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AMD Radeon HD 6850 1,024MB in CrossFireX review

by Tarinder Sandhu on 28 October 2010, 09:10 4.5

Tags: ASUSTeK (TPE:2357), AMD (NYSE:AMD), Sapphire, HiS Graphics

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Double Team

Our launch-day review of the Radeon HD 6850 and Radeon HD 6870 GPUs indicated that AMD had put renewed pressure on arch-rival NVIDIA to slash the prices of its competing mid-range graphics cards.

The numbers showed that the HD 6850's performance was roughly analogous with a GeForce GTX 460 1,024MB, while the HD 6870 fell just short of the price-reduced GeForce GTX 470.

But where NVIDIA has historically held an advantage is with multi-GPU SLI performance, where cobbling two, or more, cards together provided better scaling than with AMD's competing CrossFireX technology.

NVIDIA reasserted its SLI credentials with the GeForce 4x0 GPUs, bringing near-perfect scaling with the GTX 460 cards and tempting users into looking at two mid-range cards instead of one expensive high-end model.

AMD is also bringing some full-on CrossFireX mojo to the Radeon HD 6850, or so the company claims. We've run our benchmark suite with some tasty multi-GPU formations, so head on over to see the results.