...But, the good news, Allen especially will like that (or hate that he got the 5830s), are that the CrossfireX scaling is up to par with SLI...

We’d like to inform you of new suggested etail pricing (SEP) for one of our most popular GPUs, the GeForce GTX 460 1GB. The new SEP for the GTX 460 1GB is $199.99. As always, the SEP is just a suggestion and you’ll likely find retail boards from our partners at multiple price points. We expect many standard boards to sell in the $180s-$190s, and OC boards to sell for $209+.

In addition to the GeForce GTX 460 1GB, we’d also like to mention new pricing on the GeForce GTX 470. The SEP of this GPU is now $259.99. The GeForce GTX 470 offers more tessellation engines than GTX 460, making it ready for the most demanding DX11 games on the market today, and just as important, the games of tomorrow.

Nice catch! Did I read that right that the retail price is going to be $189 for the 6850??

I'm sure I will have some "remorse". Yet, I always wanted an excuse to "experiment" with Crossfire at not much extra cost. Now is the time

Nonetheless, if the HD6980 looks too good and the price is $100 lower than I expect -- I might just buy one and eat the $150 I spent on the extra HD5830. By far, it would not be the first mistake I've made -- that's what "experimenting" is all about. Still, I'm not planning on it

Nope.

lol even better! I'm definitely going to be picking one of these up soon

Confusing Name Change

You are going to have to get used to a different naming scheme with AMD video cards. Going forward the previous 5700 series will be AMD's "low end" series of GPU. The 6800 series we are seeing here today will be the new "mid-level" GPU series. Later this year we will see a 6900 series of GPUs that will represent the high end or enthusiast level cards. Seeing the 5700 series stay intact is somewhat of a testament to the ability of the GPUs.

The 6900 series will have a superset of features compared o the 6800 series. This means that there will be features and architecture differences between 6900 and 6800 series. This allows AMD to take more chances on the high-end enthusiast class GPUs and architecture things different, to really step up performance that enthusiasts demand. So, just to restate, the new 6800 series will offer performance of the 5800 series, at a lower price, with lower power, and a smaller chip.

At the top end we have the Mexican standoff between the recently price-reduced GTX 470, the newly released Radeon HD 6870, and the overclocked GTX 460 as represented by the EVGA GTX 460 1GB FTW. At $260 the GTX 470 is several percent faster than the 6870, and at only $20 more NVIDIA has done a good job pricing the card. If performance is your sole concern, than the GTX 470 is hard to beat at those prices – though we suspect NVIDIA isn’t happy about selling GF100 cards at such a low price.

Meanwhile if you care about a balance of performance and power/heat/noise, then it’s the 6870 versus the EVGA GTX 460; and the EVGA card wins in an unfair fight. As an overclocked card in a launch card article we’re not going to give it a nod, but we’re not going to ignore it; it’s 5% faster than the reference 6870 while at the same time it’s cooler and quieter (thanks in large part to the fact that it’s an open-air design). At least as long as it’s on the market (we have our doubts about how many suitable GPUs NVIDIA can produce), it’s hard to pass up even when faced with the 6870.

Without the EVGA card in the picture though, the 6870 is clearly sitting at a sweet spot in terms of price, performance, and noise. It’s faster than the 5850 while drawing only as much power and yet it’s still slightly quieter. Meanwhile it completely clobbers the reference clocked GTX 460 1GB in gaming performance, although with NVIDIA’s new prices and the $30 premium we would hope that this is the case. If nothing else the 6870 wins by default – NVIDIA doesn’t have a real product to put against it.

As for the Radeon HD 6850 however, things are much more lopsided in AMD’s favor. It’s give and take depending on the benchmark, but ultimately it’s just as fast as the GTX 460 1GB on average, even though it’s officially $20 cheaper. And at the same time it draws less power and produces less noise than the GTX 460 1GB. In fact unless the GTX 460 1GB was cheaper than the 6850, we really can’t come up with a reason to buy it. For all the advantage of an overclock when going up against the 6870, the stock clocked card has nothing on the 6850. Even the GTX 460 768MB, while $10-$20 cheaper than the 6850, still has to contend with the fact that the 6850 is almost 10% faster and only marginally louder.

In fact our only real concern is that while the reference 6850 is a great card, the XFX card is less so – XFX heavily prioritized temperatures over noise, and while this pays off with a load temperate even better than the GTX 460, it comes at the price of noise levels exceeding even the 6870. Shortly before publication we got a note from XFX that they’re going to work on releasing a BIOS with a less aggressive fan, which hopefully should resolve the issue. In the meantime we suggest checking back here next week, as we’ll have several custom 6850s arriving next week that we’ll be reviewing as part of a 6850 roundup.

The bottom line from Anandtech's review:



I definitely think the smart move is to wait a couple of weeks and see how the AIB's deploy the new chip. I don't see anything in the reference designs to buy right now, but when Asus, Gigabyte, and the rest begin tweaking the specs and the cooling the comparisons against the 460 and 470 will get more interesting.

One thing I noticed from Anand's tests: The 6870 steps all over the 5870 in most mid-high resolution benchmarks. A lot of the reviewers have noted the price pressure the 68xx puts on nVidia, but the 6870 is going to crush the market for the 5870 if buyers become aware of the 6870 doing the same thing for $200 less. The 480 is still significantly faster than the 5870 and the 6870, so is AMD abandoning the high-end market? Or are they going another direction for the $400-500 price point?

Interestingly, AMD/ATI HD68xx Eyefinity now supports any (according to some reports) combination of monitors (no longer necessary to match monitors for size and resolution for best results).

AMD/ATI HD68xx has a new type of AA (anti-alias) that works on edges in a new way and is not limited to games (they say -- I don't know personally). It circumvents some issues with some TWIMTBP titles that were optimized for Nvidia AA at the expense of AMD/ATI AA. For AA fans (I personally rarely use AA), this could be a worthwhile feature.

Interestingly, AMD/ATI HD68xx Eyefinity now supports any (according to some reports) combination of monitors (no longer necessary to match monitors for size and resolution for best results).

AMD/ATI HD68xx has a new type of AA (anti-alias) that works on edges in a new way and is not limited to games (they say -- I don't know personally). It circumvents some issues with some TWIMTBP titles that were optimized for Nvidia AA at the expense of AMD/ATI AA. For AA fans (I personally rarely use AA), this could be a worthwhile feature.

AMD/ATI HD68xx tessellation performance has been doubled in the useful range. It was already good enough for real games. It is speculated this may help ATI benchmarks when "excessive" tessellation is used -- where Nvidia GTX has looked better by comparison.

I have not read all the reviews, so I have not confirmed all the above. Posted FWIW - and conversation

...if i could I'd run an ATi 6870 w/ the 8800GTS as the PhysX. but on not sure how the drivers would like each other.