The card delivers a score of X12092 in the 3DMark Vantage Extreme benchmark, and P24499 in the Performance benchmark. It's about 20 percent faster than the GeForce GTX 480, and closing in on the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970. Here are the Crysis and Unigine scores:

But, can it play Crysis? At Very High, 1920x1200, 4x AA, the HD 6870 comfortably plays along at 43.55 fps. The minimum fps is 29.57. Crysis has been well and truly conquered at HD resolutions with high IQ settings. At these kind of settings, previous single GPU cards barely broke 30 fps average, which means the HD 6870's minimum framerate is the same as the average of HD 5870 / GTX 480. Remarkable!

Unigine's Heaven tessellation has been and one of the biggest weaknesses of the HD 5000 series, possibly signifying weak tessellation performance for future games. On the other hand, it was GTX 400's strongest benchmark, with the GTX 480 proving to be an incredible 75% faster than the HD 5870 for the (unrealistic) Extreme preset. Typical scores for 1920x1200 4xAA Extreme are 900+ for the GTX 480 and 500+ for the HD 5870. Amazingly, the HD 6870 scores a whopping 922, which is a massive increase over the HD 5870 and puts it on par with the GTX 480. Do note, however, that the previous results were on Heaven 2.0, whereas the HD 6870 benchmarks use Heaven 2.1. The relevance of the Extreme tessellation benchmark has been heavily questioned as well. Still, it is clear that AMD have taken tessellation very seriously with the HD 6000 series.

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