AMD Radeon 6870 benchmarks show performance improvement - and loss

The launch of AMD's new graphics cards is preceded by a few leaked screenshots, showing mixed performance in 3DMark Vantage.

The launch of AMD's upcoming graphics family, the Radeon 6xxx series, has been tainted by the usual leakages of information from chinese websites - showing the supposed 6870 'Cayman XT' design a few weeks ago - and now showing how fast it is.

A screenshot hit the internet at the chinese forums PCInLife, where a screenshot of a 3DMark Vantage Extreme run shows a score of X11963. For comparison's sake a single 5870 generally scores just over 9000 points, suggesting the card may be up to 33% faster than the current generation.

The Vantage score appears alongside a GPU-z readout that shows the core clock as 850MHz, in line with the earlier leaked specification slide, though it also shows a phenomenally increased memory speed of 1600MHz - in other words, GDDR5 chips running at an effective quad-pumped 6400MHz.

The first leaked PCInLife screenshot, showing higher Vantage performance.

However high this may be it seems that another chinese website, Xfastest, is also claiming to have a 6870 card. Theirs is clocked higher on the core by 50MHz compared to the leaked slide, though a memory speed of 1050MHz matches the slide perfectly.

Even stranger is the performance of the 6870, which Xfastest seem to bench as:

3DMark Vantage performance preset results P16270 points and X7538, 3DMark06 score of 19480.

It seems that their card does worse in 3DMark Vantage by 19%! This is definitely a strange result, considering that the whole point of a new series is to improve on performance.

The situation becomes even more confused when VR-Zone noticed PCInLife forums throwing in more benchmark results, this time from Crysis and Unigine Heaven V2.1. This shows an almost-doubling in performance compared to our own Unigine testing.

The second leaked PCInLife screenshot, hinting at more powerful dedicated tessellation units.

So what can be taken away from this? Assuming that the Xfastest result is wrong, due to dodgy drivers or simply being faked, it appears that the 6870 will be roughly 30% faster in standard benchmarks and games as we predicted - and in heavily tessellated environments it will have a serious boost.

Atomic has a few 6870 cards heading our way so we'll find out exactly what the difference is. Stay tuned for more testing and inevitable leaking in the meantime!