First HD 6870 benchmarks leak out

In recent days, several suspected benchmark results of an HD 6800 card have surfaced on the PCinlife forum. It would be an HD 6870, which according to other rumors will see the light of day in November.

The successor to the HD 5000 series would be launched this year. Unlike the HD 5000 series, the first benchmark results have already been leaked this time, although it is still questionable whether the results are real. An HD 6870 has already been tested on the Chinese forum PCinlife using Crysis, 3DMark Vantage and the Heaven 2.1 benchmark. The Heaven 2.1 benchmark is the most eye-catching, as AMD would have made significant gains in it with the HD 6870. The HD 6870 achieved a score of 922 points, while an HD 5870 doesn’t even break the 600-point mark. The GTX 480 also has to compete with the HD 6870 in that benchmark.

In 3DMark Vantage, the HD 6870 scored 24,499 and 12,092 points respectively in the Performance and Extreme settings. It is unclear which CPU was used, which has consequences for the meaning of the total score. In comparison, an HD 5870 scores 18,300 points with a Core i7 920 clocked at 3.8GHz, while an HD 5970 scores over 25,000 points. The last was tested with Crysis, which achieved an average of 43.55 fps.

A striking detail is that the memory of the HD 6870, according to the gpu-z screenshots, would have a clock speed of 1600MHz, or 6400MHz effectively. The GPU itself would be clocked at 850MHz. Despite the benchmarks of the HD 6870, the HD 67×0 line should be released first in October, followed by the HD 68×0 series in November. The HD 6970, the successor to the HD 5970, would then appear in December. The latter would have two full-fledged Cayman chips, the chips that will be used for the HD 6870.