Radeon HD 6870 to have 1120 shaders

Over the past week, we have featured articles on the Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 launch, and how the 6870 will be faster than the GTX 460.

Now it’s time to bring you a bit more information on the 6870 and it’s Barts XT codenamed GPU. It has now come to our attention that it will have a total of 1120 shaders. The 6870 and it’s baby brother 6850 will both use arch 5D shaders which lets AMD run the core clock at the standard 900MHz yet gain performance through more shaders with better technology.

Due to these shaders, we have been informed that you will expect a 15 to 20 percent better score when compared to the GeForce GTX 460 which as we know is what AMD are pitting their 6870 card against.

Overclocked GTX 460’s will obviously still be in their element but you will be sacrificing more money for that slightly better performing card, as we would expect anyway. I mean, nothing in this world is free, right?

Early benchmarks figures that we featured already showed that the 5850 and 6870 were very similar with regards to performance, giving the 6870 a 5 percent lead over its predecessor. The 5870 however, is still faster on all acounts, giving a clear cut performance win over the newer cards. Maybe a new benchmark that utilises the new technology on the cards is needed?

A lot of hype on the internet is assuming that the 5800 series cards will be phased out shortly after the 6800 series launch due to AMD not wanting to compete with itself. How true is this? That’s anyone’s guess.

One thing we do know is that from studies, it does show that users buy products with higher numbers, due to this, we can only assume that the 6870 will outsell the 5870 due to its numbering.