Testing:

For comparison purposes, the ASUS EAH6870 1GB Radeon HD6870 will be tested against a Sapphire 1GB Vapor-X Radeon HD5870 and a Sapphire 1GB Radeon HD5850. The HD5870 card is itself factory overclocked on the GPU and memory, while the HD5850 follows the reference design detailed in the table on page two of this review. These two cards should provide a good reference for where the HD6870 fits in to the new world order of Radeon cards.

3DMark Vantage (Performance):

FutureMark's 3DMark Vantage will be the first test to consider, and it will be run in two different modes. The complete set of tests were first executed in Performance mode, which uses a 1280x1024 resolution. We'll take a look at just the GPU and Total scores, and higher values are better for each set of results.



Checking the GPU scores above shows that at "stock" speeds, the HD6870 lags behind the HD5870 by a fairly small margin, but when overclocked it surges in to the lead.



The total score follows the trend seen in the GPU test results, with an overclock pushing the HD6870 past the HD5870 in the fight for top honors. It was mentioned earlier in the review that the HD6870 was expected to fall between an HD5850 and an HD5870 in terms of performance, and here we see that (although it does fall much closer to an HD5870 than a HD5850).