesn't mean that we all do.
Re:Nice card shame about the price. (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems to be one of the worst reviews out there, looks like it comes directly from the nVidia PR department. The main reason, apart from the benchmark selection and lack of any methodology details, is that it only pits the new cards against an OC card that nVidia strategically priced yesterday and had EVGA send it to the reviewers asking for this to be the AMD competition. Also, I don't see the prices that the article uses, because even the sites that did try out the EVGA card (along with others of course, unlike this site here) stated it is competitive but did not notice a price/perf advantage.
The point is that while the OC cards vary in price and availability (since the good ones use hand picked GPU's, at their introduced price points the AMD cards have the best price/performance, and absolute performance over the regular 460 versions. In fact, all other reviewers seem to say that even at yesterday's price cuts the regular GTX 460 is a bad buy, while interestingly if you can go to the GTX 470 price that is the only point nVidia now leads.
Unless in Great Britain there is some weird pricing going on hence the article...