AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review

Stereoscopic 3D, HDMI 1.4, Eyefinity and More

AMD hit a Grand Slam with Eyefinity when it launched with the Radeon HD 5800 line. But why rest on “good enough?” There are now more display options thanks to Display Port 1.2.

A single card can now have 3-6 simultaneous displays with the right equipment on the Display Port connections. You no longer need a special, more expensive “Eyefinity Edition” card to take advantage of more than 3 monitors.

HDMI 1.4a is also shipping on the AMD Radeon HD 6800 series cards. That means we now have honest to goodness 3D Blu-ray support for a HTPC! Worth noting in this photo is that there is now only one Dual Link DVI instead of the two that we have grown accustomed to. Those of you running a pair of 30″ panels at 2560×1600 will need to look for a miniDP to DL-DVI adapter to get both of your panels running at native resolution. Even those of you with only one 30″ panel will need to make sure that you’re plugging into the DL-DVI port.

The AMD Radeon HD 6800 series is a processing power house. As you can see above it supports UVD 3.0 for accelerated Blu-ray 3D and DivX decoding. AMD is continuing to back OpenCL on the GPU compute front.

Anti-Aliasing has been with us for many years now and AMD is still working to provide new and better ways to get the job done. This time they are rolling out what they call Morphological AA. It delivers full-scene AA in a post process filter that is accelerated by DirectCompute. It has no limitations, works faster than super-sampling and works with any DirectX 9, 10, or 11 application!

AMD has again addressed Anisotropic Filtering by refining their algorithm. With the AMD Radeon HD 6800 series you’ll see smoother transitions between filter levels, less mess in noisy textures, and it is angle independent.

3D Gaming

Something that NVIDIA is always touting that they have over AMD is 3D gaming support, well not anymore! AMD has partnered with 3D middleware vendors such as Dynamic Digital Depth and iZ3D to offer a great Stereoscopic 3D gaming experience with AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series.

If it’s 3D, the AMD Radeon HD 6800 series does it. Stereo 3D gaming is supported by both displays and glasses. AMD is enabling 3rd party stereo 3D software conversion!

AMD has partnered with DDD and iZ3D to convert over 400 gaming titles in stereo 3D with native stereo 3D games are planned for 2011!

DDD software has the power to automatically convert over 350 gaming titles raging from DX9-11, with flexible options to enable 3D gaming on lower ended graphics hardware. You can also capture 3D gaming sequences with the software.

As you can see, the AMD Radeon HD 6800 series graphics cards are packed full of features and make it a well rounded card. There isn’t much that these video cards can’t do!