Review – AMD Radeon HD 6850: Same Technology, Lower Price

Conclusions

The AMD Radeon HD 6850 retails at around US$ 179, a good US$ 60 cheaper compared to the HD 6870. That price point puts it nearly head on against the 768 MB version of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 460, which sells for US$ 169 (down from US$ 199, prior to the launch of HD 6000 series) as well as factory-overclocked GeForce GTS 450 models currently selling for around US$ 170.

For a graphics card of its class, the AMD Radeon HD 6850 is reasonably fast. That alone should make it worth the money. It won’t keep up with the HD 6870 though, due to smaller amounts of texture units, stream processor, and lower working frequencies. Still, the Radeon HD 6850 managed to consistently produce more than 30 FPS in all our game tests, except Metro 2033. In DiRT 2, the frame rate stayed well above 60 FPS. As for DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 games, this card had no trouble rendering the graphics at 60+ FPS.

Performance wise, Radeon HD 6850 is roughly similar with GeForce GTX 460 768 MB. In DiRT 2, the GTX 460 is slightly faster than the HD 6850, while in most other games the latter keeps up or even takes over the lead.

The sub-US$ 200 graphics card market is one of the most important segments for graphics card manufacturers since it contributes a significant amount to overall sales. Given the current offerings from both NVIDIA and AMD that are specifically aimed at this segment, things are really heating up as of late. This ever-tightening competition proved to be beneficial for the consumers because there are now plenty of choices to go for, not to mention the subsequent effect that usually accompanies this kind of rivalry: reduced prices. The mainstream graphics card market has never been this exciting!