With the Radeon HD 5800 series and its smaller offshoots AMD celebrated the victory over arch-rival Nvidia DirectX 11, the Fermi architecture major problems revealed not long ago and the yellow of the egg was. But the success Of the AMD Radeon HD starts much earlier, to be exact in 2005 with the publication of the 360th XboX For the first time has a graphics card with fully programmable units, which could take depending on the purpose of tasks. The console is a success, and (then) ATi sets about to develop a similar graphic card for normal computer.
But the resulting generation of HD 2000 is a flop - a mistake in Ringbusspeichersystem gives a dramatic performance hit, so that only the smaller cards are due to its high acceleration to a certain popularity. Nvidia knows at this time no such problems: Just one has moved with the G80 chip giant raised the bar a due piece, ATi is a lost cause. Nevertheless, we stick to the architecture, and revised them several times. Over time, created so the HD 3000, HD 4000, HD 5000, and now the HD 6000 generations. Always the goal was the same: a high, if not maximum performance at a reasonable price - hit a sweet spot.
Finally, the Cypress chip, however, was not what the customers wanted. A doubling of the execution units did indeed a significant increase in performance, but also the power and hunger, the price is suffering from the now almost huge with its 2.15 billion transistors. Thus began one to launch a cost-effective refresh of the popular series, which should be much cheaper due to a better chip and existing technology. This strategy has paid off completely by AMD, so we now have HD 6850 hold in our hands, which is to deliver at a price of less than 180 € the almost same performance as the 100 € more expensive predecessor HD 5850th But what exactly has changed, and how is the performance from start to finish? These and other questions is the current review, and we hope to have made your taste.