AMD has loosened the leash on pre-briefed press and partners and told them that they can talk about the HD 6800 series slots, ports and what the card looks like.

We will share the 3Dmark Vantage score of the Radeon HD 6870 and the magical number is 7500 at extreme quality, give or take a few points. This is the score on a 3.2GHz clocked Core i7 965 XE. We have also learned that with high quality textures the card scores close to 7400, while with adaptive quality settings you score a bit higher than 7500.

The same card on high scores 11000 while at performance settings you can get 16500. With a six-core CPU you can probably score a few more points but we doubt that people with six core Intel CPUs will go for mainstream ATI card. We can see some AMD six core adopters doing that and many, who can afford would like two of these cards.

Radeon HD 5870 scores 9000 at extreme settings while HD 5850 scores 7200, and Nvidia’s non overclocked Geforce GTX 460 provides some 7000. Vantage is just one of the numbers worth taking into consideration, but in games Radeon HD 6870 scores close or better to Radeon HD 5850 and loses from Radeon HD 5870.