text: AMD's Radeon 6800 catapults DX11 gaming to new levels of realism | TG Daily
  AMD's Radeon 6800 catapults DX11 gaming to new levels of realism Posted October 21, 2010 - 22:52
  AMD has introduced its long-awaited Radeon HD 6800 series which promises to catapult PC gaming to new levels of realism. Indeed, the 6800 (Barts) GPUs tap AMD's second-gen DX11 capable architecture to provide more than 30 percent greater game performance compared to competing graphics cards. In addition, the 6800 series offers significantly improved tessellation execution. "Remember, excessive use of tessellation is often inefficient for today's GPUs - as it leads to poor utilization of rasterizers, overshading and an over-abundance of polygon edges. Clearly, the brute force approach is wasteful," AMD exec Eric Demers told TG Daily.
  "But the 6800 lineup tessellates the right way, as it focuses on the most efficient usage models. You ideally want ~16 pixels per polygon, as this facilitates the best balance of image quality and performance."
  According to Demers, the 6800's adaptive tessellation achieves optimal quality and performance because it uses high levels only for objects close to the viewer, on silhouette edges, or in areas with fine detail.
  "And of course, the cards use low levels for distant or simple objects to improve performance and avoid geometry aliasing problems," he said. Demers added that the 6800 also supports morphological anti-aliasing, which includes a post-process filtering technique accelerated with DirectCompute. "As such, the 6800 lineup is capable of delivering full-scene anti-aliasing that is not limited to polygon edges or alpha-tested surfaces. "In addition, the GPUs offer improved Anisotropic Filtering via a refined algorithm that addresses visible discontinuities in very noisy textures. This results in smoother transitions between filter levels, while ensuring full performance and angle independence."
  Other noteable specs include: 6870 ($239)
  2.0 TFLOPs of compute power
  900MHz core clock speed
  1GB GDDR5 frame buffer
  256 bit, 4.2 Gbps memory width/speed
  151W/19W load/idle board power
  255 mm die size
  1.7 billion transistors
  900 million polygons/sec geometry throughput
  14 SIMD engines 56 texture units
  2 x miniDP (DP 1.2), HDMI 1.4a, 2x DVI (DL-DVI+SL-DVI)
  6850 ($179) 1.5 TFLOPs of compute power
  775 MHz core clock speed
  256 bit, 4.0 Gbps memory width/speed
  127W/19W load/idle board power
  2 x miniDP (DP 1.2), HDMI 1.4a, 2x DVI (DL-DVI+SL-DVI) View the discussion thread.
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