We realized that we have never mentioned the shader number of the Barts XT part and the number of Shaders is 1120. These shaders are arch 5D and the Radeon HD 6850 also has arch 5D shaders. In AMD’s case they run at the same clock as the GPU, which is 900MHz for the faster card and they can bring quite a lot of performance.

Our first reports indicate that you can expect a 15 to 20 percent better score than a default clocked Geforce GTX 460 and this is the card that AMD targets with Radeon HD 6870. The overclocked Geforce GXT 460 should stand a much better chance but it will probably come much closer to Radeon HD 6870 price. Compared to Radeon HD 5850, the new Radeon HD 6870 is some 5 percent faster, but as you can expect it ends up losing from HD 5870. We do believe that AMD plans to phase out Radeon HD 5800 boards shortly after it launches the first Radeon HD 6000 series products, as it doesn't want to compete with its own parts.

As for the retail market, HD 6870 will definitely outsell 5870 as end users usually buy bigger numbers.