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.

The lineup of cards we test the HD 6870 against will be almost identical to that of what was seen in the Sapphire HD 6850 review with the only difference being the HD 5770 has been dropped in this instance.

What that means is we'll have the HD 6850, HD 5850, HD 5870 and GTX 460 OC in our tests here. The main things we want to answer are how much faster is the HD 6870 over the HD 6850? How does the HD 6870 go against the GTX 460? And how does the HD 6870 sit against the HD 5850 and HD 5870?

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 that the HD 6870 offers a nice little boost over the HD 6850. It manages to also outperform the HD 5850 and even the GTX 460 which is making use of its PhysX abilities here.