The AMD Radeon HD 6800 Series

You know it’s winter when the sun sets earlier, the air feels a little crisper, and when a graphics giant releases new video cards.

Hot on the heels of NVIDIA’s GTX 460 and GTS 450 launch, AMD is back with a whole new architecture. To be honest, I only expected a frequency bump and a few tweaks, but what AMD is launching most definitely qualifies as “new.”

Yes, the new naming convention can be confusing. The performance of the AMD 6850 and AMD HD 6870 greatly eclipses that of the Radeon HD 5750 and Radeon HD 5770. In fact, they come close to the performance of the Radeon HD 5850 and Radeon HD 5870, and in heavily tessellated situations, can even surpass them. So for this release, AMD has decided not to call them the 6700 series. But having a part that performs only “as good” as the last-gen doesn’t make sense, does it? Well, AMD is greatly reducing the price of the 6800 series vs the 5800 series, and they’re also eliminating the 5800 series altogether, so there’s not much quibbling we can do about it now. The 5800 series direct replacement will end up being the 6900 series, so once those cards hit the market, the naming convention will definitely make more sense.

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