We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: Intel, ASRock, Kingston, Mittoni, Noctua and Corsair.

We'll be looking at the HD 6850 against a number of cards which include the HD 5770, HD 5850 and HD 5870. For the NVIDIA side of things we've included the very popular GTX 460 which has become the card to buy in its respective price category.

There's going to be a few things we're looking at today when it comes to our testing. The first is we want to see if the Tessellation performance has become betterl this was one area NVIDIA was a lot stronger in. We'll see this most notably under the Heaven benchmark. The other thing we want to know is whether or not AA performance increased. When we turned AA on with the HD 5000 series the performance was hit very hard and we saw NVIDIA really perform stronger in this situation.

Finally, we want to see if AMD continue to have the edge at the highest resolution. At 2560 x 1600 the HD 5000 series performed better than the NVIDIA counterpart most the time. We want to see if AMD can continue to perform strong at this resolution. Of course, we also want to see where exactly the model sits compared to the GTX 460 and the previous generation 5000 series cards.

Let's get started!

3DMark Vantage

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.0.1
Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com
Product Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmarkvantage/
Buy It Here

3DMark Vantage is the new industry standard PC gaming performance benchmark from Futuremark, newly designed for Windows Vista and DirectX10. It includes two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, and support for the latest hardware.

3DMark Vantage is based on a completely new rendering engine, developed specifically to take full advantage of DirectX10, the new graphics API from Microsoft.

Under Vantage we can see the new HD 6850 clearly sits ahead of the HD 5770. Here we see it sits a little behind the HD 5850. Compared to the GTX 460 which is taking advantage of PhysX, it also sits a little behind, but not by much.