AMD Radeon HD 6870 benchmark performance predicted

Each generation of graphic card is faster than the previous one, but the real question is ‘How much faster?’. KitGuru has been up late at night, drinking with experts and ‘outsiders who claim to be in the know’. We’re ready to stick our flag in the ground on Radeon HD 6870 performance. KitGuru friends, prepare to smile knowingly. KitGuru doubters, sharpen your knives and prepare to stab our backs.

Graphics processing speed can be improved by a huge number of factors. It’s a bit like Formula One cars. Often one team spends ages developing a series of small improvements – each of which gives them a small boost – only to find that the competition made one single change and blasted to the front of the grid (we’re thinking ‘rear diffuser’). The next generation of Radeons is several months away, but it’s looking good for the graphics division of CPU giant AMD. Let’s break the future down into manageable blocks and see what might be possible by Christmas.

What’s all this Tick-Tock stuff?
With processors (CPU and GPU), the most common ‘diffuser advantage’ is simply moving to a new process sooner. The new process will be smaller (die shrink), reduce hot-spots and the effect of aggressor wires etc. Most importantly, in the case of graphics, it will give you more GPUs per wafer.

Back in the disastrous days of the R600/Radeon 2000 series, nVidia was scoring clear wins at almost every price point. The entry level Radeon 2400, however, had one thing going for it. ATI managed to make it smaller and cheaper than the nearest nVidia product. The difference was less than $5, but in creating that small price advantage, ATI won a huge amount of business with the world’s biggest system builders like Lenovo. All of our Far East system builder friends are famous for ‘tick box marketing’ and their inability to ‘say no to a saving’.

Will AMD be able to move to 28nm for the launch of the Radeon 6000 series in Q4?  Hard to tell, but it is unlikely it would want to. In the past, both nVidia and ATI have been burned by trying to move a complex technology to a new process. At the same time, the world leader in this kind of manufacturing has a simple strategy called Tick-Tock.

In its own words, Intel creates a new process (i.e. a shrink) which gives a better version of an existing processor. They call this the ‘Tick’. Then Intel unveils a new processor architecture, which is normally much more powerful. They call that the ‘Tock’.  The result is a series of solid, predictable steps. It’s a very simple strategy but, most importantly, it works.

Will AMD try to beat the Tick-Tock?
Looking at the complexity of each new generation of graphic cards, we can’t see AMD wanting to take any huge risk in bringing them to market.
So how can you know for sure whether AMD’s Radeon HD 6000 series will launch on 28nm?……….Simple.
AMD’s execs will make (or not) an announcement at their next quarterly briefing. The announcement will be that AMD has moved a small/simple Radeon HD 5000-series card to a new 28nm process. In addition to whetting Wall Street’s appetite for AMD shares, it would also become a true ‘company milestone’.

If there’s one thing that KitGuru’s learned over the years, it’s that semi-conductor companies LOVE laying claim to any ‘world first’ available. You can almost imagine the CTOs getting armoured up and laying claim to the new lands.

Sir Eric Demers seen claiming DX11 in the face of extreme competition and technical complexity

Timeline
“Why has the 5000-series taken so long to re-spin?” we hear KitGuru readers ask. Response? “Lack of DX11 competition”. Without stiff competition for so long, we’d guess that AMD has gone straight past a simple re-spin and will be making significant changes to the architecture.

Think about it this way, even before a new product launches the manufacturer already knows what the weak points are. They will know which parts work and which are busted. Remember, GPU projects don’t run in series, there are strong elements of parallel development. The Radeon HD 6000 series will have kicked off a long time before the Radeon 5000 launched. Known issues with the Radeon 5000′s basic design will have been addresses, alongside a number of issues that AMD will have found with a new product AFTER then went into production.

From the launch of the Radeon HD 5870 last September, AMD was probably in position to do some kind of re-spin around the CeBIT timeframe (March 2010 – 6 months after launch). However, with little/no DX11 pressure from nVidia, development would have carried on. At the same time, the ATI engineering teams would have been able to analyse the complete Fermi architecture in detail. That analysis lets the Developer Relations team understand what kind of games would work best on Fermi hardware.

If AMD had launched around Computex (June 2010 – 9 months after the initial Radeon HD 5870 launch), then a lot of changes could have been made.  Right now, it’s looking like the Radeon HD 6000 series (Northern Islands) will launch in Q4 2010, toward the end of this year.

That means AMD’s engineers will have had more than a year to work on the new design. They would have also had several months to analyse and counter any Fermi advantages in the big games that will launch in Q4. That’s an incredible amount of time. So what have they spent that time on and how will the changes manifest themselves?

Zardon's recurring dream centred on rescuing Radeon 6870 from a place called Danger Den

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Radeon HD 6870 Benchmark Prediction
From KitGuru’s first experience with the GTX480 at CeBIT 2010,  it seemed clear that nVidia’s biggest win would be in ultra-complex tessellation situations. KitGuru Labs’ full, in-depth testing with the GTX480 has proven that correct.
Turning the tessellation sections of the Unigine benchmark to ‘crazy difficult mode’ allows the GTX480 to pull away from it’s Radeon competitors by some margin. Unfortunately for nVidia, none of its TWIMTBP games have been released yet and gamers don’t play benchmarks.
Those games are coming however and they’re likely to be hitting the streets around the Christmas holidays. On that basis, KitGuru predicts a massive increase in AMD’s tessellation capability to coincide with the launch of heavily tessellated DX11 games.

All of that preamble brings us to the main event. Can KitGuru accurately predict how fast the  AMD radeon HD 6870 graphics card will be when it launches just in time for Christmas 2010?

We’ve tried out best.

AMD Radeon HD 6870 Benchmark Performance against GeForce GTX480 in 3DMark Vantage?

KitGuru says: Are we correct? Are we way out? With the AMD Radeon HD 6870 sail past 23,000? Would you bet against our prediction? Come on KitGuru followers – you must have an opinion. Also, there is the real question to consider, “Is there any end to this development?”.  Each generation of card seems to deliver more performance that we could ever have wished for. Then, within 6 months, we’re looking at the next big thing and all of the previous records lie smashed on the floor. OK, we can’t help it, we’re already drooling and can’t wait to get our undeserving Ultra White Lab Mittens on the Radeon HD 6870 so we can torture test it and render our verdict. Roll on Q4!

Tell us we’re wrong over here in the KitGuru forum