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The AMD HD6850 1120/960 Shader Debate – comparisons

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

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  • Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
  • Multicore CPU support
  • Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
  • Powerful C++ API
  • Comprehensive performance profiling system
  • Flexible XML-based data structures

Once again we can see a 6 percent increase between the card models when we change to the 1120 unified shader model.

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16 comments

  1. Fascinating stuff Zardon. thanks for the info, I feel more educated now 😉

  2. Excellent, the 960 performance is great, but I can see how the 1120 shaders can enhance the results, thats for sure.

  3. I ordered a 6870 on Friday, good reading thanks 🙂

  4. If a few of these get leaked outside review sites they would be worth some money in the future, as a product never released 🙂

  5. Very interesting, and ive never seen a ‘shader’ based review before. they really do make a difference, depending on the engine.

  6. fascinating read, thank you.

  7. 3dmark gets a nice boost of a 1000 points or so, nice.

  8. Heh, shame they didnt start selling these !

  9. This is a lesson in shader power and how important it is. would have been awesome if they had sold these in stores for the same price 🙂 a quick OC and its 6870 goodness at less money.

  10. Great to get facts rather than speculation. testing is really useful.

  11. Can AMD hardlock cards from being overclocked? I thought they could. they should have sold t he 6850 at the same price with 1120 shaders, but hardlocked it so it couldnt be overclocked.

  12. Only downside with that Garry is that people would be able to hack the bioses to get the clock speeds up. then they basically could get a 6870 for 140 quid rather than 200. but i like the idea. a locked 775 core 6850 with shader power of 6870 which would be clocked at 900mhz and able to be overclocked. i think they would sell more, but it might stop sales of 6870 long term.

  13. The Tessmark result is strange. How can you get a 36.8% performance increase with 16.7% more shaders? Must be something else at play.

  14. Absolutely – no idea, but ive asked the program author to comment.

  15. Amazes me at times how many sites do little research, I saw one other writer saying kitguru had run tests with a 1120 shader HD6850 in previous reviews. Yet here we are looking at this article and the 960 shader results in this match the sapphire and XFX reviews published last week for the 960 cards. the 1120 cards are clearly much better performers. Thanks for the info, very good read.

    I think the news here on kitguru, while controversial and funny at times tends to damage the amazing quality of the reviews.

  16. Thanks, my HD6850 arrived and my results are much the same as the 960 core version in this article. Bit of a bummer they didn’t let a few 1120 shader versions out into the wild as the differences are quiet noticeable.