AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review

3DMark Vantage

3DMark Vantage is the new industry standard PC gaming performance benchmark from Futuremark, newly designed for Windows Vista and DirectX10. It includes two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, and support for the latest hardware. 3DMark Vantage is based on a completely new rendering engine, developed specifically to take full advantage of DirectX10, the new graphics API from Microsoft.

The Extreme settings were used for testing, so a resolution of 1920×1200 was used.

Benchmark Results: It’s strange that in some real game benchmarks we saw the Radeon HD 6870 performing better than a Radeon HD 5870, but then when you a synthetic benchmark like 3DMark Vantage we see the opposite. In fact this benchmark showed the Radeon HD 5870 scoring 21% faster than the Radeon HD 6870. AMD’s internal testing showed that the Radeon HD 6870 should score around X7700 and our testing showed that it scored X7645. It looks like AMD was spot on with their assessment and that is good to see. When run in CrossFire the Radeon HD 6870 scored nearly X14500, which is nothing to laugh at.