Introduction

Today, AMD launched its Radeon HD 6800 series graphics processors, with all its AIB partners bringing out their designs. If you haven't read our review of the Radeon HD 6870 already, please do so, to understand what the card is worth in its single GPU form, it may also clear some lingering misunderstandings about the product and its naming scheme, which you may have.

The Radeon HD 6870 supports 2-way AMD CrossFire multi-GPU technology, which allows you to upscale performance by pairing two HD 6870 cards of any other make, you can also pair an HD 6870 with a HD 6850, which may not yield the maximum performance increase but provides an additional upgrade path.



In this review we're going to show you what to expect from Radeon HD 6870 CrossFire, a roughly $480 solution at present. Since AMD got off on the premise of promising us Radeon HD 5800 series kind of performance at very affordable price points, it will be interesting to see if HD 6870 CrossFire can surprise us.

Test System

Benchmark scores in other reviews are only comparable when this exact same configuration is used.

• All video card results were obtained on this exact system with the exact same configuration.
• All games were set to their highest quality setting

Each benchmark was tested at the following settings and resolution:

• 1024 x 768, No Anti-aliasing. This is a standard resolution without demanding display settings.
• 1280 x 1024, 2x Anti-aliasing. Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens today (17" - 19"). A bit of eye candy turned on in the drivers.
• 1680 x 1050, 4x Anti-aliasing. Most common widescreen resolution on larger displays (19" - 22"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
• 1920 x 1200, 4x Anti-aliasing. Typical widescreen resolution for large displays (22" - 26"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
• 2560 x 1600, 4x Anti-aliasing. Highest possible resolution for commonly available displays (30"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.

Aliens vs. Predator

Aliens vs. Predator is based on a merger of the Aliens and the Predators franchise: two legendary alien species that are in conflict with each other, fighting to the death with human marines caught in between. The first person shooter game was developed by Rebellion Studios, who also developed the first AVP PC title and released in February 2010. It was one of the first DirectX 11 games with support for new features like Tesselation, which is why AMD heavily promoted it at the time of their DX 11 card launches. We used the AVP benchmark utility with tesselation and advanced DX11 shadows enabled.