One word aptly describes AMD’s latest Radeon HD 6800 series GPUs: refinement

Reviews on the just-released second generation DX11 Radeon cards are out.

The gist:  solid performance, lower cost, best-in-class energy efficiency, and an unmatched feature set, including full DirectX 11 support, Eyefinity multi-display technology, HD3D stereoscopic technology, Unified Video Decoder 3, great CrossFire GPU scaling, and DisplayPort 1.2 (enabling multiple displays at different resolutions, refresh rates, and color depth using Eyefinity). The cards also support both DirectCompute and OpenCL!  KitGuru offers a comprehensive review of the Saphire Radeon HD6850 and HD6870 (summary here).

HotHardware says it most succinctly:
“One word aptly describes AMD’s latest Radeon HD 6800 series GPUs: refinement.  AMD’s goal was to drive cost and power consumption out of their architecture, along with enhancing its capabilities, features and image quality in next-generation DX11 gaming engines.  To that end we’d say the company has succeeded masterfully. With the Radeon HD 6870 at $239 MSRP, gamers can enjoy virtually all the performance and then some of AMD previous generation $299 card, but with lower power consumption and better support for DX11 features like tessellation and seemingly better multi-GPU scaling.

The Radeon line is for consumer cards and does not offer the accuracy or reliability or performance of the FirePro line.  But the new GPU’s bode well for future FirePro professional graphic cards. More value with less energy consumption ( performance per Watt) is exactly the direction things should be heading in the professional DCC and CAD world.

And just because the video was so much fun, I am posting a promo video for the XFX Radeon 6800 implementations.  I want that Eyefinity monitor setup!