Table of Contents:
• 1GB GDDR5 memory
• 790MHz Engine Clock
• 1000MHz Memory Clock (GDDR5)
• 128GB/second memory bandwidth (maximum)
• 1.75 TeraFLOPs compute power
• Double slot form factor
• TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture
• 960 Stream Processors
• 48 Texture Units
• 128 Z/Stencil ROP Units
• 32 Color ROP Units
• PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface
• Eye-Definition graphics
• DirectX 11 Support
• Shader Model 5.0
• DirectCompute 11
• Programmable hardware tessellation unit
• Accelerated multi-threading
• HDR Texture compression
• Order-Independent transparency
• OpenGL 4.1 support
• Up to 24x multi-sample and super-sample anti-aliasing modes
• Adaptive anti-aliasing
• Morphological anti-aliasing
• 16x angle independent anisotropic filtering
• 128-bit floating point HDR rendering
• AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology
• Independent resolutions refresh rates, color controls and video overlays
• Display grouping
• Combine multiple displays to behave like a single large display
• AMD EyeSpeed visual acceleration
• AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing technology
• OpenCL 1.1
• DirectCompute 11
• Accelerated video encoding, transcoding and upscaling
• UVD3 dedicated playback accelerator
• MPEG-4 AVC/H.264
• VC-1
• MPEG-1 (SD and HD)
• Multi-View CODEC (MVC)
• MPEG-4 part 2 (DivX, Xvid)
• Adobe Flash
• Enhanced Video Quality Features
• Advanced post-processing and scaling
• Dynamic contrast enhancement and color correction
• Brighter whites processing (Blue Stretch)
• Independent video gamma control
• Dynamic video range control
• Dual-stream HD (1080p) playback support
• DXVA 1.0 and 2.0 support
• AMD HD3D technology
• Stereoscopic 3D display/glasses support
• Blu-ray 3D support
• Stereoscopic 3D gaming
• 3rd party Stereoscopic 3D software support
• AMD CrossfireX multi-GPU technology
• Dual-GPU scaling
• Cutting edge integrated display support
• DisplayPort 1.2
• Maximum resolution 2560x1600 per display
• Multi-Stream Transport
• 21.6Gbps bandwidth
• High bit-rate audio
• HDMI 1.4a with Stereoscopic 3D Frame Packing Format
• Max resolution 1920x1200
• Dual-link DVI with HDCP
• Maximum resolution 2560x1600
The new ASUS HD 6850 DirectCU is based upon AMD’s Northern Island architecture, with a chip codenamed Barts Pro. The Barts chip starts off with AMD’s familiar 16 SP SIMD which is capable of four operations a clock plus a Multiply ADD operation a clock for five processors per SP. So each SIMD unit has 80 Stream Processors. .
The HD 6850 has two less SIMDs with 12 each having 80 SPs for a total of 960 SPs. The card has 48 texture units, 32 ROPs and 128 Z/Stencil ROPs. AMD says that their HD6850 card can do 1.75 TeraFLOPS/second of computing power compared to the 2 TeraFLOPS a second on the HD 6870. The fill rate of the card is 24.8 Gigapixels/second.
ASUS has clocked their HD 6850 card at 790MHz which is a slight increase in clock speed versus the AMD reference card design. The key takeaway here is the card should be priced at the same range as a reference design card at 775MHz. ASUS does have their own features including the Extreme Design features on their card.
One thing that ASUS has been pushing with their motherboards and video cards is their Xtreme Design features such as Solid Capacitors and EZ DIMM installation on their motherboards. Video cards like the HD 6850 DirectCU also support their own brand of features like their DirectCU cooler, a dustproof fan, the GPU guard and a Brace guard.
If you know what the Periodic table symbol for copper is, you would realize that ASUS has put a copper plate directly on the graphics chip with heatpipes leading out from the plate to the heatsink. This results in lower operating temperatures as copper is one of the best metals for conducting heat. The second feature is the dust-proof fan that prevents dust buildup and lowers heat. The GPU Guard and Brace Guard protect the card from bending due to the weight inside a case.
The HD 6850 has a memory speed of 4.0GHz clock speed using a 256-bit memory bus. The HD 6850 has a memory bandwidth of 128GB/second. Now mind you this card is targeted at the sweet spot of the gaming market in between $179.99 with the HD 6850. This should offer near the same performance of the 5850 for a lower price point on a smaller die. The ASUS card has a clock speed of 790MHz which is 15MHz faster than the reference design.
One improvement AMD has made with their HD 6 series is the improved Tessellation performance. The HD 6870 and 6850 has up to 2x the performance in Tessellation over the HD 5870 series in differing situations. This means improved performance in DirectX 11 games over the previous generation as games like HAWX2 which uses a lot of tessellation throughout the game and Aliens Versus Predator which uses tessellation throughout will benefit from increased performance in this regard.
3D is really taking off with the release of 3D Televisions, and Blu-ray 3D. NVIDIA introduced 3D Vision last year to their graphics cards to support 3D gaming on while using stereoscopic glasses and a 120Hz monitor. AMD introduced support for their version of 3D with the HD 5 series but hasn’t gotten much traction. With the launch of the HD 6 series AMD is moving towards bringing support for Blu-ray 3D support and stereoscopic 3D support for games with over 35 DisplayPort products , 45 validated and ready titles with hundreds of compatible games and affordable Single-Link DP to DVI adapters to allow for stereoscopic 3D on a budget.
Anti-aliasing improves the image quality of a game by removing the jaggies and image artifacts from a game or application. Current methods of anti-aliasing include SuperSample anti-aliasing which ups the internal resolution by the number of samples and down samples the resulting image. Multi-Sample anti-aliasing each pixel at the edge of a polygon is sampled multiple times. For each sample pass a slight offset is applied to all screen coordinates. By averaging all of these samples the result is a smoother transition of the colors at the edges. The number of samples taken for each pixel indicates the level of multisampling, so 4 xs is 4 samples from each pixel at the edge of a polygon. AMD is introducing a new feature with the HD 6 series called Morphological Anti-aliasing. MLAA adds a post-processing pass on the fully rendered image and anti-alias the sharp edges using DirectCompute. All AMD DirectX 11 cards support this new technique from the HD 5450 to the HD 6990 inclusive.
