Leaked screenshot of HD 6870?

[skier]

A forum member on Chinese website has leaked a 3D Mark Vantage Extreme benchmark, alongwith a GPU-Z screenshot, alleged to be from a next-gen ATI Radeon HD 6870. The important result is the 3D Mark Vantage score, which X11963. Considering the GTX 480 offers under X10000, and the HD 5870 is in the X9000 range, this is an impressive result for what is rumoured to be a minor intermediate generation on the same 40nm process.

It is the GPU-Z screenshot, however, which reveals more details. GPU-Z recognizes the sample as an "ATI Radeon HD 6800 Series". The GPU ID is 6718, which according to the Catalyst 10.8 codename list, indicates a Cayman XT GPU - well in line with rumours thus far. The core clock is same as the HD 5870 - 850 MHz. This suggests the performance boost comes from more functional units (perhaps 1920 SP) or improved performance per clock (using some of Northern Islands' units) or a combination of both. The GDDR5 speed is boosted by a whopping 33% to 1.6 GHz, or a whopping 6.4 GHz effective. The same 256-bit memory interface is retained, but the ultra fast memory results in a massive memory bandwidth of 204.8 GB/s - well over the GTX 480's 177.4 GB/s. Of course, one of the possibilities for such a high memory clock speed, as well as the impressive benchmark, could be that the card is benchmarked overclocked.

Of course, many such leaks are at times proved to be fake / photoshopped, so take these leaks for what they are. That said, if they are faked, they are indeed very good fakes, as most of the details make sense.

Source (well not really the source, but their source link doesn't work)

[lordvic]

Hmm...quite interesting indeed.
Why is ATi still keeping the 256-bit memory interface? - other then keeping prices down - it would definitely provide a very noticeable boost in performance with 384-bit.
Feels like they will hit a wall in the near future when more Stream Processors won't give much of a performance boost...considering GDDR5, 256-bit memory interface, and same Core/mem clocks is still used.