How long is the amd 6870

The following benchmarks stem from our benchmarks of review laptops. The performance depends on the used graphics memory, clock rate, processor, system settings, drivers, and operating systems. So the results don't have to be representative for all laptops with this GPU. For detailed information on the benchmark results, click on the fps number.

GPU no PhysX. Unigine Heaven 2. SPECviewperf 11 - specvp11 snx SPECviewperf 11 - specvp11 tcvis SPECviewperf 11 - specvp11 sw It's not exactly compact either, but for a mid-range card we would say it's about average.

Pairing that frequency with a bit wide memory bus gives the Radeon HD Connected to the base of the heatsink are three copper heat pipes that help improve efficiency, and a 75x20mm fan draws air in from the case and pushes it out through the rear expansion slot. The fan operates very quietly for the most part, partly thanks to the card's impressively low 19W idle consumption. With it comes the Radeon HD series, the culmination of what AMD has learned since designing and launching the series.

Below that is the Radeon HD , which in the long history of parts is utilizing a harvested version of the Barts GPU, which along with a lower load voltage make the card the low-power member of the family. The runs at MHz and is attached to SPs. There are some very notable changes compared to Cypress, but except for tessellation these are more about quality and features than it is about performance. Barts is a return to the sweet spot, and more generally a return to the structure AMD operated on with the series.

With a focus on the sweet spot, it should come as no surprise that AMD is also focusing on costs and pricing. Next up, we turn our magnifying glass to Crysis 2's early submarine level, where we take to the very high graphical preset with DirectX 9 and v-sync engaged, while the resolution is set to x The crash in this first sequence does a sterling job of showing Crytek's technical wizardry in an enclosed space, where their water shaders and alpha effects dominate the spectacle and place high demands on our original DFPC.

Slotting the Radeon HD in for testing lands us results which show the biggest overall improvement over the former card. This time, we see a consistent lead of almost 30 frames per second for prolonged sections of this initial level, where the upgrade holds out at the maximum 60FPS with only the occasional dip nether-wards.

Early levels demonstrate that Crysis 2 can happily sustain p60 with the new GPU, and the performance advantage over the original HD is clear to see. Later levels, however, start to show its limitations, and can demand the lowering of graphical settings to uphold this target performance. This lead isn't here to stay though. At its worst, we find surveying the long stretches of New York's urban sprawl in the second stage pulls the frame-rate down to an average of 50FPS.

We still see a considerable performance boost here, though engaging in direct battle can often-times lower this further downwards to 40FPS. Overall, the frame-rate advantage remains convincing, and the DFPC rarely catches up in precisely like-for-like set pieces. But considering each level gets progressively more vociferous in its demands on the GPU, it's questionable that this processing power can be considered enough to sustain p60 by the end of the game.

When the time comes, lowering geometry and post-processing settings become a necessary step in lightening the burden. This takes the edge off many of the frame-rate nosedives we see with the HD installed, particularly while swimming around the flooded submarine in the prologue stage.

Achieving a perfectly butter-smooth frame-rate across the board is never quite possible even at this resolution, alas; our take-away is that we'd walk the p high road if given the choice, given that the frame-rate is liable to drop down to 45FPS during battle sequences in either case.

Crysis 2's results fall in line with what we're seeing on Battlefield 3 and Skyrim, where running at precisely the same settings allows 60FPS to be entirely tenable with this configuration.

The p60 dream is realised here, and even with ultra settings enabled, general playability is perceptually smooth despite the occasional odd dip. By comparison to playback on the budget PC's Intel G, this is a huge leap forward for these higher settings.

Of course, it would be unfair to call it a day at just these three high-end games. There have been plenty of top-notch PC releases over the last two years which don't require your hardware to bend over backwards to achieve great results.

Naturally, the window for improvement is fractional when these games are v-synced to a typical monitor's 60Hz refresh. The ceiling has been hit. Even when raising the stakes further by increasing the MSAA from 2x to 4x, we still enjoy an unerring 60FPS response during the first stages of each of these games. With the upgrade, these creases in the graph are straightened out entirely, and maximum performance is easily attainable. Blizzard titles such as StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3 also benefit from the upgrade, albeit to wildly different degrees.

With the former, running at p on High settings makes our 4v4 in-engine replay run with a marginal advantage during the big, all-in showdowns. It's an improvement overall, even if it is slight one.

Gameplay Performance Matrix: x resolution, high quality settings, 2x MSAA enabled, v-sync engaged unless otherwise stated. The v-sync 60FPS cap is a great leveller. Diablo 3 fans, on the other hand, can enjoy in excess of a per cent increase in frame-rate when running global high settings.

We ran our standard test, hacking and slashing en-route from New Tristram to the first waypoint. Originally, we opted to avoid smoothing shadows for this test due to the colossal performance hit it incurs- and at a very meagre benefit to the presentation - but we find adding it on our upgraded rig only lowers the frame-rate to This means that engaging v-sync pins performance at 60FPS regardless of how high you crank the settings.

Between the HD and , the difference basically boils down to being able to run with this smoothing enabled, and to have the assurance that the frame-rate won't be throttled down to The remaining two games, Rage and Saint's Row: The Third, aren't able to get close to this sky-high level of performance.

We use the buggy ride through the wastelands to test the first, where we enable texture detail, have anisotropic filtering set to high, and have large texture cache selected to see the worst case scenario. Sticking to the p60 master plan causes some egregious stuttering throughout the trip which lowers the average to just over 50FPS, though fortunately, dropping the resolution to p and disabling texture cache does at least help uphold our 60FPS target.

Sadly, the resulting pop-in of its textures does sully the visual impact to a large extent. To round off, we put Saint's Row: The Third through its zany paces during a complete playthrough of the first level, with high graphical settings and DirectX 11 enabled.

The lengthy roof-top showdown with a chopper makes for the least flattering results out of all our selected tests. Even factoring in the upgrade, performance here averages out at just under 40FPS.

We find this is directly linked to the DirectX 11 settings in effect for lighting and shadows, however, and toggling these to the next rung down is all that's truly necessary to optimise for p It offers a surfeit of power to the point where you may need a CPU upgrade to see the full extent of its capabilities. In review, the results inevitably favour the beefier, more watt-ravenous circuitry of the HD , but the key point here is pricing.

This ranges from the considerable to the slight when it comes to our entry-level dual core gaming PC. We're left with the feeling that the extra expense is backed up by the performance, but that the is probably a closer match to the dual core CPU we specced in our original parts list. For the likes of Crysis 2 and Battlefield 3, we're surprised to find that the HD upgrade doesn't go quite far enough in making p60 attainable during shoot-outs for either campaign.

The general run of play does favour Crytek's shooter though, being the more stealth-based of the two, and offering the largest disparity in the "before-and-after" upgrade comparisons. It's interesting here that the same card in a quad core system does so much more - in effect, an entry-level dual core CPU simply can't "feed" the with enough data quickly enough. Specifically, we find titles like DiRT 3 and Diablo 3 now join the ranks of Modern Warfare 3 and Portal 2 in their ability to run entirely maxed out at p Meanwhile, StarCraft 2 and Saint's Row: The Third need nudging down on the graphical settings, from high to medium in either case, in order to achieve the same class of performance with ease - again, there's a sense we're CPU bound at the higher level settings here.

In the case of id Software's Rage, the lack of scalability in the graphics settings menu does mean we can't tone down texture asset quality or the complexity of the lighting model to optimise gameplay in a similar fashion. In the end, this means that the only ways to achieve a fluid 60FPS response with this game is to sacrifice either full p resolution, or to disable texture detail.