The AMD HD6850 1120/960 Shader Debate – comparisons

Sadly AMD's HD6850 launch was marred a little by European pricing issues and again later when it was found out that some publications had a version of the card with 1120 unified shaders. Some of the early HD 6850 samples were built with pre-production ASICs that have the higher number of 1120 Stream Processors enabled, like the HD 6870.  These ASICs were supplied by the manufacturer as Pro (HD 6850) parts together with a BIOS for them running at Pro clocks.

There has been somewhat of a frenzy online saying that all reviews are worthless and that everyone needs to reissue their content.  Thankfully our own testing wasn't tainted by the shader discrepancies and the results today show just how important these missing 160 unified shaders can be in terms of outright performance.

So how badly tainted are the reviews featuring HD6850's with 1120 shaders onboard?

The synthetic tests are improved considerably, especially Tessmark when running at moderate settings (a 36.8% increase). Alien V Predator and Lost Planet 2 also show huge gains (9.6 and 12.2%) from the extra 160 unified shaders.

KitGuru says: The HD6850 and HD6870 are both worthy gold award winners, and we hope this article today has helped clear up performance differences between the cards. AMD partners seem genuinely embarassed by this mistake and are offering to reissue samples to publications who wish to retest.

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