If you can hang tight for another week and a half before upgrading your GPU, you'll have more options to play with. That's assuming news and rumor site Fudzilla is correct in saying AMD's HD 6870 and HD 6850 will launch next Friday, October 22nd.
AMD purportedly has already begun shipping parts to vendors, meaning this won't be a paper launch. How well the cards end up selling, however, will depend on how well they compete with current-gen parts.
Both cards are being built around AMD's Barts core (PRO [6870] and XT [6850]), with the faster Cayman core reserved for high-end parts later this year, likely the HD 6890 and/or 6970/6950. Both the 6870 and 6850 are expected to ship with 1GB of GDDR5, HDMI, DVI-I, DVI-D, and DisplayPort outputs (two DisplayPorts on the 6870).
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Ry03
October 13, 2010 at 4:05pm
Im so glad that they are not a major upgrade over the 5xxx series. I would have gotten burned after buying my HD 5870 otherise
aferrara50
October 13, 2010 at 3:20pm
so ATi doesn't even try to counter the gtx480.... this is disappointing... only 1gb gfx memory in the 6870? what am I buying??? a budget card?!?!? I think I'll stick with my 3 gtx480s at 950 core. These 6870s better be cheap with only 1gb of vrm.
aviaggio
October 13, 2010 at 7:58pm
The 6900 series will be the counter for the GTX 480s. These new cards are MIDRANGE. Yeah, you heard me, MIDRANGE. These are the Barts chips. The Cayman chips are going to be the high end cards that will smoke anything Nvidia has.
crazitrain02
October 13, 2010 at 12:12pm
Even though it will drop the price of the 5xxx series cards, I probably still won't upgrade from my Crossfire 4870's right now.... I might for Christmas though :)
s3th
October 13, 2010 at 12:00pm
Whats a good use for the mini-display ports? Also if the 5970 still runs easily at 700$, are these likley to cost a little more or less. Is their an article somewhere about the Barts Core and Cayman Cores?
Im building a new computer when I get out of this crap hole in Afghanistan, might be looking into one of these for the new build.
Thursday
October 13, 2010 at 2:46pm
First off, thanks for putting your arse on the line for us back here in North America.
As for your questions, these cards are reported to be in line with the performace of the current 5850 and 5870. The main advantage to the Barts part is supposed to be better overclocking and/or better TDP (IE: Lower power draw and heat dissipation). There has been some speculation that the parts are actually going to be a little bit slower than the current 5850 and 5870 but this is based off of preliminary runs with engineering samples so it could be the result of unrefined board designs or something.
Long story short, if you want performance in the 5970 range then wait for the Cayman based parts closer to Christmas season.
FoamysKing
October 13, 2010 at 10:56am
been waiting for these to truly finish my new pc with eyefinity
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