AMD Radeon HD 6850 review

The new 6000 series cards haven’t quite made the splash we expected. Plus, as the smaller sibling of the pair, the HD 6850 could easily be overlooked. However, just like the more-powerful HD 6870, this card provides an excellent balance of price and performance.

It may be a cut-down version of the HD 6870, but the HD 6850 still provides plenty of graphical power. In terms of pricing it’s on a par with the old HD 5830, and is around the same price as the cheaper of the Nvidia’s GTX 460 cards. In terms of performance, however, it easily outshines both these – in fact it’s pretty much the equal of the old HD 5850, which costs around £200.

The card’s GPU and architecture are largely identical to its larger sibling. There are less stream processors however, down from 1,120 to 960, and though the memory bus remains at 256-bit, memory speed is reduced slightly to 1,000MHz. The big change is in the core clock speed of the GPU, which drops by 125Mhz to 775MHz.

Despite these differences, we have to look to our tougher tests to separate this card from the HD 6870. Running Crysis at 1,920×1,080 with 4x anti-aliasing gave us a score of 42.6fps, just 4fp below the HD 5870. Our DX11 Stalker test showed a larger gap, with the HD 6850 producing 33.3fps, compared to 38.8fps from the more powerful card – it’s not a huge gap but is just enough to justify the £45 price hike for the more powerful card.

The HD 6850 scored higher than the GTX 460 1GB is all of our tests, yet it costs significantly less, being available for just a few pounds more than the GTX 460 768MB, which it completely outclasses. It’s a great buy for any gamer who hasn’t upgraded their graphics card for a while.