Radeon 6800 Series Launches, Targets GeForce GTX 460

From DailyTech: Computer gaming advanced dramatically last year when ATI ushered in the DirectX 11 age with the Radeon HD 5870 graphics card. The introduction of the DisplayPort connector and Eyefinity multi-monitor support meant games could be played with many more pixels, leading to a better visual experience. Windows 7 was just about to launch, and gamers were eager for some major hardware upgrades.

However, production difficulties at TSMC meant that AMD's graphics division only shipped half the GPUs they were hoping to during the busy holiday shopping season. They still managed to sell over two million DX11 chips, but could've sold a lot more.

The original plans for this year's launch were for an entire lineup of 32nm GPUs, but TSMC scrapped their 32nm development in favor of the 28nm process. ATI took their 32nm designs and rejigged it for their third generation of 40nm products, codenamed Northern Islands. The high end consists of Barts, Cayman, and Antilles.

The new Radeon 6800 series uses the new Barts GPU and is comprised of the Radeon HD 6870 (Barts XT) and the Radeon HD 6850 (Barts Pro). The new chip is designed for slightly lower performance at a much lower cost. At 255 mm2, it is 25% smaller than the 334 mm2 Cypress chips it will replace.

A new seventh generation hardware tessellation unit doubles the performance of the Radeon 5000 series through improved thread management and buffering. Anisotropic Filtering has been enhanced by using a refined algorithm that addresses visible discontinuities in very noisy textures. It also allows for smoother transitions between filter levels. The third generation Unified Video Decoder (UVD3) adds MPEG-4 decoding for DivX and xVid, as well as Blu-Ray 3D.

Both cards sport a s dual-slot design and provide 2 mini-DisplayPort 1.2 connectors, 1 HDMI 1.4a connector, and 2 DVI ports. This allows the 6800 series to support up to four monitors natively.

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