On Thursday, chip maker AMD unveiled its Radeon 6800 series chips for gamers. The chips, which use the new Barts GPU, comprise of the Radeon HD 6870 (Barts XT) and the Radeon HD 6850 (Barts Pro).

The new, more energy-efficient, Barts chip is 30 percent smaller than the GF104 chip used in the GTX 460. The cost of the cards using the new chips and 1GB of GDDR5 will be nearly $239 and $179 respectively.

Noting that the much-awaited new Radeon series offers 30 percent better game performance vis-à-vis its closest rival products, David Cummings, AMD’s director of product management for GPU Division, told CRN: “We have a significant lead over our competitors in terms of time-to-market. We were quite aggressive in adopting new technology, whether its 45nm technology or DirectX 11 support.”

At 255 mm2, the new chip is 25 percent smaller than the 334 mm2 Cypress chips that it will substitute. Both the new cards sport a dual-slot design, and feature 2 mini-DisplayPort 1.2 connectors, 1 HDMI 1.4a connector, and 2 DVI ports; thereby enabling the 6800 series to natively support up to four monitors.

In addition, enhanced thread management and buffering capability of a new seventh generation hardware tessellation unit helps bring a twofold improvement in the performance of the Radeon 5000.

Furthermore, Anisotropic Filtering has been improved with the use of a much advanced algorithm, which not only addresses discontinuities in extremely loud textures, but also facilitates smoother transitions between filter levels.