The high-end Radeon HD 58 will be replaced by the “Cayman” and “Antilles” Radeon HD 6900-series before the end of Q4 2010. This is more like Radeon HD 58 territory. Barts is designed to fill the $150 to $250 range, far below today’s Radeon HD 5870.
What about the folks who don't get the memo? We can only hope that price insinuates performance. Even after hearing the official party line, we still don't like the fact that the branding requires an explanation from us in order to make sense. Now, if you're like us, that Radeon HD 6800-series moniker will strike you as disingenuous. The idea here is to engage Nvidia's GeForce GTX 460 1 GB and 768 MB beyond performance.īefore we dig-in to the Radeon HD 6800-series, let's take a closer look at the targeted price points. A handful of features are being added, and price points are coming down. The "Barts" GPUs realize a re-balancing of the Cypress design that performed so well already. It's confusing, we know, but AMD has what it considers a good explanation for the naming scheme.Īnd while raw performance is down, overall, the purpose behind AMD's Radeon HD 6800-series is purportedly an optimization of the architecture. Radeon HD 6850 is slower than Radeon HD 5850. The Radeon HD 6870 is slower than Radeon HD 5870. The potential for such an evolution will have to wait until next month. Naturally, then, when you hear that AMD is launching its Radeon HD 68 cards, you expect the next generation of high-end-a follow-up capable of knocking GeForce GTX 480 off of its perch, perhaps. What's the point? Today's DirectX 11-class graphics market is more competitive than anything we could have imagined one year ago, when AMD was undisputed king of the hill and Nvidia's GeForce GTX 295 was still the flagship. Supplies of GeForce GTS 250 should start drying up soon, leaving you to pick and choose between the current crop of DirectX 11 cards. Interesting side-note: one of Nvidia's board partners lets us know earlier this week that G92 is officially dead. The GF104-based GeForce GTX 460 offered the price tag and performance to make us reconsider the Radeon HD 5830, and the GF106-based GeForce GTS 450 was at least good enough to lock horns with AMD's Radeon HD 5770, even if prior-generation cards still offered (and continue to offer) better performance for your dollar. Only when Nvidia started rolling out derivatives did AMD's position seem truly challenged. But the heat and power consumption associated with a 3 billion transistor GPU counterbalanced some of its brighter performance highlights.
It enjoyed a solid six months of selling the world's only DirectX 11-capable product stack at a time when DirectX 11 and, more important, DirectX 11 games were actually shipping.
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