AMD Radeon HD 6870

When it was announced in late 2009, the ATI Radeon HD 5870 ushered in a trifecta of key graphics-card innovations. Along with the concurrently launched Radeon HD 5850, it was the first card to support DirectX 11 for improved graphics in next-generation games. With DisplayPort, DVI, and HDMI connectors, it allowed users to connect up to three screens to one card for more-immersive gaming. Plus, its impressive raw performance made it the most powerful single-chip graphics card on the market—until, that is, rival Nvidia launched its first DirectX 11 card, the beastly GeForce GTX 480, in early 2010.

Now, roughly a year after the launch of the Radeon HD 5870, AMD has put to bed the ATI brand that it has been using since acquiring the graphics-chip company in 2006, and it's rolling out a pair of second-generation DirectX 11 graphics cards: the AMD Radeon HD 6870, and the AMD Radeon HD 6850. While the more-mainstream Radeon HD 5700-series graphics cards will continue to be manufactured and sold, AMD says that the HD 6800-series cards will replace its Radeon HD 5800 series. This last move may seem surprising once we get to our performance-benchmark tests, but first let’s tackle what’s new with these cards.

First of all, with 3D movies breaking records in theaters and 3D HDTVs finding their way into early adopters’ living rooms, AMD has finally added support for true 3D (in this case, stereoscopic 3D) gaming with this latest line of cards, as well as support for 3D Blu-ray. Nvidia has had its own GeForce 3D Vision kit available for its graphics cards since early 2009. But while Nvidia’s 3D technology uses active (that is, powered) shutter glasses, necessitating expensive, bulky frames and a USB breakout box to make it all work, ATI’s 3D-gaming technology, dubbed HD3D, uses passive glasses, which should be less costly and less bulky. This is the same technology used in a few recent 3D-centric monitors, such as the Zalman ZM-M240W Trimon display we tested this summer. (Some 3D HDTVs are also supported).