AMD officially unveils the Radeon 6800-series of graphics ca

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AMD only just began teasing their new Radeon HD 6800-series graphics cards a couple of days ago, but now they’re already ready to serve up the details of their latest line of polygon-blasting GPUs. Meet the AMD Radeon HD 6870 and AMD Radeon 6850.
Here’s what we’re looking at. As far as features, both cards pack a pair of DVI outlets, a full-sized HDMI out port, and two mini DisplayPort jacks. You’ll find each card supporting ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology as well as second-generation DirectX 11 architecture.
They are beefy cards, but they’ve got a consumer’s wallet in mind: AMD is starting these cards off at just $200. You can also expect the AMD Radeon 6800-series to start creeping into notebooks down the line, as the company has said they plan to bring the chipset to notebooks shortly down the line.
The only problem? These aren’t good cards for gaming. According to Hardware Heaven, who described gaming performance as a “disaster” on the Radeons they reviewed. If what you’re looking for is some solid GPUs for Blu-Ray and home video the 6800-series looks right up your alley.
On further inspection it seems that Hardware Heaven’s comments relating to gaming being a disaster were aimed squarely at the performance of 3D sterescopic gaming. As for general gaming performance the cards performed well with Hardware Heaven concluding:
Performance of the two cards was identical and each was more than a match for the GTX 470 which dropped in price yesterday in advance of this launch. There are of course a few benefits to purchasing a Radeon over the GTX 470, support for HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort 1.2 being a couple. The ability to power more than two screens being another and of course support for 7.1 audio is another feature which will appeal to those interested in the media performance of the 6870.
 
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