AMD Radeon HD 6670 And 6570: Turkeys Or Turkish Delights?

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Based on the new Turks GPU, AMD’s Radeon HD 6570 and 6670 graphics cards are poised to hit the $80-$100 market. Do these products have what it takes to compete in this fiercely competitive segment, or are AMD's subtle evolutionary changes too small?

HD Video Quality: HQV 2.0 Benchmark

Now we test the ability of these cards to deliver high-definition video quality using the HQV 2.0 benchmark:

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HQV Benchmark version 2.0 Results (out of 210 possible)
Row 0 - Cell 0 GeForce GT 240GeForce GTS 450Radeon HD 5670Radeon HD 6570Radeon HD 6670
Test Class 1:Video Conversion8787899090
Test Class 1: Noise and Artifact Reduction2020445454
Test Class 3: Image Scaling and Enhancements3030303030
Test Class 4: Adaptive Processing202072727
Totals:157157190201201

While the Radeon HD 5670 cannot handle mosquito noise reduction without dropped frames, the new 6570 and 6670 can. This means that the pinnacle of AMD's video image quality (a score of 201, according to the HQV 2.0 benchmark) starts at the ~$80 Radeon HD 6570, and more expensive Radeons offer nothing better. This is a significant improvement over the GeForce lineup, where the top-scoring cards achieve about 160 points.

When you consider that all of these reference cards are half-height models without dedicated PCIe power connectors, you can see that the Radeon HD 6570 and 6670 have a lot of potential to be excellent HTPC graphics cards.

Don Woligroski
Contributor

Don Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.