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@ 2010/10/25Unfortunately in the aftermath of initial reviews it was discovered that some of the HD6850 cards reviewed actually had the same shader count as the HD6870′s, that being – 1120 instead of 960. Thankfully we noticed this beforehand and were sure to use the correct cards in our review, but it appears other publications didn’t.
This has caused a lot of confusion with people wondering if the HD6850′s are worth the money. You can easily check our reviews on KitGuru to get accurate results but we decided that it was time to put some cold, hard facts onto paper (well, your screens in this case), by comparing two identically reference clocked HD6850′s – one with 960 shaders and the other with 1120. We happen to have two reference HD6850′s with 960 and 1120 shaders at hand so it was a pretty straightforward task.
The synthetic tests are improved considerably, especially Tessmark when running at moderate settings (a 36.8% increase). Alien V Predator and Lost Planet 2 also show huge gains (9.6 and 12.2%) from the extra 160 unified shaders.
The HD6850 and HD6870 are both worthy gold award winners, and we hope this article today has helped clear up performance differences between the cards. AMD partners seem genuinely embarassed by this mistake and are offering to reissue samples to publications who wish to retest.
This has caused a lot of confusion with people wondering if the HD6850′s are worth the money. You can easily check our reviews on KitGuru to get accurate results but we decided that it was time to put some cold, hard facts onto paper (well, your screens in this case), by comparing two identically reference clocked HD6850′s – one with 960 shaders and the other with 1120. We happen to have two reference HD6850′s with 960 and 1120 shaders at hand so it was a pretty straightforward task.
The synthetic tests are improved considerably, especially Tessmark when running at moderate settings (a 36.8% increase). Alien V Predator and Lost Planet 2 also show huge gains (9.6 and 12.2%) from the extra 160 unified shaders.
The HD6850 and HD6870 are both worthy gold award winners, and we hope this article today has helped clear up performance differences between the cards. AMD partners seem genuinely embarassed by this mistake and are offering to reissue samples to publications who wish to retest.
