HIS HD6850 IceQ X Turbo 1GB (H685QNT1GD)
Mar 24th, 2011 | By JaredFirst out of the gate is the suite of 3DMark benchmarks, while a synthetic benchmark they are widely considered the standard for comparing video card and system performance. Synthetic benchmarks don’t necessarily translate to real world performance, but give us a good comparison between cards with a standard scoring system. First I ran 3DMark Vantage on stock settings and then moved on to 3DMark 11. I ran Vantage on the following presets at default settings; Entry, Performance and High. 3DMark 11 was run with the presets: Entry, Performance and Extreme.
It is interesting to note how close the 6850 IceQ X performs to the 5870 iCooler V Turbo. The differences in scores increases as settings are increased but there is a clear advantage in scores from overclocking.
Next on the block is Furmark. Furmark is an OpenGL benchmark that renders a large ring of fur to stress and test the GPU. Here I ran at a resolution of 1920×1200 with 8x MSAA.
Again we see a clear increase in performance with the additional overclock and it nearly matches the 5870 card.
The final benchmark for this chapter is with Lightsmark 2008, a realtime global illumination and penumbra shadows enabled benchmark. Natural lighting makes artificial graphics life-like. Computers get faster, but rendering more polygons doesn’t add value if lighting looks faked, so insiders know that the next big thing is proper lighting aka Realtime Global Illumination. Typical workloads in realtime rendering will shift. Lightsmark simulates it. Global Illumination renders often take hours. Is your computer fast enough for realtime?
Here is the first benchmark where the 6850 IceQ X just can’t keep up with the more powerful 5870 iCooler V Turbo though it still puts up some impressive numbers.
That concludes testing with the synthetic benchmarks and so far the 6850 IceQ X Turbo is certainly performing well. Next we will move onto some game benchmarks, because quite honestly though if you are buying this card it is most likely with gaming in mind.